by Stayaway from Bnei Baruch

Created on: May 30, 2009   Last Updated: June 04, 2009

I grew up living in two worlds. At my home in rural Montana, I spent my days flitting around the forest imagining I was a fairy. I observed the natural world with the wide open mind of a child. The other world was above my father's punk-rock pizza restaurant, adjacent to the University of Berkeley in California. In Berkeley, I fell under the influence of the great stimulations one finds in a metropolitan city: art, music, exotic foods, museums and street culture. In Montana, my daily life consisted of avoiding home schooling to play bare foot in the open fields, picking wild flowers, and giving meaning to all the movements of land and sky.

For the rest of my life, these two worlds represented how I viewed spirituality and corporeality. The simple life of the forest was my understanding of spirituality. The fast hard reality of the city was the opposite. In my late teens I pictured the spiritual world as a monk meditating on a solitary mountain top. My view of corporeality was epitomized in cultural heroes like those of American novelist Jack Kerouac. I wanted to hitchhike to Mardi Gras in New Orleans and to experience every sensation life had to offer.

When I had my son at age 25, the two worlds split even further apart. I became fixated on my concept of spirituality, which included vegetarianism, yoga, meditation and the elimination of media influences, such as TV. Yet my modern, sensation-seeking mind could never keep this routine up. In turn, I would find myself craving financial success and the power of personal physical beauty. The constant back and forth between worlds brought me confusion and a great deal of social condemnation. By the time I was 30, I owned a perfect little organic herb farm in rural Oregon, but I sold it to move to the city because I wanted to disco.

It wasn't until I found the wisdom of Kabbalah, that I understood the contrast I experienced between these two worlds. On one hand, I am pulled to nature, which is a dim reflection of the spiritual world I long for. On the other hand, I am pulled by the pleasures of this world, which appeal to my human nature.

As humans, our purpose in life is to reconnect with the spiritual world. In order to do this, we must integrate our desire for the spiritual, into the physical world. It is easy to be righteous if we separate ourselves from the rest of the world, but it is impossible to evolve spiritually without incorporating the desires of the world into the self.

In the words of the great Kabbalist Baal HaSulam, "This is the purpose of the opposites in the world and the complete person must unite in complete unification." In other words, we use the pleasures of this world to show us how opposite we are to the spiritual world. By doing this, we can choose to become more aligned with the qualities of the spiritual. It is in this process that one discovers spirituality.

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