Spiritual Education
Spiritual Guidance
Retreats
Money Management
Rituals
Although his is an frequently used term, the meaning is often personal in nature. One person's explaination of spirituality may be totally different from another's. The dictionary lists many definitions for spiritual and spirituality. The word "spirituality" is used in this web site means:
a) Of or pertaining to the spirit. The spirit is the mystery that connects the universe and all beings within the cosmos. The spirit is that part of ourselves which has been labeled the soul, human essence, a supernatural being or energy field of which the physical body is one manifestation. Christians use the term Holy Spirit for the larger mystery and soul for each individuals spirit.
b) Of or pertaining things of the spirit but not bound by the confines of a particular religion, philosophy, doctrine or dogma. Being spiritual in this sense does not necessarily mean being religious or being a member of a religious organization.
c) That which people find important enough to organize their lives around. Some possible anchors of organization include: financial success, money, consumerism, environmental concerns, work/job, their understanding of Creator's will for them and participation in the Great Mystery called Spirit.
If you would like to read more about the difference between spirituality and religion and a short essay and what is spirit read the following information from Spirit Matters by Michael Lerner (Hampton Roads Publishing Co. 2000)
Spirituality is a lived experience, a set of practices and a consciousness that aligns us with a sense of the sanctity of All Being. It usually involves:
a. an experience of love and connection to the world and to others
b. a recognition of the ultimate Unity of AH Being, and through that, of the preciousness of the Earth and the sanctity of every human being on the planet
c. a conviction that the universe is not negative or neutral but tilts toward goodness and love
d. awe, wonder, and radical amazement in response to the universe and a consequent unwillingness to view the world merely in instrumental terms
e. a joyous and compassionate attitude toward oneself and others
f. a deep trust that there is enough for all and that every human being deserves to share equally in the planet's abundance and is equally responsible for shaping our future
g. a sense that the world is filled with a conscious spiritual energy that transcends the categories and concepts that govern material reality and inclines the world toward freedom, creativity, goodness, connectedness, love, and generosity
h. a deep inner knowing that our lives have meaning through our innermost being as manifestations of the ultimate goodness of the universe (or, in theistic terms, through our connection to, and service of God)
This is what spirituality is about.
Religions, on the other hand, are the various historical attempts to organize a set of doctrine rituals, and specific behaviors that are supposed to be "the right way to live"
That makes talk about Spirit so difficult is that language is so limiting. In the earlier part of this introduction, I talked about Spirit as the Force of Healing and Transformation, that aspect of reality that makes it possible for us to transcend all that has been and shape a new reality. Yet many spiritual thinkers go beyond that and hint at other aspects of Spirit. Every such attempt has some severe problems because of the limitations of our language. That's a problem with Spirit-we can allude to it, but every attempt to define it in itself rather than in its manifestations ends up seeming silly, empty, or vague. The deepest spiritual thinkers warn us that the realm of Spirit is the realm of the ineffable. It simply can't be adequately expressed in language. The best we can get is poetry and song, not prepositional knowledge. Again Abraham Joshua Heschel: "The heart of being confronts me as enigmatic, incompatible with my categories, sheer mystery. All we have is a sense of awe and radical amazement in the face of a mystery that staggers our ability to sense it."
Those of us who feel the delight of spiritual life have a compelling desire to share the loving joy with others. So we engage in language that is inevitably inadequate. There is no one right way. Every approach to Spirit is limited, and no one who really gets what Spirit is about is going to put down other people's approach, except in one case; the case of spiritual or religious traditions that demean others and don't treat everyone as equally a manifestation of God. It's not unreasonable to want to have some relevant words. But the words may sound confusing. They point in all different directions, and you may not feel you fully understand them until you've allowed yourself to be engaged in spiritual practice on a regular basis. It's kind of like writing about music-it doesn't capture very much until you've listened to a lot of music and have some idea of what these words might be talking about.
