Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer
What do we mean when we use the word “spiritual?” Right away many people usually start using the word “religion,” but they are not exactly the same in meaning. When we talk of our spirit, we mean our inner life, our connection to a larger perspective, something that necessarily makes us feel and think that we are somehow better off. It explains our own nature, and it encourages us to integrate our unexamined parts into a whole that is both more centered and less entangled. Religion may encourage us to follow a prescribed method or pathway of spiritual evolution and growth, but it almost always involves our doing this in a way that someone before us has done, and so it is potentially something that may make us do things that are beyond our flexibility or ability. Spirit seems to be the method or path way that we are always naturally on, whereas religion seems to be a method we adopt, one that we use if we are unable to perceive or identify our own path.
This seems so because those who are spiritually led tend to be the ones who begin their own paths, which are often turned into religions. If we look back at the spiritual leaders of humanity, they all tend to be portrayed as those who broke with the religion of the day, and those who then are seen as the progenitors of the religions that follow them. In this way, we can say that spiritual leaders begin religions. But it may be better said that those who view these spiritual leaders as having answers use those leaders as the well-spring of the religions they formulate around those leaders.
It well may be that if those same spiritual leaders were to see what has become of their insights they might think that the religions created in their names were vastly different from the original thoughts and pathways that acted as seeds for them. Maybe we should go back and examine the original premise, the concept of the spiritual, and see what the point was to begin with.
We know that each religion has many rules by which adherents are adjusted to see the light. If we are to look at just this angle under just these circumstances, then we will glimpse the unseeable. The spiritual leader is seen as having been in just this mindset, sitting at just this angle, which just this thought, at exactly this location, and because of the absolute time and space coordinates of emotions and thoughts, insight and understanding, humbleness and humility, the moment came when total integration occurred and if those who are adherents to this method are to reach a like state of consciousness, they must apply themselves to attaining the same delineation of demarcation in existence, to be just like their mentor, however esoteric that might seem.
In some ways this is like trying to fall in love by sitting in the same spot where our parents were when they met and the sparks flew. It is like trying to hear a joke in exactly the same way that someone else does. It is like trying to have the same joy as another in a mountain vista, a seaside shore, or an incredible sunset. William Blake said, “There is no natural religion.” Whatever he might have meant by that in the absolute sense, we can adopt it here to mean that no exact copy of a spiritual experience is possible; we all will have to experience the ineffable on our own and in our own way.
This is frightening to most people. Most people are not very inventive, they are not quite sure what they feel or think and it is far easier for them to simply say, “Yeah, what he said.” They cannot believe that they could say it more clearly or powerfully for themselves than the way that it has been offered in a certain text or be some certain speaker. Others must speak for them because they cannot speak for themselves.
In a way then, the spiritual is not able to be represented by any given schema or thought pattern. It is as evasive as the jackalope or the unicorn. We know what we mean, but we have never seen one. We know what we feel, but no single breeze or sunset absolutely captures it. We are so sure that we feel it and that we have felt it because of certain conditions and that those feelings are so important that we can’t imagine not feeling them, even though we must constantly renew our own status and position on an on-going basis in order to better secure these insights and feeling for ourselves. We are pretty absolutely secure in believing that others must feel and think as we do, so much so that we deny other insights and we proffer he one that we have adopted as the only one available and real. We may so much believe this that we not only deny any other position, we argue that it is the only reality and even demote others for having any other thoughts, feelings, or beliefs, even though we ourselves must renew our own vows on a moment to moment basis since we are ourselves incapable of keeping to the program that we have adopted without forgetting our commitment 1000 times a day.
A specific characteristic then of the spiritual life is that no matter how we try to shake it, there is no getting rid of it. We can change religions, but our spirits remain the same. We speak of this as our having a soul. Sometimes we will see the vocabulary stack up and up and the esoteric imaginings will pile mile high with insight after rule after concept until the most basic understanding of these subjects are years of study and lifetimes of inspiring testimony after eons of enculturation and social engineering. By the time a person even begins to fundamentally grasp the most basic essence of the inner and deepest perspectives of the philosophy of the study of the spiritual leader’s simplest principles, the time is up and the life is over. We may have spent an entire life contemplating a few words and our faintest understanding is a simple humbleness in awe of the immensity of it all.
In the meantime, we may have spent our entire lives fighting, arguing, digesting, and judging. We juggle, preen, position, and assert. We dress for the occasion, downplay the flaws, put on the dog, jockey for position. All the while, in the background, the spiritual in us is both amused and saddened that we have taken a lifetime to learn to appreciate so little.
What are we to do? Let’s take up again the premise, what is the spirit? If we are to finally see ourselves as spiritual leaders for our own families, we cannot do it as tyrants. We must seek insights that are inclusive of the children we have, as broad a spectrum as that might include. If the final deliberation of spirituality is to finally include all beings, then we can even include ourselves, since we know ourselves to be the least real, the most fake, the most self-conscious, the most self-righteous, the least capable of being absolutely honest, and therefore we are the last ones we would humbly include as being worthy of any real insight into the infinite. If this is not true, then we really don’t know ourselves, we are dishonest, and we do not really understand the question to begin with, and this is just how naïve we really are.
This is necessarily true because the infinite is so vast in comparison to what we think we know that we have barely even begun to even understand the question of what it means to be free, or open, or inclusive, or loving. The values we hold the highest are concepts that are so far beyond our reach that we do them not only an injustice by our believing that we have absolutely understood them, we destroy their value in our lives by adhering to and supporting our flimsy proffering of their ultimate meaning.
The things we say, the actions we take, the beliefs we have, the faith we carry, the lives we live are so far beyond our understanding that to say that we infinitely understand them is to disgrace their very essence. We may believe that we hold life as sacred, but at all corners we degrade and slander this simple thought. We may believe in freedom, but we enslave ourselves and others at the drop of a hat 1000 times a day, an hour, a minute with our mouths, our eyes, and our thoughts. We may have faith to stand in the face of that which we deny at place, but we have moved no mountains if all we have done is to glibly offer our own futile insights to a starving world of illness, pain, and hopelessness.
The spiritual is so overwhelming that it transcends the nature of words, the concepts of the mind, the rough drawn slopes of our feelings, and the intellectualized slogans of any follower. In a truly spiritual world, there is only one being, only one. To divide and separate ourselves is to de-integrate, to go the opposite direction. Spirit means all one. No difference. Together. Integrated in peace.
runningturtle87
Having completed 33 years of public school service, Chris Herrington lives, with his wife, in Appleby, Texas, and his writing consists of blogging and essay writing concerning an array of topics including education, mediation, self-development, and human interests.
Chris Herrington can be reached at herrington@everythingnac.com
