As I said in my previous post, my spiritual journey hit a wall that I now recognize as modernist thinking and halted me for quite some time. However, after finishing a book given to me by my sister which was titled, “A Brief History of Everything” by Ken Wilber, I have realized that this wall was not blocking my way, but instead, tempting me to climb. One of the main flaws in modernity is that it left spirit out of the rationalization and reasoning that it engulfed the world in from the Enlightenment period and beyond. That being said, I believe that modernity has helped me move beyond the religion and blind faith that I had as a child and an adolescent. It helped push me to defend the beliefs that I have been raised in all of my life. I was very surprised to find that despite my strong beliefs in religion and my faith, I was unable to defend any of this with real reasoning. This realization sent me into a downward spiral of a loss of faith and my reason became the hammer and my faith became the structure that I began knocking down with increased dedication. This state of confusion and pain with regards to spirituality really stuck with me for many years, always lurking under my confident surface. However, I do believe that now I am at a better state with my spirituality, but I recognize that the scars and confusion remain from those troubled times of my faith.
With the help of Ken Wilber’s phenomenal reasoning and documentation of history’s collective and individual faith journeys, I was able to see that my spiritual predicament was one that is all too familiar in the world today. It may seem semi-obvious to some, but I was approaching spirituality from a very external and objective standpoint and disallowing it to enter inside of me as a person and the community as a whole. Wilber stated that this is very common within both the modern and postmodern movements and used a metaphor that really solidified things for me. Through the use of my approach to spirituality, I was just like a researcher who analyzes brains. Say, just for the sake of it, I was examining your brain and over the years I became an expert on every centimeter of your gray matter and was able to measure every blurb on an EEG from your brainwaves. Although all that I learned was true, it was not the whole picture, because no matter how much of an expert that I was on your brain as an object, I would never know what you were thinking, until I talked to you. Wow, that metaphor hit me like a ton of bricks. Just describing religion and spirituality isn’t enough, I have to experience it. Until I allowed for a communicative and personal approach to spirituality, the objectivity left me feeling empty and hopeless. Which, if I do say so myself, is pretty representative of my religion blog from March.
At the end of the blog I made it clear that I could not just give up all of the information that I had gleaned from my reasoning and rationality. In a way I was fighting the same battle that post modernity was fighting when it realized that modernity left it with nothing but an empty shell in a world that it had fully reasoned and rationalized out, but never truly understood. I still retain the same stance that I will not try to revert my thinking back, nor should I, because that would not work at all. I would truly get nowhere near the bliss that I used to have, because I would always know that my mind and soul had already moved beyond this clear cut faith of my childhood.
So this is where I was a few short weeks ago when school let out. Even after all of the soul searching I had done with one of my very close friends, a true soul brother, I had still not found what I was looking for. Even now, I still have not found a place where I would like to reside in my faith. Rather, I seem to have found the path that was previously overgrown and covered by ivy, shielded from view, that strays from the path that I was on. The road less traveled, to use a term from Robert Frost. I say that my faith journey is a separate path, but it does not mean that I am abandoning the other paths that I have walked in life. Instead, I have a new path that is still made of the same dirt foundation as before, surrounded by the same beautiful nature. In this way I have transcended and included the previous faith paths to create one that is both different and the same from my previous ways of thinking.
Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Rastafarianism, Hinduism, and many of the other mainstream faith paths teach that there is a path that we must walk in life to move up the spiritual ladder. Of course, at the top of this ladder is some divine form or forms who is pure spirit that is without all of the earthly temptations and connections. Once one is in touch with this divine form, all will be well with yourself and basically the world. In one way or another, these religions are striving after similar, but not identical, objectives. The one main problem that is seen with this is that they often teach us to follow the path to the top. But once we get to a high level, we are instructed to look back at our journey and the levels it took us to get there and reject it all. By reject, I mean that we are taught to look at the temptations and earthly joys that we had when we were at lower levels with disdain. And if someone tries to get you to let go and experience these desires then they are to be rejected too because they are not at the same level, or they don’t have the same relationship with the divine as you do.
