The real provocation here isn't the soul-over-body ranking, but the reversal of what we typically mean by "experience"—suggesting that our messy, embodied struggles aren't interruptions to some purer spiritual existence but actually *the point*. Most people live as though their inner life is the real self trapped in an inconvenient container, when Teilhard insists the container is where the self becomes itself. When you're exhausted after caring for an aging parent, or wrestling with disappointment, you're not failing at spirituality—you're engaged in the very work that constitutes it. The difference feels subtle until you stop treating your ordinary Tuesday as something to transcend and start asking what it's genuinely teaching you.