What is spirituality?

Spirituality is everyday existence. It is kindness. It is acceptance. It is apply and it is enlightenment, as nicely as the opposite of all these.

Spirituality is a redundant word, since, considerably like enjoy, it has been overused. If we are to use it with any specificity, as I feel we must, we want to obtain jointly all I have just said, collectively with the disparate definitions supplied by other people who are involved with the so-named increased worlds and undertake a house-clearing, so that we know what we are speaking about. If not, let’s believe of a new term altogether! –simply because the purpose of language is to talk.

Today we have a Tower of Babel situation just appear around at the extensive array of religious teachers, spiritual traditions, new and historical spiritual philosophies which are at times puzzled, vague or obtuse, but usually complicated. If we are to genuinely talk, I never consider that spirituality ought to be any various to cooking or medicine or politics. Within these spheres of endeavor, if you are as puzzled as men and women look to be in the non secular sphere, we would be speaking nonsense with devastating consequences.

So what is the definition we must use to inform us?

Spirituality is the term that describes the larger operating of human beings. Without a spiritual dimension, human beings are engaged solely with animalistic worries, like belonging to a team, mating and procreation, acquisition and actual physical stability. In the intermediate levels of human growth we are anxious with id, socialization, compassion for other folks and personal obligation. Spiritual philosophies and methodologies are people which envelope all of these and go on to believe a greater aspiration for human achievement, an intrinsic require, felt by many, that we are much more than we appear to be and that the entire world of appearances is not all there is.

Like Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of wants?

Indeed, like self-actualization and peak activities in Maslow’s model. But also like the insights of the Upanishads, the Dhammapada, the System in Miracles, Zen Buddhism, mystical Christianity, Sufism, and on and on through transpersonal methods and spiritual maps also several to mention. But what they have in widespread is human beings striving for the greatest comprehending in the perception that one thing elusive that is beyond the planet of appearances presents that means and significance to life.

Why is spirituality a concern of relatively number of individuals?

Spirituality is common. It is everyone’s concern to find out who they truly are, by way of bodily, psychological, psychological, soulful and non secular ranges of the human predicament. We can’t judge how personal individuals are engaged with this, but arguably no matter what a individual is performing — pondering, working, forming relationships, vacationing — is an try to equilibrium, have interaction with and realize self and the globe. It is a response to the quiet, tacit concern of existence.

And that concern is?

Who am I? No a single is free of the consequences of this concern. The only distinction is in how we decide on to solution it in self-referral, self-definition or self-transcendence.

What about the etymological origins of the term? Spirit means breath, doesn’t it?

Spiritusmeans breath and espiritus signifies the breath of God, which is the word from which we derive our phrase inspiration. So spirit is about breath, the divine breath prajna, the interchange with the universe we encounter when we breathe in and breathe out. When I breathe in the universe breathes out or inspires me when I breathe out the universe breathes in or I inspire it. Which is it? From the spiritual standpoint there is no variation, simply because the universe and I are the exact same.

Spirituality then is about a romantic relationship between soul, spirit and entire body?

Spirituality is also linked with questing in the sort of a journey. It appears that we have to undertake a spiritual voyage, a quest, or some type of ordeal in which we are transformed in some way by means of suffering. The ahead shifting narrative of that ordeal, the lively look for for that enterprise has been important to notions of spirituality for centuries. Dependent on in which and when we have been introduced up it took the type of the Pilgrim’s Progress, the Ramayana, the legend of Siddhartha, Dante’s journey through the underworld, the Native American eyesight quest and so on. What each of these narratives has in frequent is the basic principle theme of striving in the direction of a spiritual purpose by way of effortful persistence, powerful will and perseverance.

Curiously really couple of of these religious maps see outside of effort. It is as if we are rewarded only when we thrust ourselves difficult. Nevertheless religious realization itself is epitomized by acceptance, receptivity, gentleness and surrender — all very soft characteristics. Reading through these accounts you would feel that the only way to heaven is by way of hell.

And just isn’t it?

Heaven and hell are factors of look at. You enter possibly one particular in any second by way of your predisposition, which hinges on your attachment to the ego, or separation from the rest of existence. As assorted examples, both Jacques Lusseyrian in the course of his incarceration in World War II and St John of the Cross in a Toledo jail in the Sixteenth Century experienced profound spiritual and divine epiphanies, in spite of enduring the most horrendous physical and mental mistreatment. Yet another example is Laurens van de Put up who taught 1000’s of POWs in Java to resist bitterness and forgive their captors so that they survived the ordeal psychologically and emotionally intact, through adopting a non secular method.

Does spirituality entail disidentification from the entire body?

