The Sensuality Of God

  

"Glorify God in your Body." ~1 Corinthians 6:20

Spirituality is not the renunciation of the senses, but their refinement to the subtlest of all sensations: God. God is the most sensuous of delights.

Meditation refines sensation through quietness. Our spiritual practice cultivates finer perception until taste and smell sense the flavor and fragrance of pure Being; sight gazes into the light shining from Divine Darkness; touch feels the inner caress of breath, the gravity-hug of earth through the skin; hearing listens to the hum of silence, which contains the music of galaxies.

Subtler than these five sense organs is the sixth, the mind. Meditation refines the mind just as it refines the other organs of perception. When the restless mind settles into quietness, we transcend thought, no image limits awareness, the bliss of emptiness overflows, and reason relishes infinity.

Subtler than mind is the soul, I Am, yet the soul is also a sense organ. The soul is not the opposite of matter; it is simply at the other end of the energy spectrum. Matter and spirit are one continuum of divine Being, from the dense to the subtle. The dense is the incarnate glory of the subtle, and the subtle is the healing nectar within the dense outer husk. Soul is the fine end of this continuum.

When, through meditation, the soul becomes "poor in spirit," it inherits boundless wealth. In the heart of silence, the soul transcends soulness, flows beyond the root of individuality, and enters the seed of Christ-Consciousness. This loss is rich indeed. For when the droplet becomes the sea, the sea becomes the droplet. Now Christ dwells fully in the soul, as the very Self of ourselves. So scripture says, "No longer I, but Christ who lives in me." (Galations 2:20)

Mystics described this exquisitely subtle relationship between the soul and Christ as a love affair, leading to the sacrament of the Bridal Chamber. Why would they choose such a sensual metaphor? Likewise, Hindu poets expressed this communion as the playful love-tryst of Radha and Krishna in the garden of Vridavan. The Hebrew Bible gathers ancient Canaanite marriage hymns into the Song of Songs, representing the union of the bride and the royal bridegroom. This is why the Song of Songs was the favorite Biblical book of Western mystics, at once the most sensuous yet spiritual of poems. Both those who interpret the Song of Songs as mere sensuality, and those who interpret the book as mere mysticism, miss the exquisite paradox. It is not one or the other. It is a book about the mystical sensuality of God.

When we enter into this marriage, all our senses feel the transcendental kiss of the Divine, who has created the earth and its sensory pathways just to lead us back to this place: the wild garden in the heart, where the seed of Christ is stored. For when God speaks to us, God uses everything - plants, animals, human faces, dust. God kisses us all day long with creatures.

This world of created things is a message and a scripture from the Creator. And where is this Creator? Deep inside your chest. Thus we should not hesitate to let the world radiate from our heart. For the earth is the radiance of the human heart, and the cosmos around us is the sensation of God. The thing-ness of incarnate things is a vessel of God's passion for us. God is so voluptuously in love that we are called forth from ourselves, to see all boundaries as ornaments and veils on the transcendental form of the Beloved.

Now God whispers to our soul, "You are the garden, I am the Spring." Our soul sings like the bride in the Song of Songs, "My beloved is mine, and I am my beloved's. Come into your garden, and feed among the lilies."

Painting: Illustration to the Rubayat by Rene Bull, 1913