Last edit 26/09/06
'Know the Universe as your self, and you can live absolutely anywhere in comfort.
Love the world as your self, and you'll be able to care for it properly.' Tao Te Ching
'Do you really have to fret about enlightenment?
No matter What road I travel, I'm going home.' Shinsho
As we truly absorb the implications of the unbroken wholeness of the Universe, we will still be able to see and value the distinction between the parts (religions, races, nations), but we will also value how permeable the membrane is between the parts. As in ecology, we will know the value of diversity, and at the same time, know that for the greatest amount of health and well-being there is a profound interdependence at work naturally. Robert Keck
1.0 Healing as a sacred path
The late Robert Keck gave a personal and social history in his book about the transformation of medicine from being totally materialistic and mechanistic to becoming comprehensive, holistic, and integrated. He provides scientific data and a rational basis for accepting the irrational, emotional, and spiritual aspects of the healing process. His death in 2004 is evidence of how healing can occur without cure - that is the sacred in injury and illness.
Wherever we are located internally and externally, some time some of us meet a crisis or a turning point that propels us to something more than ourselves. There are times in a person's life when, regardless of the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees in prayer (Victor Hugo). Keck was a survivor of polio, of a broken back and of crippling, progressive pain from post-polio syndrome. He demonstrated how this soul-self is the vital ingredient in health promotion, disease prevention and healing from physical and emotional trauma. (Introduction to Keck's book here.)
Usually this occurs after we reach the limit of our own resources and discover the incapacity of close family and friends to make up the short fall. We are thrown, it seems alone, like clay onto a spinning wheel and wonder is this all there is, is this all I am, what is the point?
For some, the question never arises under any circumstances and that's okay too for spirituality is not a necessary ingredient of life.
1.1 Spirituality as cliche
'Spiritual' and 'artistic' as well as cliched are both used as put-downs in the 'cut the tall poppies down to size' syndrome along with 'sensitive', 'emotional' and 'girl'. When I was a kid, 'poofter' covered the lot.
Recently one of my daughters told her new and nervous-about-meeting-the-father boyfriend, to just think of me as a gay man and we will get on fine. I smiled. So now it's IN to be sensitive and aware but only if you are queer. In earlier days she probably thought of me as a happy gay guy and her step mother as a lesbian.
Our collective rejection of the immaterial, places the aesthetic and devotional in a side lined sub-culture for 'losers' or 'wankers' who should 'get real'. 'Spiritual' and 'Truth' are synonymous with religious orthodoxy. 'Religion' turns people away from the ecstatic interior out to follow the literal material of scripture as if that were the source of Truth.
Religion remains big business and big politics. Mysticism too is subject to its own materialism, the 'how far are you advanced on the path' thing with a compulsive belonging to a spiritual group where 'outsiders' are judged as not 'on the path'. Psychology too can be used as a cult of self-worship, a new religion.
I remember a God's Squad wedding in which the leather clad pastor John Smith, spoke to his leather studded, body pierced and chained congregation all clasping beer cans to their hearts, of the impossibility of marriage without the third person of God present. The ceremony invited that Being and asked the couple to welcome that Life into the marriage. That's a belief in religion as a necessary ingredient of life.
Nothing is, but image making makes it so. Wright Morris
Prayer is not the moment when God and humans are in relationship, for that is always. Prayer is taking initiative to intentionally respond to God's presence. L. Robert Keck
2.0 Intrinsic Spirituality
Only one reality seems to survive and be capable of succeeding and spanning the infinitesimal and the immense: Energy - that floating, universal entity from which all emerges and into which all falls back as into an ocean. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
It is a myth that we are born alone and die alone.
If we were just a particle then maybe, but we are also a wave and like a soul pebble thrown into a pond, the waves meet and bounce off intersecting pebble waves and demonstrating non-local effects. We are a blob of energy that from the beginning to the end is in constant, energetic, communicative movement even though the illusion remains of one solid, separate and particular entity, me.
It takes an awesome amount of brain power to continue that illusion against evidence to the contrary, probably the 90% of the brain we don't consciously use.
Without mortification, renunciation or separation from the senses, without psychic abilities, meditation, prayer, near death experiences, without religion or ritual, whilst ever we vibrate we are in contact with each other - from the womb until death and perhaps a little time after death. That is the nature of the energy field we now understand from quantum theory and wave mechanics.
'The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today.' (David Bohm, 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order' 1980)
Many esoteric traditions and yoga practices have the development of that sense of connection or unity as their aim.
'A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Albert Einstein, 1954)' Both quotes from spaceandmotion.com
Here is a cautionary view of chaos theory and quantum mechanics as a complete explanation of the wholeness of everything. That web site is filled with little treasures as is this one on christian anarchy.
One experience of intrinsic spirituality is in the breath, the 'ah ha!' experience. The words inspiration and expiration share the root word for spirit. The Hebrew (ruwach) and Aramaic (alaha) are words from which the Latin spiriea or spirit is derived, meaning air in motion, breath and life. One version of the Christian Lord's prayer from Aramaic is astonishing as is the Hidden Gospel of Jesus.
'In Jesus' time teachers had a custom of always asking their audience at the end in Aramaic "Mai kô mashma lan?"' What does it mean for us? It means that our in-breath is god's out-breath. Some claim for Christianity the same as we do for Buddhism that it is not a religion and was never intended to become one by its founder. They are both practices of reasoning and wisdom, new wine in old wineskins, not to be taken as Given but to be understood within oneself, with one's breath.