So, I don't mind if you skip this part. Because the best I can do is point to a few aspects of what I mean by Spirit:
1. About fifteen billion years ago a cosmic bang released all the energy and mass of the universe from a small point into billions of particles that eventually self-organized into atoms that eventually self-organized into clouds that formed into galaxies that formed into stars that grew, died, and reorganized into new stars and planets. About four billion years ago, one of the planets gave birth to tiny life forms that began to develop in manifold forms, reproducing, experimenting, learning to share with each other, and cooperating to form unions of more and more complex muticellular organisms with capacities far beyond those of individual cells. As David Korten points out in "For the Love of Life" (TlKKUN, January/February 2000), "Our own bodies, comprised of some 30 to 70 trillion individual living cells plus an even larger number of assorted beneficial bacteria and fungi, are an extraordinary example of the complex consequences of this experimentation. Continuously experimenting, creating, building, life transformed the planet's very substance into a web of living beings of astonishing variety, beauty, awareness and capacity for intelligent choice." The energizing Force behind this process of continuing experimentation, creativity, consciousness, and cooperation is what we call Spirit.
2. Spirit is the undergirding of all that there is, the ultimate substance of the universe, in which all else is grounded. Aristotle talked about it as nous, Mind or Enminded Substance, but in doing so made it sound as though it were some kind of material entity, perhaps just a very ghostly material entity. Some people think of Spirit as the membrane that connects every part of the universe and operates according to a logic of love, sympathy, and goodness rather than a material logic of hydraulic or mechanical rules. Recent controlled studies, documented by Larry Dossey in Reinventing Medicine and in Meaning and Medicine, have demonstrated that prayer can have a statistically significant impact on a group of people being prayed for from thousands of miles away (even in double blind studies, where the people praying don't know the people being prayed for and the people prayed for don't know that they are the recipients of those prayers). This and other psychic phenomena suggest a form of spiritual communication and causation in the universe that far surpasses any of our current categories. (Read Larry Dossey's important work, particularly Meaning and Medicine, for more information about the way medical science is struggling with this kind of spiritual information.) Some people argue that the only possible way to understand the physical impact of prayer is to imagine a universe connected by a spiritual membrane. Future generations may look at our current spiritual unknowingly with the same kind of astonishment that many people today show toward those in previous historical periods who believed the sun revolved around the earth. They will almost certainly point: with a certain irony to a higher prevalence of spiritual awareness and intuitions in less "advanced" human societies.
Try thinking of Spirit as the ultimate consciousness of the universe, a consciousness that pervades, sustains, and includes All Being and yet cannot be reduced to any part of it. We are part of this ultimate consciousness in the way a particular theory or orientation might be "part" of our minds. Each of us is a particular part of spiritual consciousness and a part of the process through which Spirit is becoming self-conscious. We did not originate consciousness, but instead we tapped into a larger pool of consciousness that surrounds and grounds All Being. There are gradations of consciousness and awareness throughout the manifold of Being. Each of us participates in this consciousness, and, as Wayne Teasdale writes in The Mystic Heart, "We inhabit consciousness but we don't own it." One of the great errors of human consciousness is to think of ourselves as fixed objects and to then seek to control ourselves and the world. In fact, our consciousness is part of the universal consciousness, a local manifestation of the Unity of All Being, and a stage in the development of the self-consciousness of the universe. When I talk about stages in the development of Spirit, I am actually talking about increasing levels of consciousness in which we are able to gradually comprehend the oneness and unity of all. This unity transcends all language—the ultimate fact of our being is that we are part of the Unity of All Being; it is mirrored in every cell and every pore of our selves. Unable to articulate this in language, those attuned to the realm of Spirit have turned to mysticism; to poetry, song, and dance; to ritual and meditation; and to other nonverbal activities to allude to, intuit, and experience the oneness that can never adequately be pinned down.
3. The consciousness of the universe is not separate from other aspects of Being but is that through which All Being exists and becomes manifest to us and to itself. Our desire to get hold of Spirit and to make it an object among the other objects of the world leads us into all kinds of muddles. Miguel d'Unamuno captured the problem when he talked about killing a human being and dissecting the body to find the life force. The problem, of course, is that the dissection destroys the very thing it was seeking to expose. That's the problem with all language.
4 Spirit is the Force for Freedom. But it is also the Force of Healing and Transformation.
Spirit is not a neutral force that seeks to embody freedom in any possible way (for example, by making people free to hurt each other), but a Force that pushes toward the fullest realization of consciousness, goodness, creativity, love, joy, pleasure, complexity, cooperation, beauty, and unity.
