Flickering Candle

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.”

A New Bloggining, I Hope

I have been struggling within the past few months to write a blog that would shed light on where I am within my spiritual journey since the last pessimistic, and dare I say, modernistic, blog. As I have reread the last blog many times, I often thought of what type of taste I left in the mouth of not only myself, but the very few readers I do have. How many of the fair few was I able to push away with my pessimism, and what type of blog would I have to write to gain them back? But then I realized my whole point of writing a blog was not really for others, but ultimately to put my thoughts down and create a kind of time line of my journey through this life. That being said, the dedication that I have put into this blog to document my life in the past few months resembles the amount of dedication I had when I was required to document my eating habits for a health course in high school. So with this realization in mind, perhaps this may be a turning point in my documentation…or I will acknowledge that it could be just another false start. So we shall see. Believe me when I say, I as unsure as you are, how much dedication I will put forth in the future. So until next time, (which I hope will be soon), enjoy every breath that you have on this earth, because we never know how sweet this one will be compared to those of the future.

May peace enter into your soul and reside there even when the world tries to tear it from you.

Doubts.

Turmoil. My spiritual life is in turmoil. After being raised in the Catholic faith for my entire life, I have none of the faith that my family, friends, or acquaintances have. I have doubts about almost every aspect of the pile of dust in which my faith resides. Gone is the love for Christ that once danced in my heart. Gone is the innocence I had as a child. Gone is the time where faith made sense to me. Gone is the certainty of what would happen when I die. Gone is faith security. When did I lose my way?

I suppose that most of my questions begin at God. However, I'd like to warn whoever reads this that the blog is all over the place. Just as my faith is in turmoil, this writing will reproduce that. I wouldn't have it any other way though...So here it goes:

I don't deny that there is a higher power of some sort, but I'm not quick to believe that Christianity is the best or right one. Christians say that God works through the fallen to do his will and transfer his message. If this is true, how do we know which of the fallen are truly from God? We don't, and I think that is essential. In order to truly accept that some people have a divine message, we need to accept that there is truth in the other people who may have beliefs different from our own. This enlightenment within people has to be coming from somewhere, but where that is, of course I am not sure.

I feel as if I know that God exists, but I don't know how I know this. But he/she is not the God that I knew as a child, he/she is more loving and understanding than the "damn you to hell if you don't repent" God I grew up with.

Are we here for God, or is God here for us? How can we be involved in a relationship that we were born into, only to be taught about it by our peers who never get the full truth out. Do we truly know what faith is right when religion is in most cases, geographic? If I was born in the Middle East, wouldn't I be a devout Muslim? Or if I was born in a Native American tribe, would I be worshiping along with the ancient tradition?

I understand the concept of sin. Sin, as I understand it, is when I knowingly do poor moral actions. But how can the ultimate punishment be hell, if these morals are taught with many inconsistencies. Someone may believe that it is not morally sound to kill someone because it is stated within the Ten Commandments. However, others of the same religion may believe that it is morally sound if it is an eye for an eye, because the bible follows this commandment with a long explanation of the exception to the rule. Still others may believe that there is a right to kill if it is in the act of preserving the safety of less threatening individuals. So, what exactly is the right interpretation?

If it is one interpretation over another, then those that believe in the other interpretations would be flawed. They wouldn't believe in the truth that has been deemed as accurate by some, so they would be punished for acting in accordance with the beliefs that they were raised in. This is just one belief in religion that is collective with millions of other beliefs. So, if this one point is open to interpretation, then who holds the entire or even the majority of truth. Besides God himself, who has the right to judge what is right and what is wrong? Not a priest, a rabbi, a pastor, a pope, or any religious leader. Why can't we remember that we should not judge those who we do not agree with, but allow God to do the judging?

I understand that God has a plan for each of his children and we all have no clue what that may be. But, why is there all of this discord between and within the religions of the world? How can we say that some are correct and others do not believe in the right religion? Who is the true judge of what the right religion is? Is it the holy leaders, the history scholars, the theologians? Have all of the true judges been absent for more than a millennium? Shouldn't the only one to judge who is right and wrong, be the one who has the truth? That is, the divine?

According to the Christian teaching, Christ and God's love is unconditional. Nothing you can do can make them love you less. Following this example may be a goal that we share. I don't want to just like or love someone or see the good in someone when they are being pleasant to me. I want to see the good in them when their loyalties to me are nonexistent and they are cursing me out and stabbing me in the back. I just want to love. I want to be able to keep my peace of mind and always see the best in people without and restrictions on that love. I don't want my feelings for people to be dependent on how I perceive they are treating me. More often than not, my perceptions of how people are treating me, if negative, are far exaggerated from what was actually intended.

