Body of Essence
Julian Huxley wrote, “The human person is nothing else than evolution becoming conscious of itself.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin insisted that evolution is a path toward the purification of consciousness and that it demands wholehearted involvement. He also wrote, “The peak of ourselves, the acme of our originality, is not our individuality but our person. According to the evolutionary structure of the world, we can only find our person by uniting together.”
We are always searching for something outside of ourselves to complete us and fill the void that reverberates within. Our creativity in this search is endless. Yet what I have witnessed and experienced is that only a return to our Divine Nature brings fulfillment. That Nature asks us to give ourselves, to God and to the unity of life in love. Moving the ego aside does not dissolve our essence. It strengthens it.
This is what contemplative and esoteric traditions describe as the body of essence, a second body that does not develop automatically but through conscious participation in life. It begins to form when a person chooses, again and again, not to be governed by the past, but to respond from the present toward what is emerging.
Mechanical life binds us to repetition, with the past recycling itself through us. The development of essence, by contrast, is a turn toward the future, a willingness to become rather than to repeat. Over time, this gives rise to what has been called the resurrection body, not a return to what was, but the fruit of a life lived in conscious alignment with what is not yet.
Beatrice Bruteau wrote in an essay, “To be "in Christ" is to be identified with the Living One who is not to be sought among the dead, for the Living One is the One who is coming to Be.”
The human person participates consciously in the evolutionary process. We are co-creators, so it matters what we are becoming. To step out of the past, we must forgive. Forgiveness is the act of making a new future. To be alive is to begin again, again and again.
The human person is not a fixed entity but something continuously emerging, being called forth, becoming. Personhood is participation rather than possession.
What has been lost becomes the very ground from which the future presses forward. Love that has nowhere to go is not wasted. It becomes the very shell through which life breaks forward.
At first, we are body and essence, with only fleeting moments of contact between the two, brief recognitions of something deeper within us. The path forward is a gradual permeation, an inner osmosis, through which essence is no longer something we visit, but something we begin to live from. Through sustained and often difficult participation, we are gradually shaped into the body of essence itself.
In my own life, I have learned that the only way forward is the turn toward God. Life presses forward, breaking through its own shells. This requires honoring the past while releasing its hold through forgiveness, both of myself and of others. It asks for trust in the quiet sense that I am always being shaped and renewed.
Recently, through participating in my own family constellation, I recognized the loyalties I was holding toward my ancestors. In order to live fully, I had to realign with life itself. Life moves forward like a river. When it is resisted, it becomes blocked. I am grateful for the gift of life, and I commit to participating in its movement.
Peter Brook wrote, “There is a joy in quality found and a suffering in quality betrayed, and these two experiences become the motors that constantly renew our search.”
We are capable of developing a body of essence, a resurrection body, through conscious suffering and love. This requires a quiet but radical consent, a “yes” to serving something greater than ourselves.
In each moment, we participate in what we bring into the world. We can perpetuate resentment, pride, and division, or we can generate gentleness, patience, and peacefulness. Our lived experience, felt, endured, and transformed, becomes the very substance through which essence is formed.
This path does not ask us to withdraw from life, nor to lose ourselves in it. Rather, it asks for a right relationship, to enjoy what is given without escaping our aim, and to remain conscious without hardening into spiritual pride.
This is the path each of us walks in our own way through love, through grief, through the moments when we choose life over the pull of the past.
How can we make the whole Earth our Altar?
To make the whole Earth our altar is not an idea but a way of living. It is to recognize that each moment asks something of us: to offer our reactions, our wounds, our love, and our attention into the fire of becoming. It is to forgive, again and again, so that the future is not suffocated by the past. It is to allow even our suffering to become material for transformation rather than repetition.
The altar is not somewhere we go; it is what the world becomes when we consent to participate consciously in Life. Perhaps, this is what it means to be human: to stand at the threshold of what has been and what is coming, and to offer ourselves so that something new may be born.
