An old friend has for years joked about being spiritual but without any affiliation to any organized church.
“It’s perfect,” she’ll say. “It’s like eating the icing but leaving the cake behind.” Her implication is that living a spiritual life is a simple matter. Renting, but not owning.
Now, I’m not one to quibble, but my friend is dead wrong. Just as our external senses constantly mediate, interpret and respond to stimuli from without, our inner selves are in a constant flow of thought, emotion and perception to what we come to perceive as the river of consciousness.
Taking that idea one step further, consciousness is not simply a product. It is a self-reflexive process – always questioning, probing, asking existential questions. What am I? Who am I? Why am I here? What’s next? Who’s asking? These are profoundly difficult and challenging issues.
But spirituality demands expression.
As long as we have been we, those questions have followed us. From the Neolithic cave paintings of Lascaux in France to the sandstone etchings in the badlands of southern Alberta, we see signs of a persistent spirituality in our forebears – a primal yearning to fathom the eternal. An urge to express the foundations of human existence.
Lest you imagine that I assume spirituality to be uniquely human, then rest assured; I don’t. One need only see the sorrow of a mother elephant on the death of her child, and the elaborate and ritualized ceremony conducted by her community, to know we live among many like souls.
I think, at this point, we can agree on an instructive point: Spirituality is deep within our genes and is the way we sublimate and endure unanswerable questions. Without lapsing into a discussion of the mind-body problem, let’s understand that this is key. We can also use this understanding to make life a better place to be.
Love. Inspiration. Gratitude. Compassion. Awe.
These are emotions wondrous to experience, divine to express. But, too often we keep these feelings to ourselves. Not always, but in an essentially cynical western culture some of us miss the point, thinking that these are only individual qualities. They are not. They are fundamental expressions of human spirituality.
At this point I have to bring up a current and tiresomely conventional notion, a close cousin of political correctness, and an extension of the “radical gene” concept. This idea holds that humanity is responsible for a brief but destructive influence upon life on Earth. Guilt.
This idea is emotionally corrosive and obscures our best qualities. But with a bit of practice, we can put it in its place.
Every day, I meditate on the emotions I listed above, and think about how well I have made them closer. This meditation is balanced. I recall times when I have not been at my best, how I could have made myself act or think in a better way, and how my world can be closer to fine.
I humbly suggest you try to do the same. Remember the last time you were selflessly kind. When you were truly inspired. When you were so awestruck you cried.
When you do this you will connect with a spiritual self you may not have known was there.