However, I feel that a lot of religions seek to control, to will their followers into following a set moral code. I really wish that people could just live and be nice to people, not because they are going to get in trouble or pay an ultimate consequence. But because it is the right thing to do, the right way to treat people. As you may be able to tell, I am having problems believing in many parts of any type of religion. I want to believe in faith as a whole, but I'm afraid I don't know how. I'm losing, but I haven't lost it all yet.

I want the readers to know, I say none of this attacking your belief system or any others personally. I just feel that I have so many questions, that I can't fathom abandoning all this rational reason, without some sort of explanation. I've reached for answers before, only to be let down. I'm not going to lie and say I'm not dead scared of what will happen once my time is up.

I will close with a question that may have started it all:

If we are supposed to live as God lives, wasn't he setting us up for failure because no one is perfect? I understand that people say you must get close, but how do you know when you are close enough?

Veering Left

I wrote this starting as advice given to a good friend of mine. But then I reread it and found that it applies to more situations that maybe I meant it to. So I've altered it slightly, but this came out pretty fast. It is both broad and specific in areas, maybe it will apply to your life, maybe it won't. But if it reaches one person, I suppose then it serves its purpose. Hope it is a good intro to a new start of writing frequently in this blog:

It sounds like you feel as if you have no handle on what is going on in your life. However, you are analyzing your life and how you fit within it by making arguments both ways, and it truly seems like you have a better handle on this then most do.

You are feeling both content and discontent. Stable and Instable. Satisfied and undoubtedly craving more. In other words, you are getting an influx of contrasting emotions, which I suppose is part of the human experience. But just remember, that even with all of this confusion that you are feeling, you have to know that you need both sides of the issue to really appreciate how you feel on the issue. You need the sour if you ever are going to truly appreciate the sweet.

It seems like people often come out and state things in order to make things clear to themselves, as well as to you. It may seem like they have a better handle on what they feel, but you never know what the truth is for either party involved, until people are truly honest with each other. And as Billy Joel says, "Honesty is such a lonely word, everyone is so untrue." Although he states this, it is actually a matter of observation, which is actually really depressing. Why has being honest grown vintage. Why are lies often more preferable to the truth? Why can't we just tell the truth, no matter the cost? The cost is never as draining or hurtful as we usually expect it to be. And in the end, we feel better when we are completely honest with our feelings, rather than covering it up with white lies.

This is a sideline, but what is a white lie anyway? What distinguishes it from a black lie? Is there certain criteria that a lie has to meet in order to be labeled with a color? And don't white lies always lead to more lies? Again, honesty, but I digress.

You never know what is going on in the minds of others, but chances are if you are confused, your confusion is not unwarranted. Confusion breeds from confusion. You never will truly know why people act the way they do, and then again, you may never truly want to know. But we will see where and how this develops. So for now all you can really do is just vibe. just cherish the fact that you do have confusion. But do not dwell upon it. Worrying will get you nowhere in the end. Thinking helps, but only to a certain extent. You never know if you will remain friends for now, in order to build a foundation for a stronger friendship or something beyond in the future.

The future is relative, it really isn't that far away. Perhaps life is always a bit confusing, but you can't tear your hair out over it. You have every right to want as much from people as they are taking from you in ways that they may or may not realize. We always want reciprocity. Don't beat yourself up over desiring one of the main drives that we all experience. No one likes to feel slighted. No one wants to love anyone more than they love them. But our minds convince us that this happens quite a bit more often than it actually does.

Just breathe. Just let it be.

Don't worry about a thing, because everything is going to be alright and will work out in the end.

Just breathe.

Living High, Living Mighty, Living Righteously.

As I've been shoveling and walking outside in this winter weather that I have grown accustomed to over the past few weeks, I noticed something. It's nothing enlightening, or deep. Just the fact that when you find a patch of ice in your path, and you catch yourself from a complete wipe out, your body does a little dance.

The next time you see someone slip, although it is always quick and often times funny, try and watch their dance. We will do anything to stop ourselves from falling, just as a result of instinctive reflexes. But when you slow the corrective movements, you will see what I mean. The feet go in all different directions, the hands flail around, the hips rotate, and the neck moves from side to side. Everyone has a different dance, no two people have the same reaction and reflex time. It is something very specific and unique to each person, based upon past environmental experiences as well as inherent biological factors. I've come to realize that ice is one of life's little reminders of the importance of dancing, and on a larger scale, soul expression.

Let me ask you this: How often do you take a step back from your daily routines, the busyness that we allow ourselves to succumb to; to do something that will further the nurturing of your soul? I do not claim to be an expert on the topic of nurturing the soul, but from personal experience I find that I do little things each day to help me find my focus or clarity, I am in a better mood and the lenses that I view the world through tend to fall away to a certain degree.

