The word spirituality has a capacity to divide people like few others for some it's an innately beautiful touchstone. The designator of a special kind of experience that's so valuable it's best left reverentially unexplored and pure lest one disturb its ethereal mysteries. With a cold hand of reason for others spiritual is just nonsensical Buncombe have appeal only to adolescent dreamers; the underemployed and the weak-minded but precisely because spiritual experiences are so often either
worshipped or derided it pays to try to submit them to dispassionate and sober
examination. Not in order a priori to crush them or honor them but so as to make them more intelligible to friend and foe alike. Whatever our suspicions spiritual moments are capable of being pinned down split into their constituent elements
and assessed with due regard one should and can get respectfully rational about spirituality. Spiritual moments belong to a mood that, most of us will only ever irregularly and perhaps haphazardly. Access a mood in which practical concerns are for a time kept entirely at bay and we accede to a slightly unnerving yet also thrillingly oblique perspective on existence. During these moments the ordinary world and it's pressures are kept at a distance from us. Perhaps it's very early in the morning, or late at night, we might be driving down a deserted motorway or looking down at the earth. From a plane tracing its way across Greenland it might be high
summer or a deep winter evening we don't have to be anywhere or do anything; there are no immediate threats or passions and we're liberated. To consider the world from a new and unfamiliar angle the essential element is that we're able to
look beyond the ego our customary state is more than we're generally even aware
to be heavily invested in ourselves we aggressively defend our interests we
strive for esteem we obsess about our pleasures. It's exhausting and pretty
much all consuming but in a spiritual moment, may be helped along by the sound
of flowing water or the call of a distant owl the habitual struggle ceases, we're freed from our customary egoistic vigilance and we can do a properly extraordinary thing look at life as if we would not ourselves as if we were a roaming eye that could inhabit the perspective of anyone or anything else. A foreigner or a child a crab on a
seashore or a cloud on the hazy horizon in our spiritual state the eye the vessel that we're usually supremely and exhaustively loyal to ceases to be our primary responsibility. We can take our leave and become a roaming vagabond promiscuous thing; a visitor of other mentalities and modalities as concerned with all that is not us as we are normally obsessed by what is as a result a range of emotions that we
would typically feel only in relation to us can be experienced around other
elements too. We might feel the pain of someone we hardly know or be gratified
by the success of a stranger. We could take pride in a beauty or intelligence to which we're wholly unconnected we can be imaginative participants in the entire cosmic drama there might in all this be a particular emphasis on love that could sound odd
because we're used to thinking of love in a very particular context. That of the
circumscribed affection that one person might have for a very accomplished and
desirable other but understood spiritually love involves a care and concern for anything at all we might find ourselves loving that is appreciating and delighting
understanding and sympathizing with. With a family of dung beetles or a moss
covered Tundra someone else's child or the birth of a faraway star an intensity of enthusiasm that we usually restrict to only one other nearby ego; is now distributed more erratically and generously. Across the entire universe and all its life forms spiritually minded people might at this point say that they can feel the presence of God inside them. This can be a particularly enraging remark for atheists but it is more explicable than it sounds; what they may be trying to say is that in certain states they're able to experience some of the generosity, nobility of feeling and selflessness
traditionally associated with the divine. It isn't that they promptly imagine themselves as bearded men on the clouds, it means that the objectivity and tenderness we might ascribe to a divine force now seems momentarily to be within their grasp. Spiritual moods can usher in especially anxiety free states no longer so closely wedded to ourselves we can cease to worry overly about what might happen to our puny and vulnerable selves. In the always uncertain future we may be ready
to give up on, some of our ego driven jealously guarded and pedantically held
goals we may never quite get to where we want to go but we're ready at a bob on
the eddies of life content. To let events buffett us as they may we make our peace
with the laws of entropy, we may never be properly loved or appropriately
appreciated, will die and that will all be just fine and yet. At the same time; a
particular gaiety might descend on us for a huge amount of our energy is
normally directed towards nursing our egos wounds and coping with what we deep
down suspect is the utter indifference of other people but that no longer seems
like such a specter. We have to ward off and we can start to raise our eyes and
notice life in a way we never otherwise do. Our invisibility and meaninglessness is a given we can now joyfully accept; rather than angrily or fearfully rage against we don't quake in fear. That we might not be as somebody we delight and embrace in a full knowledge, of our eternal nullity and delight. That right now that blossom looks truly enchanting. In the field opposite we cannot persist at a spiritually elevated plane at all times; there will inevitably be bills to be paid and children to be picked up. But the claims of the ordinary world don't invalidate or mock our occasional access to a more elevated and disinterested sown spirituality has perhaps for too long been abandoned to its more overzealous defenders who have done it a disservice
it deserves. To be explored most particularly by those who are by instinct most suspicious of it a spiritual experience is neither ineffable nor absurd the term refers.
