WHAT'S REAL, MAN?

Separation? or Synthesis?

In this week's chapter from The Life of Meaning we look at two views of reality. One from a Spiritualist, Marianne Williamson, and one from a Priest, Tilden Edwards.
Much of the differences in these views of what is real are predicated on Eastern world versus Western world approaches to the meaning of reality itself. And of course our meaning, task, purpose, fate within that reality.
Williamson defines our reality as ultimately spiritual. That is where the meaning of life resides. The physical is, as in the Eastern sense, illusional, a dichotomy. We have similar conception in the West when we speak of our lives as only temporal.
But it appears the essence of Williamson's message is the limitations the physical puts on our existence. As such, we express our lives bound by fear. It is this that obstructs us from being all we should be. Liberation is the path we should seek to reach our goals.
Tilden Edwards, an Episcopal priest, sees God's glory in all the created physical world. To use an analogy from physics, one might say reality appears as a "unified field theory" of meaning and construction between the two elements of physical and spiritual. Of course while we may not be able to understand the full import of this "theory," it is till our purview to study and learn lessons from it.
Are these two views divergent or complementary? How do they affect the way we live? Brush our teeth? Live with our neighbor? Conduct our lives?

Walter Morton for Terra Incognita