Your Intellect’s Spiritual Assignment

One of the deepest themes in western philosophy, beginning with Plato, is that the world of appearance isn’t real. So the job of the intellect, its spiritual assignment, is to carry us beyond this corrupt physical world to a perfected world of nonmaterial form, purely mental or spiritual. This was seen as the task of philosophy and religion until the twentieth century, when phenomenology, perhaps in part under the influence of Buddhism, which never did have a mind/body split, began to break it down. In our earth-threatened time, when we must think and care about the future well-being of the planet, it is fitting that we begin to learn and enact the truth that has always been engraved on our very skins: that body, mind, spirit, and earth are one expression, one concern, and one delight.