The Four Worlds: Body, Soul, Spirit, Divinity.

In this excerpt from The ABBA Tradition, we look at the 'Four Worlds Tradition.'

The tradition teaches that not only do we live in four Worlds but that we are four Worlds. Human

beings are composed of body, soul, spirit and the potential for divinity. In the modern scientific world some speak as though there were no reality beyond the physical, as though all of our consciousness were only an accidental epi-phenomenon produced by our body. But this is not the case. We are more

 than just our bodies. We are at very least body AND soul.

But neither are we just embodied souls, a consciousness coexisting within a body. We have a body and a soul but we are more than body and soul. We are part of a larger whole, a transpersonal reality which includes parents, family, society, culture and the whole worldwide community of other human beings. Our personal spirit links us to a transpersonal spiritual community. It is this transpersonal reality that gives meaning to our lives.

This three-level understanding of who we are is basic to the New Testament. We are not just bodies, nor are we just bodies and souls. We are body, soul and spirit. So in the first written book of the New Testament, the Christian Apostle Paul sums up his teaching saying “May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” ^[1]

The tradition says more. It reminds us that we are more than body, soul and spirit. We are also children of the Holy One, sparks from the fire of Divinity, and we have the potential of rediscovering that relationship, of reclaiming our son- and daughter-ship, our relationship with Divinity. We are called to be temples of Divinity, to live with the Holy One within. This process is called Theosis, or Deification, and it is central to the Mystical Christian Tradition.

Over time our awareness of the four Worlds has decreased. The history of the Western world appears to be a story of forgetfulness, a story of forgetting the truth that we live in four Worlds. This forgetting begins with forgetting the highest World, so that we are aware only of our body, soul, and spirit. This first forgetfulness is due, in part, to the difficulty of talking about the highest World. The third Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord Thy God in vain,’ is a reflection of this difficulty and has led the Jewish Tradition to avoid speaking directly about God.

This Jewish reticence to speak of the Holy One is paralleled in the Western Christian tradition by reluctance to talk of Deification. A consequence is loss of our awareness of the mystical dimension of our life and of our direct connection with the Holy One.

As the forgetfulness continues, we lose our awareness of the Spiritual World. We come to see ourselves as Body and Soul only, mere individuals. The organic connection of me to my neighbor is overlooked and we see ourselves as separate individuals, composed of body and soul, outer and inner parts, forgetting that we are also part of a transpersonal reality.

And then finally we forget that we have a soul and come to see ourselves as merely a physical body, forgetting or trying to explain away consciousness, meaning, purpose and all the other phenomena of the higher Worlds. The Four World Tradition is an antidote to this reductionist process that forgets and then dismisses the full reality of the four Worlds.

---

^[1]. 1 Thessalonians 5:23.