Community of Excellence - Marcus and Me on Spiritual Living

We all agree that everyone dies. But what is less clear is whether everyone lives.

For us humans, there is a lot more to living than being alive. A long life filled with intellectual expansion spiced with love and respect will be deemed a good life. In our case, this is the primary determinant of value, and it applies to no other life form. They all are judged on mere longevity and procreation.

But how would we humans describe a life that also included a vast spiritual impact? Glorious?

One's spiritual impact can be vast depending upon one's contributions to one's communities. For our souls are truly that - ours. A soul alone can never excel. It is nourished by the interaction with other souls. It grows as strengths and weaknesses are exchanged more freely, with a larger population, and to a greater extent.

One's soul is merely a single segment of the greater soulfulness of Nature. After a glorious life the soul returns to the fabric of Nature's all-encompassing spirituality having expanded the souls of the many lives it has connected with.

Marcus Aurelius - In one respect man is the nearest thing to me, so far as I must do good to men and endure them. But so far as some men make themselves obstacles to my proper act, man becomes to me one of the things which are indifferent, no less than the sun or wind or or a wildebeest. Now it is true that these may impede my action, but they are no impediments to my affects and disposition, which have the power of acting conditionally and changing: For the mind converts and changes every hindrance to its activity into an aid; and so that which is a hindrance is made a furtherance to an act; and that which is an obstacle ont eh road helps us on this road.