Spiritual Beings Having a Human Experience
Some ideas linger because they refuse to fit neatly into the categories we have built.
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
Wayne Dyer helped popularize this way of speaking in his writing and interviews, including a 2004 conversation about The Power of Intention. The sentence is often attributed to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, but its original source remains uncertain. Teilhard was a French Jesuit priest who spent much of his life studying fossils and the origins of humanity. Living from 1881 to 1955, he belonged as much in scientific expeditions as in the chapel. He believed that the discoveries of science did not diminish faith. They enlarged our appreciation for creation and invited Christians to think more deeply about humanity’s place within it.
That conviction also made him controversial.
Church authorities restricted the publication of some of his theological work during his lifetime. A 1962 Holy Office warning, issued after his death, raised serious doctrinal objections to his writings. Admiration for his effort to think about faith and science should not obscure those concerns.
Still, a thinker need not be right about everything to see something worth preserving.
The sentence has endured because it captures an intuition many people recognize. We do not experience ourselves as biology alone. We hunger for meaning, beauty, truth, and love in ways that seem larger than survival. Whether someone approaches that mystery through philosophy, religion, or simple experience, it has a way of insisting that we are more than highly intelligent animals.
It is here that Benedict quietly joins the conversation.
Benedict approached the human person through the practical demands of a shared life. If human beings are indeed spiritual by nature, then that spirituality should appear somewhere observable. It should shape how we work, how we speak, how we receive guests, how we use our possessions, and how we order our days.
In the Rule, Benedict never asks his monks to escape their humanity in order to become holy. Instead, he teaches them to inhabit their humanity more faithfully. Prayer is woven into work. Silence teaches speech. Meals become acts of gratitude. Community becomes the place where virtues are tested rather than merely admired.
For a Christian reading, that distinction matters. Body and soul belong to the one person. Our bodies are part of who we are. The spiritual life is discovered within our humanity, not by escaping it. The Catechism describes this unity in paragraphs 362–365.
The sentence continues to resonate, even when its origin remains uncertain. It pushes back against the quiet suspicion that the meaningful parts of life are always somewhere else. We imagine they are waiting after the promotion, after retirement, after the next retreat, or after life finally settles down.
Benedict would gently disagree.
The opportunity to become the person we are meant to be arrives disguised as today’s work, today’s interruptions, today’s conversations, and today’s responsibilities. If we overlook those because we are searching for a more obviously spiritual life, we may miss the very place where that life is unfolding.
Teilhard spent his life looking backward through millions of years of history. Benedict spent his looking at the rhythm of a single day. Both turn our attention back to the life we are already living.
The life of the spirit is not lived somewhere beyond the ordinary.
Sources: Wayne Dyer, interview on The Power of Intention (2004); Catechism, §§362–365; The Rule of St. Benedict, chapters 35, 36, 37, 48 and 53; Holy Office warning on Teilhard (1962).
Where am I overlooking the spiritual life in the ordinary work of today?
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