On Spirituality

              I believe that everyone is spiritual, actually everything, for that matter. I think that spirituality is the infinite essence that underlies all of life and eventually makes its way into form as well. We tend to think of spirituality as being an invisible movement, something that remains only in the mind in the realm of ideas, but I think that it also inhabits the shapes and forms of our lives and is consistently taking form and leaving form, very much like what death does for a body that is not longer useful. In a way, death acts as a cleansing agent; it does not obliterate life; it only removes an impediment to it. All the while our spirituality remains intact and as far as we know, continues to move as an essence until and unless it takes another form for greater ease of expression. This makes perfect sense to me, but then, I am a believer.

Spirituality and religion become mixed...

            Over the eons of time, spirituality and religion have become mixed up together, with religion claiming a corner on the spirituality market. This has not always been a happy partnership, for organized religion has often completely missed the flowing freedom that characterizes the nature of spirituality and tried to cram it into rigid demands and codes. Is there really a right way to be spiritual…and a wrong way? Is it possible to be unspiritual, or are we just not adhering to a religious system’s idea of correctness? More importantly, can the fulfillment of our spiritual natures be denied us by anything other than our own lack of understanding? Who can possibly know for us what we can only know for ourselves? Good questions that need to be asked, even if we are not sure about the answers.

 We step into it...

            As the centuries passed we got better and better at being religious. We gave our spirituality names and made it into gods that behaved like us. Sometimes Love sneaked into the mix, but a whole lot of time we were dealing with gods that were really mean spirited, wrathful and vengeful. As a young person I gave up on religion as such. I figured I already knew how to be miserable. Who needed a god that was better at it then I was? But spirituality, on the other hand…that never left, and its beckonings were never far off. It was, after all, essential to my nature. I didn’t have to “get” it; I only had to become aware. Awakening after a night’s sleep does not mean we have to create the daylight. We only have to step into it.

 The Genii is out of the bottle...

            The genii is out of the bottle, as far as I am concerned. I cannot go back to the rightness and wrongness of organized religion. As the Sufi poet, Rumi, suggests I can only move past those highly structured ideas and meet others in the field of spirituality we all share. Imagine what it might be like if we all did.