I believe that this rejection of life on earth in favor of a perfect life in the heavens is not only foolish, but misguided. I feel that by rejecting the earth in our path towards the divine, we are missing the point. We should not only rise above these desires, but also include them into our faith. We should look at the entire picture, rather than just looking at a portion of it. This is where I believe modernity had its strength and rationalization through science accomplished a great deal. However, science was the savior, or so it seemed, but the rejection of the spiritual became its downfall.
Science and rationalization are basically in the opposite direction of the faiths that I mentioned above. Instead of traveling up the spiritual path to reach the top, science breaks down the path to its basics. In the process science and modernity have moved from higher levels and descended to lower ones, only to reject that the higher levels exist at all. In other words, they reject anything that they cannot describe and see with their eyes or microscopes. If you want a clear example of this, I suggest you read the previous blog about the doubts concerning Christianity I wrote about. In hindsight I realize that I rationalized many portions of the ascending faith only to internally reject those things that I was not able to see or grasp with my reason. To use a biblical term, I was being a doubting Thomas.
So now I was lost. I had moved from a purely ascending spiritual pathway to a purely descending spirituality. When I finally took a step back, I realized that neither really fit with me. Neither gave me the answers and confidence that I was looking for. I began to fear that I would be stuck on the fence until my will finally caved to one side or the other and then I would begin rejecting either the ascent or descent that I had made. I had this fear, until of course, I began delving more into Wilber’s book. Of course I haven’t let this book change my entire outlook on life, because I am not so naïve to think that one person can have all of the answers. But he did something that really altered the way I look towards spirituality. He didn’t choose one path and begin rejecting another. He didn’t even accept both in all of their greatness (and lack thereof). Instead, he began to balance both pathways, combining the truth within them, while leaving behind the finer details that had been misinterpreted in order to make one pathway appear more appealing than another.
This idea of balancing the two, clicked with me in a way that neither of the pathways on their own was able to. Instead of only worshiping the God of the heavens, while rejecting all of this earthly life, or worshipping only the beauty and physical materials that surround us and rejecting the God of the heavens, we do something different. Wilber refers to the God of the heavens AND the Goddess of the Earth, as Spirit. Instead of being separate entities, competing for the spot in our hearts, they are one and the same. That which we recognize as God is the one spirit that has no beginning and no end, which exists in all of us. It is what you truly are, not a body, or a mind or a soul; it is your entity that is truly you and truly me. That may seem a bit far out, but it is the spirit as a whole. However, this is not the only manifestation of spirit; it is present in everything on this earth. Every single pebble, dirt, animal, human, tree…everything. Everything has some level of consciousness, but not since the human mind have we been able to move far enough away from instinct to be able to consciously reflect on spirit.
This Spirit is far too large to be confined into one pathway. It is both One and Many, Personal and Transpersonal, Form and Emptiness. So in a way my newly formed spirituality is Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Jainist, Rasta, Hindu; both Western and Eastern traditions. It is all these religious traditions without the rules put in place to condemn the descending path and other traditions which seek similar but not identical goals. My spirituality also includes the ideas that the spirit infiltrates and is represented in modernity, post modernity, Marxist, Freudian, Jungian, and Nietzsche realism that are philosophical ways of approaching the world in the past few centuries. I include these ways of thinking and approaching various forms of the spirit, and I transcend them in a way that brings them under a central description of Spirit in all of its forms.
So I believe that with this ability, we also have gained immense responsibility to take care of all of the manifestations of spirit. We need to take care of this Earth, from the One in all of us, to the Many manifestations of that spirit in the world today.
I do not claim to have all the answers or even be close to fulfilling this spiritual faith journey, but the connection between both sides of my quarrelling soul has been made. In fact, I am only just beginning this new (and old) type of spiritual journey and I am excited to see where it will progress to. There will always be questions, but now I feel more prepared to face these questions and find the proper balance in the way that I live my life.
I would like to close with a quote from Ken Wilber: “We want to include the liberating movement of wisdom that takes us from body to mind to soul to spirit, but also the incarnational movement of compassion and healing that brings soul and spirit down and into body, earth, life and relationships – both God and Goddess equally honored.”