'Ripe/Blessed are those who soften what is rigid in body and mind; for they shall receive power and sustenance from the subtle forces of creation.' Yeshua, (Gospel St Matthew 5:5) a contemporary translation from Aramaic to English (compare translation of same Aramaic beatitude into Greek into Latin and then into English King James Bible: 'the meek shall inherit the earth')
In this link about divinity are a rich cross section of views about the meaning of spiritual. My personal favourite in this tradition is the reluctant messenger Thomas the apostle.
3.0 Extrinsic Spirituality
'If we realize that life is asking us to respond with our core values, we awaken to the precious beauty of our life and of others. We abandon spiritual practice and embrace life. We do not worry. We do not flee. We act with grace, strength, and compassion. We act even with imperfection -- but we act. Spirituality born out of crisis is grounded in the personal. I truly believe that to be the case. Don't fool yourself and think that Spirit is somewhere else, in other worldly experiences, in great rushes or ecstatic visions.
Surviving my nightmare has taught me that we are all a lot better off when we understand that the Holy is in our hands and in our deeds. I suspect that was King David's message when he wrote the simple statement, "May goodness and compassion chase me all the days of my life." If we hunger to live the spiritual, we hunger to serve and to give. Life's deepest experience is the joy that fills our hearts when we love and give to others. Ask anyone in the middle of battling a catastrophic illness. Or survey all my friends from the acute trauma ward, and they will tell you they live to give a halting hug or to speak a word of grace to another. The irony can no longer be lost on me. When crisis explodes in our midst, what we yearn for is a clue to our spiritual life.' from Yehuda Fine and here an interview with the 'times square rabbi'.
Extrinsic religiosity was researched by Gordon Allport in the 1950's and discussed here in the guardian review of the book 'The Story of God' by Robert Winston.
Extrinsic spirituality, however, is the sacred in the ordinary and everyday. In beauty and solitude, in music and in a crowd, in every act of service and kindness. It is not religiosity but a broad spirituality that includes self, family and bio-community. Volunteering celebrates the sacredness of life.
Esoteric and exoteric is simply contrasted on that link. Due to the impossibility of reconciling literal scriptural theology with mystical insight sharp divisions occur between Islam and Sufism, Judaism and Kabala, Christianity and Gnosis. This is not such a problem in Eastern practices.
4.0 Neurotheology
The biological correlates of religious experience explored in the critical and non-dogmatic numenware blog. For example: 'Siddartha Gautama was enlightened at age 35, whereas Jesus of Nazareth’s breakthrough came at the age of 33. What is it about the early-to-mid-thirties?' and near death experiences 'allow the dying organism to think more lucidly and flexibly in order to save itself from death'.
5.0 Spirituality in art
I can't say it better than Gerhard Richter, quoted from his 'The Daily Practice of Painting - writings 1962-1993:
When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we create models ... Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate: the unknown, the incomprehensible, the infinite. For thousands of years we have been picturing it through surrogate images such as heaven and hell.
In abstract painting we have found a better way of gaining access to the unvisualizable ... Accustomed to pictures in which we recognise something real, we rightly refuse to regard mere colour as the thing visualized. Instead we accept that we are seeing the unvisualizable: that which has never been seen before and is not visible. This is not some abstruse game but a matter of sheer necessity: the unknown simultaneously alarms us and fills us with hope, and so we accept the pictures as a possible way to make the inexplicable more explicable ...
Of course pictures of objects also have this transcendental side to them ... when represented in a picture, the object conveys this mystery all the more powerfully, the less of a 'function' the picture has. Hence, the growing fascination of many beautiful old portraits.
6.0 Psychotherapy and spirituality
I can't say it better than Sandford Drob
As a consequence of Darwinian and Freudian developments (there) has been a further bifurcation between man and the world, between the humanities and the natural sciences; to the point where the soul has been taken out of the world and confined to man.
James Hillman, has spent the past 30 years bemoaning this occurrence, urging us to regard the world itself as well as our own productions in art, language, and science as filled with soul and spirit. We have boxed ourselves into such a corner that the psyche is confined to ourselves and our relationships, and we are no longer as capable as previous generations of sensing the great depth and soul in the world at large.
Indeed, our generation is one in which to be deep means to turn inward toward the self, and to be involved in such matters as politics, science or the natural world is deemed psychologically uninteresting. Many of the most creative minds of our own generation have spent the better part of their lives in self absorption on the analytic couch or in other primarily psychological activities. As such, we are in a position that is in some ways analogous to that of God before creation: we are narcissistically preoccupied and unable to get ourselves out of the way so that we may genuinely encounter an ensouled world.
Perhaps another human act of contraction or tzimtzum is necessary at this stage to recognize that the hermeneutic categories which we have eagerly applied in psychoanalysis to ourselves are relevant to the world at large, and that there is as much psyche and depth in that world as there is within our own souls.
When patients take a genuinely deep and abiding interest in the world around them and turn away from their own inner preoccupations I consider this a most hopeful sign. While such an interest can, on occasion, be a sign of resistance, it is very frequently also a sign that the patient has contracted himself, that, he has gotten himself out of the way to such an extent that he has permitted a world to emerge outside the confines of his own psyche.
Achieving this might be considered a wonderful act of imitatio dei, and when it occurs the Kabbalists would find it as a warrant for the assertion that man was created in the image of God.
© 2005, 2006 Ziji Fox All Rights Reserved www.peterfox.com.au
