Thought for the Week: Spiritual energy
H Dennis Compton reflects on spiritual energy
am now ninety-seven years old and have been a member of the Religious Society of Friends for the last fifty-five years. My interest in the things of the Spirit goes back to a series of ‘random coincidences’ that I experienced during the second world war.
It appears to me that we exist in two dimensions: the outward physical body and the inner Spirit. The body, like all life on earth, is of a temporary nature. It will soon die and decay into its raw constituents. The Spirit is immortal, eternal, and is thus far more important, but we don’t treat it as such. In normal living we pay a great deal of attention to the welfare of the body, because our conscious and persistent effort is necessary for its support. The Spirit is largely ignored (some people even denying its existence) because we need do nothing to sustain it.
The view to which I have been led over these many years is that the whole physical universe is the outpouring of an infinite ‘spiritual energy’. This is not by any means a novel idea. It crops up regularly, from time to time, since René Descartes proposed it in the seventeenth century. Its chief characteristics (it seems to me) are Awareness and Purpose.
Everything living is aware to some degree (biologists say that the cells in human organs appear to be aware of their surroundings and their function). The physical world is not creative in itself, but is used by the Spirit as the unresponsive stuff for its creative purposes. All creation is the work of the Spirit, of which we are equally a part. We are composed of Spirit and we are, therefore, creative in our own right.
While we are encased in this physical body and confined within the time and space parameters of the physical world, our creative nature must use physical materials for its manifestations in buildings, works of art, music. We live in the mind: all our decisions are taken by the mind, every action the body takes is the result of a thought in the mind (even though in many cases the thought is subconscious).
Spiritual energy is not confined by time or space – so neither is our mind. Our thought can range over past and future and when we lift our thought away from the body’s needs and into the spiritual dimension we can create. And that is what we do in prayer.
We activate our spiritual nature, which is normally ignored in our constant care for the body, and add our own mite to the ongoing universal tide of creation. The results become part of the normal course of events and, so, are often not recognised as our contribution. The potency of our prayer is commensurate with our sincerity in praying. The prayer must come from the heart and must mean something to us. I recall Leslie Weatherhead writing that he had once heard a parson say, ‘Let us pray for India, China and the islands of the sea…’ Absolutely useless, he wrote: a complete waste of time.
Our prayer will be effective to the extent to which it conforms with the Purposes of ongoing universal evolution. To pray for something evil or negative will rebound as a ‘black mark’ against the pray-er. I am convinced that the ‘spiritual dimension’ is governed by natural laws as inevitable and automatic in action as those (like gravity) that underpin the physical. Our many scientific disciplines have thoroughly investigated our physical environment: very few have been equally interested in the capabilities of the mind. Those that have devoted their time to this have come up with some remarkable discoveries. But this is not the place…
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