The little things that nurture the soul are specific and unique to each person. They include anything from simple repetitive tasks (doing the dishes, washing windows, sewing, etc), to artistic expression (drawing, playing music, painting, dancing, scrap booking, singing, etc), to things that further your connection with yourself as well as faith of some sort, (praying, meditation, reading), and anything else that helps you relax and get in touch with your self and those who surround you everyday.

When was the last time you did things like this, to just let yourself be and free yourself from the manacles that tend to bind you to your responsibilities and the daily stresses that are often a result of our own thoughts. When was the last time you took a good, deep, refreshing breath? We breath all day, and it is usually unconscious unless you focus on it. But have you ever noticed how good one deep breath into your lungs feels? Once you realize it, you tend to continue breathing deeply and find how relaxed it can make you. When I take the time to breath deeply and meditate, it allows me to come to terms with what things have taken priority over others, and whether or not they should have. It allows me to break away from the self-centered way of thinking that our society today preaches. It furthers the connection I have with people and allows me to be empathetic instead of apathetic, selfless rather than selfish.

I don't do this as often as I should. I wish I did it often enough to make it a habitual, daily (but not routine) practice. If everyone took time out to consider why people act the way they do, what could be motivating them, or what could be troubling them, then what a far cry the world would be from the one we live in today. In other words, if everyone cared for the gifts that are received when interacting with other people and by realizing the importance of recognizing the emotions that are beyond our own selves, perhaps we could get closer to peace and further from strife and conflict.

We pour all of our money, time, and efforts into furthering our outer appearances, our social status, and basically just trying to fit into the prescribed way of life that society tells us that we need to fit in. Instead of focusing on the important things that will further us on our individual journeys, we tend to fall into distorted lives that are not truly reflective of who we actually are. Be true to yourself and your feelings or you will burn yourself out trying to complete the simplest tasks of living. Once you are burned out, it is harder to get the spark that will light you up again and it will leave your soul extinguished for when more difficult tasks present themselves.

The only one who can care for your soul and be aware when things go awry is yourself. So try your best to be yourself. That is all that anyone can ask of you. Those who accept the true you are the ones you truly need and those that don't aren't worth bothering with.

Peace. Love. Hope. Faith.

You Never Know

Seize the day, put no trust in tomorrow.

- Horace

I was surfing the Internet a few weeks ago and I found this quote. It immediately struck a chord with me so I copied it down. It is not an entirely original phrase, because when it is boiled down to the raw ideas that motivate the phrase, it tells us of the sacredness as well as the briefness of life itself. I believe that this idea has been floating around since life itself started, and the reality set in of how limited of a time we have on this earth.

This past year has been quite an eyeopening time for me, as I have started to practice introspection quite a bit. I have learned so much about myself and discovered areas of my personality and self that I never brought to light before. From this I have found that I have been pretty careless with my time in the past 19 years of life. I have spent a lot of time being anxious, being sad, taking foolish risks that could have had a detrimental effect on my health. I basically took every day as if it was owed to me and if I wanted to waste it away being sad and angry at the world, so be it. This realization has hit me hard again and again, like running at a wall and getting up and hitting it head on again. As I have come to realize that I continually fall into the same pattern, I do feel that this realization has allowed me to try and veer from the pattern slightly, bit by bit.

So thoughts have been running crazy through my head since I have realized that I have been living in a habituated pattern of anguish and sadness for many of my days. I have begun to turn my life around, trying to live more freely from the self-induced confines that I have put myself under. So the point of my writing is to establish a written record of the beginning of a new phase in my life. Hopefully I can stick with it. I believe I can, because if I falter I know that I have a strong support system of people who will encourage me to keep at it. And for that, I am thankful.

Everyday should be a good day to die. Every minute should be spent sparingly, never taken for granted. Live in the moment because the present is the only thing that is really certain. The future is relative. Today is yesterday's tomorrow, yesterday's future. If you spend your time planning or worrying about the future, you miss what is happening now. This very second. Not to say that planning or worrying don't have their place, but when they overtake your life to the degree that you lose your days, you need to take a step back and try to reevaluate.

If you died at the end of the year, the month, tomorrow or in the next breath, would you have regrets about how you lived your life? I'm trying to live without too many regrets, worrying about worthless things. I need to let the chips fall where they may, leave the myth of perfection alone, and see it for what it is, an unattainable, yet unwanted goal. I should let my imperfections and mistakes that I make, not define me, but help build me into a better person.

Strive for peace of mind, body, and soul because you never know...