Divine Expression.
In the last post, I discussed the importance of fully recognizing how our “animal” nature impacts our time here on Earth.
I’ll continue that conversation in this post, exploring how this full understanding of our animality can lead to greater expression of the divine.
Let’s begin by highlighting a few important points from the last post.
Much of our behavior is influenced by our evolutionary hardwiring, particularly action geared towards survival and mate signaling.
We can see this hardwiring if we look at a “typical” day, noticing most of our time and energy is devoted to increasing our (or our family’s) safety or devoted to increasing our level of attractiveness relative to others (or hunting pleasure associated with both).
The exercise of really seeing this hardwiring is important — it helps us better understand our own desires and tendencies, the desires and tendencies of others, and most importantly, allows us to channel this hardwiring for the goal of divine expression.
Okay, let’s keep going.
Before we start exploring how to channel our innate desires and tendencies, let’s first take a closer look at the term “divine expression”.
Divine expression is as it sounds — living in such a way that our divinity can be fully expressed through us.
We can think of our divinity as our Soul, or, our individual piece of the divine.
I’ve discussed the concept of the Soul in several other posts (check them here and here), so without doing a deep dive in this one, let’s think of our Soul as:
“The ultimate internal principle by which we think, feel, will, and by which our bodies are animated.”
More simply, our Soul is who we really are — our “irreducible uniqueness”. It is our special offering to the world.
To tie this back to its expression, the human experience is our opportunity to share this offering. To share our piece of the divine.
How we choose to live on Earth impacts the magnitude of our offering, or, the level to which our Soul is expressed through us.
A helpful metaphor for understanding divine expression is to imagine each person’s Soul as a beautiful diamond they carry deep within them. Some faces of this diamond are covered in dust and dirt, and some are polished and shining brightly.
It’s my belief that our time here on Earth should be largely spent trying to “clean” as many faces of our diamond as we can.
The decisions we make on a day-to-day basis can serve this exact purpose — “cleaning” our diamond. Conversely, living out of accordance with the Divine adds metaphorical dirt and grime to the faces of our diamond, dimming our light and weakening our offering.
To tie this back to our animality, greater awareness and understanding of our innate desires and tendencies is the first step on a journey of channeling them for the goal of “cleaning our diamond”, or expressing our divinity.
In terms of exactly how to channel these desires and tendencies, humans have been making recommendations on how to do so for thousands of years. In previous posts, I’ve broadly discussed the universality of religion, or in other words, the parallels between different “recipes” for divine expression. I highlighted that although religious and philosophical frameworks differ in terminology and exact prescription for “diamond cleaning”, for thousands of years they have understood we ALL have something to clean.
This will be the topic of the next few posts — a closer look at several religious and philosophical prescriptions for deeper expression of the divine.
“The soul, which is spirit, can not dwell in dust; it is carried along to dwell in the blood.” — St. Augustine