Fairly you relate spiritually to your entire body, as effectively as to everything else. What this signifies is that you centre yourself in the essence that is frequent to every little thing that occurs in consciousness and feeling the source of all that arises.

Almost everything that occurs at some stage also ends?

But that which has no ending is the essence of spirituality. The non secular quest is to learn and turn out to be 1 with the supply of consciousness, the root of interest. Spirituality lies amongst what we call the mystical and transcendence it is not an end in by itself, our intention need to not be merely to exercise spirituality, but to penetrate even more to where it prospects. So, our knowing of mysticism, or the self-directed mystical route (as distinct from a spiritual path), sales opportunities us on a non secular journey to self-transcendence and the assembly with the Divine.

For some this is God, for others Buddha Character, infinity, the Complete or Brahman. But all of these terms are mental constructs they are just suggestions. There is only one particular suitable response to a assembly with the Divine — awe-inspired, mystical, respiratory silence, since in that great relaxed 1 last but not least encounters one’s real self, which is outside of tips of thoughts, interpretation and description.

Spirituality leads to a conference with the Divine?

Or a conference with yourself it is the identical factor. To know yourself, to locate out who you actually are you have to make use of religious strategies, continue being consistent to a spiritual exercise, but then you have to get rid of that practice, depart it totally to arrive in the spot it has been having you. This is a single of the difficulties in the Contemporary Era, as well as in historic instances. People are loath to destroy they’d fairly create up. Right now we get in touch with it materialism. Chögyam Trungpaeven coined the phrase ‘spiritual materialism’ to explain how non secular practitioners turn into hooked up to their achievements and their follow.

Spirituality is anxious mostly with inner aspects of the human being. It is accurate that a spiritual getting demonstrates specified attributes, like enjoy, gentleness, compassion and forgiveness. But none of these are well worth anything at all unless they are real, actually knowledgeable from the heart heart of the particular person exhibiting them. To interact with the heart heart one of the insights we need to expertise is that we do not lack… something! Nothing at all by any means is wanting in the human expertise when it is felt, seen, touched and experienced entirely. When this perception has been recognized entirely, 1 has this expertise of internal emptiness it is profoundly receptive and resonating and it allows you to relate authentically with the relaxation of the world. Psychic Abilities is the state of becoming-ness within you, with no action, restlessness of any type, without disturbance — internal or outer — it is reliable, unwavering you would not even call it religious, it would be far more exact really to call it one’s all-natural condition.

Is this ‘natural state’ accessible to all?

Yes of course. But you have to want it, and you have to want it badly. Also you need to possess an interior integrity, a deep honesty about it and you must accept no substitutes! Because the non secular path is beset with such interruptions, problems, seductions and pretenses, urgings of the ego to permit it all go and settle for some quasi-religious point out that would be exalted from the level of view of the amateur, the man or woman who aspires to the religious benefits of the path.

What can you do in this quasi-non secular condition?

Set up as a non secular instructor! Engage in excellent, notify men and women what to do, entice other people to act as followers or disciples, compose a ebook about your ‘spiritual’ activities, your enlightenment, although all the time you are basically preening your ego. It is barely uncommon in this darkish time the period of time the Hindus predicted we would be in now — the kali yuga.

But the interest in spirituality, meditation and yoga is definitely increasing?

Nicely, desire isn’t always ample. The religious entire world is entire of dilettantes and enjoyment-seekers and self-aggrandizement. This is not to detract from the honest practitioners, the applied types, but even there you see you can occur throughout an ego lure, since some people’s ego is retained alive by enticements like ‘I will by no means succeed’, ‘I’m not good enough’ — it is just the antithesis of ‘Look how fantastic I am’, ‘I have succeeded because I am better than the rest’. Spiritually you will find no distinction in between these two details of view they each serve the preening of the ego condition.

So what should we do? I am beginning to see what you suggest about the non secular path getting beset by seductions.

Don’t be seduced, apply by yourself diligently, do not end right up until you get to the end of your religious journey, pick a training and a teacher that tends to make sense and will not take anything at all on confront price, relatively concern every little thing and do not consider for a minute that you can do it on your very own.

Everybody demands a expert?

Absolutely everyone wants direction from an individual who features as a trainer in their life and on their spiritual route, to preside more than their non secular endeavor and correct and inspire and concern and cajole and supply a model of an reliable human getting in the globe. This is how we protect religion, know that it is attainable to do well and cultivate the determination and courage to carry on.

Richard Harvey, Psychotherapist, Creator and Non secular Instructor, can make the connection between counseling and psychotherapy and non secular expansion. He speaks specifically to those who are seeking for more than they have located in treatment. And offers advice to individuals seeking to undertake the internal journey – advice free of charge of dogma and grounded in what several of us expertise as the “messiness” of our personalities.