introduction to spirituality

In this series of talks I want to give an overview of the whole field of spirituality. These talks are aimed at the total beginner, perhaps someone who has grown up in a western culture who has not explored spirituality or religion at all.

I want to encourage you to explore this area, it has many secrets to tell and through delving into this part of life we can come to live in peace, with deep contentedness, feeling whole, fulfilled.

By spirituality I mean being in touch with our innermost essence, the very core of our being, the energy of life itself within us. In talking about this I’ll be contrasting some of the ways of exploring our inner being with the more objective way of science. I want to make it clear from the outset that I have nothing against objective science. It has yielded many benefits, but it has little to offer in this inner search, the exploration of who I am. So, forgive me if at times I sound like I am against objective science – it is not so. It is just that objective science has a limited scope and any true scientist understands this. There are questions which are outwith the scope of science.

For example, objective science requires that anything can be observed by independent observers who can compare and come to agreement as to what they have observed. So this assumes that the observer can be neutral, unbiased. It also assumes that events can be replicated, reproduced in a different space, difference place and at a different time.

A leaf has just fallen from a tree and for a moment my thoughts stopped as I watched it glide to the ground. It was beautiful, a feeling of beauty arose in me. Now, as I gaze at it where it rests, the tan brown colour in the strong sun, still I feel that beauty resonating within me. What can we say about this objectively?

We can talk about gravity, we can talk about photons, we can talk about hormones in my body. The feeling of beauty, what can be said of this? If you have experienced beauty you will know something of what I speak and if you have never felt beauty then all the words in all the languages of the world will not help us. For beauty is a subjective feeling, it is a feeling within me, perhaps triggered by things outwardly but nevertheless a feeling.

And how much richer is my life for this feeling of beauty? If we take this away, if we take away love, love and beauty, how dull life would be. We’d be merely machines without these. So in exploring the inner world we can talk of subjective feelings. We will not be able to prove very much, for proof is an objective concept and this whole search is not about convincing someone else of a truth. It is about finding one’s own truth, one’s own truth about the deep mysteries of life.

So what is this spirituality? There are many approaches, there are many paths but essentially spirituality is a journey to discover who I am. It is a journey through which we come to realise our wholeness, it is a journey to the absolute – the absolute which is within each of us. This may sound romantic, sentimental but one can experience for one’s self a great opening and a transformation. It is of this that the ancient sages spoke. It is this that underlies every religion of the world, theistic or non-theistic.

To begin with we do not know. In fact this is one of the most truthful statements a human being can utter: I don’t know. Feel it in you, in your body, in your being: I don’t know, I don’t know why I am here; I don’t know why anything exists; I don’t know whether there is a god or not; I don’t know what my consciousness is; I don’t know. Most of our knowledge was borrowed from text books, from teachers, from newspapers and gossip, from scientific journals. We trust in it as a matter of blind faith, we believe, and yet we laugh at those who follow a religion with a similar blind faith.

Here in this series of talks I am not going to urge you to have another blind faith, there is far too much of that around already. Instead I will urge you to explore, to explore your innermost recesses, explore your own mind, explore your feelings, your emotions, explore the sensations within your body. Through this, your own exploration, you will come to feel things which you have never felt before. Whether or not you can make clean rational sounding stories out of these feelings is another question and one which I am not so concerned with. The whole purpose of the spiritual journey is to find one’s own truth, the deep absolute truth, not in words.

Through this journey we come to be alive, truly alive. Without it, if you do not undertake this journey, then on your deathbed you will realise that you have missed the whole purpose of life. But by then it will be too late. So I urge you to explore. What have you got to lose? Perhaps your friends will laugh at you, perhaps some will even abandon you, but it is a journey to find your own truth. Without that, without your own truth, everything in your life is secondhand, borrowed from others, with an unreal feel as if you are watching a TV show, a soap opera. This is not how life is meant to be and we can change it through an inner search. So, I urge you, to explore yourself.

In the remaining talks in this series I will be outlining some of the basic approaches to this inner search. There are many, some will suit you better, some not so well. You can try as many as you will and use those which work or seem to bring you some new feelings, insights – explore these further. Enjoy your journey, may it bring you the ultimate flowering of consciousness, may it bring you the absolute within yourself, may it bring you your own truth.