5. Spirit is the process of evolution as the universe becomes more loving and caring. Spirit is the process that brings about deeper and deeper levels of knowledge, goodness, and radiant beauty. Or, we might say, as my teacher, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi suggests, that Spirit is the voice of the future beckoning to the present. The distinctive thing about human beings is our ability to hear that voice, feel addressed by it, and find meaning in life to the extent that we respond to it. Or as Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, "I am commanded, therefore I am." That is, Spirit is the aspect of reality that needs us to be its partners in tikkun (the healing and transformation of the planet).
6. Spirit is, among other things, the world's permission to you to leave or temporarily suspend the focus of your attention on goal-directed mental, emotional, or physical activity and join instead in play, humor, joy, pleasure, and celebration of all that is. This is a form of love that, as Evelyn Fox Keller puts it, "allows for intimacy without annihilating difference."
Spirit is the playful, joyful, loving energy that pulsates through All Being, imminent in all, and yet fully transcendent of any given state of being and any given manifestation. It is the invitation to dance, to song, to erotic energy, and to celebration. Sometimes Spirit has been identified only with the realm of transcendence, as a powerful being that exists outside our bodies and beyond the Earth. The result has been patriarchal spiritual traditions that denigrate the Earth, the feminine, the body, and nature.
On the other hand, we've had matriarchal spiritual traditions that have sanctified the Earth and nature but have often allowed that to drift into a sanctification of any existing reality and lost all sense of possibility and transformation.
In my account, Spirit is both fully transformative/transcendent (or a power beyond anything we experience as tangible) and fully imminent in all that is (that is, present in nature and culture, in events and in things). The Unity of All Being is an unfolding evolutionary process, mirrored through the development of the consciousness of human beings. The Force of Healing and Transformation and the Creative Energy of the Universe are One. This Unity continually makes itself manifest to us through spiritual experience. Overcoming the dualities and seeing the ultimate Oneness of All Being is at the heart of the mystical spiritual experience.
The meaning most people seek is achieved when we find sonic way to connect our own lives to the unfolding of Spirit in the universe. That might sound like a rather difficult task, but, in fact, it comes through a recognition that we, like ail other aspects of Being, are manifestations of Spirit. Some will add here that Spirit is consciousness becoming self-conscious through the evolution of human beings. Spirit manifests through us and is in need of us. Our ultimate meaning, as my teacher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, used to say, is to be an answer to a cosmic need. The closer we get to experiencing our lives as service to this calling, the closer we get to experiencing a sense of meaning and purpose in life.
We don't have to do something, we have to let ourselves be the fullest beings that we can be—and then we will be in touch with our spiritual identity as manifestations of the ultimate Being of the universe. Then our lives will be an answer to God's need for us (an answer to the Biblical question that God first put to human beings:
Michael Lerner "Where are you?"). The greatest Joy in life comes from being able to answer that question, being able to recognize ourselves as part of the Unity of All Being, to recognize the foundation of our Being in Spirit, to dedicate our lives to making its purposes our own, to overcome the false consciousness that sees us as separated, lost, and on our own with no higher goal than to take care of ourselves. Though we can never be truly separate from Spirit, we can experience deep alienation by not realizing our connection and by attempting to create that feeling of connection through all kinds of partial and substitute gratifications for the fundamental need to be connected to Spirit.
It all sounds so heavy and serious. But, in fact, the recognition of our connection to Spirit is a state of bliss. We recognize our part in Being when we see that we arc manifestations of love, goodness, joy, and creativity. Spirit is in our being, but is also so much more than us.
Well, you can see why words are so inadequate here, and why spiritual people say, "Have the experience, encounter Spirit through developing a spiritual practice, and forget the words."
I've often wondered why people write long books about something they believe is fundamentally inexpressible in language. In my case, this book is nor. Primarily about defining Spirit, but about why it matters to the world and why we should notice that the matter in the world is filled with Spirit. Although we may have trouble defining Spirit, we can attend to it and incorporate that attention into a way of being in the world. And doing so can lead to wonderfully fulfilling experiences. Conversely, building a social world based on the denial of Spirit can cause tremendous pain.
So come out and play. Because serious as this book may seem, it's all about playing with God/Spirit as She manifests Herself in infinitely complex and wonderful ways through you and me.
If you still fear that by joining in this playful venture you may be leaving reason behind, remember Blaise Pascal's notion in his Peme'es, hat Reason's last step is recognizing that an infinity of things surpass it.