You’ve probably heard the line before. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. It gets said so often in spiritual spaces it’s basically wallpaper at this point, printed on a tote bag somewhere, definitely in someone’s Instagram bio.
And look, it’s true. I’m not arguing with the line itself. I’m arguing with what people usually do with it.
Because most of the time, when someone says that phrase, what they actually mean underneath it is, this human stuff isn’t really real, isn’t really me, and the goal is to see through it. Wake up from it. Get back to the “real” spiritual self that’s apparently been waiting patiently behind all this inconvenient physical nonsense the whole time.
I want to gently push back on that. Not on the idea that you’re spirit. On the part where the physical experience is treated like a problem to escape.
What if the dream is the point
Here’s the reframe I keep coming back to. What if this whole incarnation, this body, this messy unfinished life you’re living right now, isn’t something keeping you from spirit. What if it’s literally what spirit wanted to feel.
Think about it for a second. If you were pure consciousness, infinite, undifferentiated, no edges, no body, no stakes, what would you actually be missing? Probably exactly the things you spend your physical life trying to transcend. The ache of wanting something. The relief of finally getting it. Heartbreak. Grief, which is just love with nowhere left to go. The specific, ridiculous, embodied joy of good coffee or a song that hits exactly right or someone’s hand in yours.
None of that is available to something formless. You need edges to feel contrast. You need a body to feel a hug. You need to not know how the story ends to feel the particular aliveness of hoping anyway.
So maybe the physical world isn’t the cage spirit is trying to escape. Maybe it’s the instrument spirit built specifically so it could feel something it couldn’t feel any other way.
The dream isn’t a distraction from the point, it is the point
I think a lot of spiritual frameworks accidentally teach people to treat their actual life like a waiting room. Something to get through, transcend, see past, on the way to some more “real” or “higher” state. And I understand why, the physical world is genuinely hard sometimes, and the idea that none of it really matters can feel like relief.
But it also quietly devalues the very thing you’re here doing. The bills you’re stressed about. The relationship you’re working through. The body that gets tired and hungry and occasionally falls apart on you at the worst possible time. None of that is the obstacle to your spiritual life. It IS your spiritual life. It’s the actual material you’re working with.
You don’t wake up from the dream by ignoring it. You wake up inside it. Same dream, different relationship to it.
What that actually looks like
This is the part I think matters most, because the idea is lovely but it needs to land somewhere real or it’s just another nice thought you forget by lunchtime.
It looks like, the next time something physical and ordinary and slightly annoying happens, the traffic, the dishes, the awkward conversation you’ve been avoiding, you don’t immediately try to spiritually bypass it by reminding yourself none of this matters in the grand cosmic scheme of things. Instead you let yourself actually be in it. Fully. As the spirit that apparently chose this specific, weird, particular experience on purpose.
It looks like noticing that the parts of your life you’re most tempted to rush past, the boring bits, the hard bits, the unremarkable Tuesday afternoons, might actually be exactly where you’re supposed to be paying the most attention. Not because suffering is noble. Just because this, all of this, the whole textured mess of being a person, might be the actual assignment rather than the thing standing between you and the assignment.
You don’t need to escape the dream to be spiritual. You just need to remember you’re dreaming, and then keep dreaming anyway, wide awake inside it.
