When you look for “spirituality” on google you’ll get 33,200,000 results, but before I will address the importance of spirituality in this time, we should need to understand what it means. Spirituality is that awareness where we experience our universal unity. This awareness is pure consciousness that is beyond our mind, intellect and ego. In religious traditions this pure consciousness is referred to as the soul which is part of a collective soul or collective consciousness, which is part of the consciousness mentioned as God. When you have even a glimpse of this level of awareness you experience joy, insight, intuition, creativity and there is the awakening of love, kindness, compassion, happiness and equanimity. When your mind settles down, your body also begins to heal itself because it also quiets down. The body’s self-repair mechanisms are activated when the mind is at peace because the mind and body are at the deepest level inseparably one. But you should be aware that with such glimpses, it is the mind and ego which will translate it to fit its own believe system and so draws you back. One is fully awakened when one uses mind as a tool instead of ego using it for its own goal.
All religions are founded on a deep spiritual experience of unity consciousness where there was complete union between the personal and universal. Unfortunately, many times the followers of religion, instead of understanding the religious experience and seeking it for themselves, ended up merely worshipping the founder of the religion. Or their glimpse which was translated by what the mind/ego has built as its believe system translates it to fit its own ideas. It is more important to fully grasp the teaching of the religion and its basic tenets, that have come from a deeper experience of transcendence. Self-righteous morality is not a means to experiencing higher consciousness. Higher consciousness spontaneously leads to moral and ethical behaviour. However, because spiritual knowledge is powerful, the custodians of organized religion have frequently ended up with destructive behaviours, power mongering, crony-ism control, corruption and influence peddling. As a result, organized religion has frequently become quarrelsome, divisive and led to conflict.
No organized religion has been immune to this unfortunate tendency. So, we have had the crusades and witch-hunts of Christianity, the “Jihads” of Islam, the violent wars instigated by fundamentalists and the persecution of minorities and ethnic cleansing, all in the name of God.
Our present times are particularly dangerous because ancient habits combined with modern capacities and technologies of destruction are a devastating combination that can destroy life on our planet.
As humanity begins to have a more scientific understanding of the transcendent level of their existence and starts to look at the basic tenets of all religions, you’ll find that the spiritual experience is fundamental to all and similar in all. This experience can be had by anyone through contemplative self-inquiry, the letting go of the lower self and by the expression of love and compassion. The intellectual inquiry into the deeper meaning of life will eventually lead you to the so called inner path. With these practices, you will begin to realize that this pure awareness is omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient and infinite. And this experience also leads to unbounded love and compassion. Getting in touch with your deepest self is therefore the utmost importance because it is your doorway and connection to the mystery that we call God.
“Spirituality begins when the subject becomes the object of his own study.”
“You’re not just a star in the infinite universe, you’re also the universe in the star.” If there is anything that will at this moment heal our wounded planet with its immense problems of social injustice, ecological devastation, extreme economic disparities, war, conflict and terrorism, it is a deeper experiential understanding and knowledge of your own spirit. With this deeper understanding and with an interfaith dialogue that looks at your commonalities rather than your differences, you have the opportunity to solve the problems of the world, address its inequities and heal yourselves. The word, “healing” and the words holy and whole, all mean the same thing. To be healed is to have the return of the memory of who you really are. When you return to your sacred source, the world will be holy and it will be healed.
No political party, no new world order or organized religion or intellectual thought out plan will be able to heal the world in the true meaning of the word unless and only if it is a fully awakened one.
When you look at the groups and organizations, be it offering courses or blue pills, insights, human rights, animal rights, trees, nature, or UFO’s, none brings you any closer to the unity and healing power needed to change the world. Internet, a wonderful medium with social groups like Facebook, Twitter etc. has not helped to bring people together. It has only strengthened individualism. Now you can strengthen your personalized believe system because you can select and seek to your personalized liking. Talking, thinking and collecting or creating more groups is not being spiritual, nor is a Reiki diploma, a collection of angels, aroma therapy, astrology, yoga classes, books, videos, conspiracies, Mandala or the thousands of other things being offered under the heading of “Spirituality”.
As said prior, not the messenger but the message. Not out there but within, not a new leader who promises riches for everyone unless all is focused to finding the truth within you, then all else will be healed.
For the short term future, be prepared for great turmoil. All that represented security, comfort and pleasure will come to an end. Many will turn mad of fear and none of their personalized belief systems will be able to comfort them, except that special place in your heart. But many have a heart filled and left no room for truth to enter.
You don’t need a smart prime minister or president, but a King with a purified heart. Descartes, his famous dictum: “I think, therefore I am”. The more a person enters the spiritual , the less that person relies on thought. While you may conceive of distant realms, of heaven, of higher dimensions, even of God, your thinking itself remains inexorably bound to the world of space and time. As thought enslaves you and nurtures your addiction to listening to, in adding to and arguing with the ever continuing flow of thoughts and images in your minds. But you cannot think your way into heaven. Many spiritual seekers mistake thoughts and ideas about the path for the path itself. But for travelling the spiritual path, thoughts, no matter how elaborate, abstract or holy, are the wrong vehicle. Though words of prayer or a Divine name can orient us in the right direction, only by seeing beyond thoughts and beyond mental imagery can you begin to touch the higher worlds. Thoughts and concepts play no role when you stand before the ineffable.
So why write all these articles on spiritual subjects? Right thinking and true ideas offer two invaluable ingredients for the inner life: motivation and guidance. The stories in the holy scriptures and other written sources, contain ideas and images which can serve to raise the level of your spiritual aspirations and commitment to the path, and revealing greater truths as you get closer to the true path. Eventually, the wonders of the path itself start to reveal and become motivation. But until that door opens, the articles will help lift you toward the non-conceptual. The key here is not confusing the moon with the finger pointing toward it.
The inner landscape unbeknown to most needs a road map. What psychologists call the unconscious guides you away towards the outer landscape. Therefore a set of signposts through this land will prove useful. But the inner landscape is not material in the way that streets and roads are. The articles however, signposts for a mental map of the inner realms so that through practise you calibrate, revise and align your conceptual map to conform to the actual landscape, to the experience of walking the path, and understanding will deepen.
Remember therefore, by reading with a conditioned mindset can only interfere with your inner work, arousing thoughts and fixing your attention on concepts that your mind has built and measures by, rather than moving beyond them. Be you like children really means that children do not have these strong convictions and images through which they measure and are therefore more open to the truth which, like mentally built concepts, can recognize of itself also. But in most circumstances, in everyday life, your thoughts perpetually cascade through the foreground of your mind, reading articles of the spirit, pondering their contents and drawing inspiration from them channel your thoughts and hearts toward actual steps along the path, the famous pilgrims step, two and one, but like so many things taking two physical steps forward and one back as so many rituals do not bring you closer. They are like the finger pointing to the moon and not the moon itself.
8-05-2010
Moshiya van den Broek