View attachment 237634worshipped or derided it pays to try to submit them to dispassionate and sober
examination. Not in order a priori to crush them or honor them but so as to make them more intelligible to friend and foe alike. Whatever our suspicions spiritual moments are capable of being pinned down split into their constituent elements
and assessed with due regard one should and can get respectfully rational about spirituality. Spiritual moments belong to a mood that, most of us will only ever irregularly and perhaps haphazardly. Access a mood in which practical concerns are for a time kept entirely at bay and we accede to a slightly unnerving yet also thrillingly oblique perspective on existence. During these moments the ordinary world and it's pressures are kept at a distance from us. Perhaps it's very early in the morning, or late at night, we might be driving down a deserted motorway or looking down at the earth. From a plane tracing its way across Greenland it might be high
summer or a deep winter evening we don't have to be anywhere or do anything; there are no immediate threats or passions and we're liberated. To consider the world from a new and unfamiliar angle the essential element is that we're able to
look beyond the ego our customary state is more than we're generally even aware
to be heavily invested in ourselves we aggressively defend our interests we
strive for esteem we obsess about our pleasures. It's exhausting and pretty
much all consuming but in a spiritual moment, may be helped along by the sound
of flowing water or the call of a distant owl the habitual struggle ceases, we're freed from our customary egoistic vigilance and we can do a properly extraordinary thing look at life as if we would not ourselves as if we were a roaming eye that could inhabit the perspective of anyone or anything else. A foreigner or a child a crab on a
seashore or a cloud on the hazy horizon in our spiritual state the eye the vessel that we're usually supremely and exhaustively loyal to ceases to be our primary responsibility. We can take our leave and become a roaming vagabond promiscuous thing; a visitor of other mentalities and modalities as concerned with all that is not us as we are normally obsessed by what is as a result a range of emotions that we
would typically feel only in relation to us can be experienced around other
elements too. We might feel the pain of someone we hardly know or be gratified
by the success of a stranger. We could take pride in a beauty or intelligence to which we're wholly unconnected we can be imaginative participants in the entire cosmic drama there might in all this be a particular emphasis on love that could sound odd
because we're used to thinking of love in a very particular context. That of the
circumscribed affection that one person might have for a very accomplished and
desirable other but understood spiritually love involves a care and concern for anything at all we might find ourselves loving that is appreciating and delighting
understanding and sympathizing with. With a family of dung beetles or a moss
covered Tundra someone else's child or the birth of a faraway star an intensity of enthusiasm that we usually restrict to only one other nearby ego; is now distributed more erratically and generously. Across the entire universe and all its life forms spiritually minded people might at this point say that they can feel the presence of God inside them. This can be a particularly enraging remark for atheists but it is more explicable than it sounds; what they may be trying to say is that in certain states they're able to experience some of the generosity, nobility of feeling and selflessness
traditionally associated with the divine. It isn't that they promptly imagine themselves as bearded men on the clouds, it means that the objectivity and tenderness we might ascribe to a divine force now seems momentarily to be within their grasp. Spiritual moods can usher in especially anxiety free states no longer so closely wedded to ourselves we can cease to worry overly about what might happen to our puny and vulnerable selves. In the always uncertain future we may be ready
to give up on, some of our ego driven jealously guarded and pedantically held
goals we may never quite get to where we want to go but we're ready at a bob on
the eddies of life content. To let events buffett us as they may we make our peace
with the laws of entropy, we may never be properly loved or appropriately
appreciated, will die and that will all be just fine and yet. At the same time; a
particular gaiety might descend on us for a huge amount of our energy is
normally directed towards nursing our egos wounds and coping with what we deep
down suspect is the utter indifference of other people but that no longer seems
like such a specter. We have to ward off and we can start to raise our eyes and
notice life in a way we never otherwise do. Our invisibility and meaninglessness is a given we can now joyfully accept; rather than angrily or fearfully rage against we don't quake in fear. That we might not be as somebody we delight and embrace in a full knowledge, of our eternal nullity and delight. That right now that blossom looks truly enchanting. In the field opposite we cannot persist at a spiritually elevated plane at all times; there will inevitably be bills to be paid and children to be picked up. But the claims of the ordinary world don't invalidate or mock our occasional access to a more elevated and disinterested sown spirituality has perhaps for too long been abandoned to its more overzealous defenders who have done it a disservice
it deserves. To be explored most particularly by those who are by instinct most suspicious of it a spiritual experience is neither ineffable nor absurd the term refers.
Some of you will understand where this came from, the message and answer is still there though. It's what you make of it.
