The World Equals Earth Plus Spirit
By William Bezanson
Many people refer to the Earth and the World as the same thing. In this article I want to propose that they are not the same, and that their difference is very important for everyone to realize, especially for us in the “spiritually focused, conscious living” community.
Years ago, I read in Teilhard de Chardin’s book, The Phenomenon of Man, of his concept of the “noosphere”. He proposed that there was a spiritual, mental envelope surrounding and enveloping the earth, consisting of a membrane of collective consciousness that manifested from all the thinking beings living on the earth, and he named this envelope the noosphere. I was fascinated with this idea, and I found later that it aligned with and complemented the Rosicrucian notion of a triune model of man: body, spirit, and soul.
Eventually, I stopped referring to the world as equivalent to the earth, but started thinking of the world as consisting of not only the physical earth, but also a spiritual component that we might call the world’s spirit, or the spirit of humankind, or the spirit of all living entities on the earth. In short, I concluded that The World equals Earth plus Spirit.
Such a two-part structure of something appealed to my developing sense of how a great many things can be mapped onto a similar structure. For example:
~ All living beings consist of a physical body and a spiritual component (soul, spirit, mind, etc.).
~ All phenomena consist of cause and effect; every cause has some effect, and every effect results from some cause.
~ Everything has polarity: positive and negative, or higher and lower, or inward and outward.
~ The energy that we need for growth comes from both the earth (nutrients) and the air and sunshine (the vital life force).
~ All active entities consist of both a noun and a verb: a thing plus its actions; a vehicle plus its motions; an idea plus its implementations; the passive and the active.
And there are many other instances that could be mentioned. (Most of the above examples come from some of the teachings of mystery schools, including Hermeticism and Rosicrucianism.)
Seeing how very many concepts overlapped prompted me to look for related passive/active structure in everything that I perceived or was aware of. This line of thinking quite naturally led to the concept that the world has two components: earth and spirit.
Thus, we are limiting our thinking if we speak of the world and point down to the earth. In a similar way, we limit our view if we refer to a person by pointing to his or her body. When you think of it seriously, it is impossible to point to a person when instructed “Point to me!”, because pointing to a body is easy, but pointing to the corresponding spirit (the actual person) is impossible, due to its intangible nebulosity. Similarly, it is easy to point to the earth, but not to the spiritual part of the world. One may gesture in some all-encompassing manner to refer to the spirit of a person or the world, but one cannot point directly to it.
An interesting phenomenon to consider is that for the World, its Spirit may interact with the Earth. In a manner similar to how one’s spirit/soul interacts with one’s body–intuition inspiring the brain, the mind creating thoughts for decision-making, emotions influencing our actions, and so on–we can conceive of the world’s spirit interacting with the earth, such as evil thoughts causing weather disturbances, thoughts of love softening the heart of a tyrant, visualizations of global peace influencing political decisions, and so on.
My hope is that if we all become conscious that the World equals the Earth plus Spirit, then we will find ourselves on a path of learning many new aspects about the natural and spiritual world and its multiple dimensions and planes. Having a broadened awareness of seemingly obvious concepts should give us some astonishing insights into our mystical and spiritual environment.
You may find it insightful to contemplate and meditate on this duality of the World. Such insights will likely trigger intuitive impressions from widely diverging domains, which will be of great assistance in your spiritual development.
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About the Author
William Bezanson lives with his wife in Ottawa, Canada. He writes a monthly Blog article for OMTimes, and books on world stewardship and systems design. His next book, due to be published in the late summertime of 2014 is I Believe: A Rosicrucian Looks at Christianity and Spirituality. To read about his books, see his website at http://www3.sympatico.ca/bezanson1.
