Spirituality?

     Many, perhaps most people are detail- or specifics-oriented. Their comfort zone is in dealing with widely-agreed-upon factual details, specific, familiar places & situations, immediate, tangible, material concerns. They're not comfortable engaging with general principles, broad concepts, & 30,000ft overviews. Particularly foreign, disorienting, even threatening are spirituality, mysticism, wisdom, etc.
     This is in sharp contrast to a small group of folks with a rare (<1%, "Advocate") personality type, whose real passion is getting to the very heart of issues, ideally to help prevent serious problems. These folks may have a facility for & interest in focusing less on individual trees, and more on the basic principles of forestry, in order to prevent catastrophic forest fires.

     Each of us is pretty well stuck with one personality type. Nevertheless, it's becoming terrifyingly obvious to most that human behavior is rapidly destroying the earth. Arguably, this is because most modern humans are ignoring spirituality:
     “our modern worldly values (desire for fame, money, etc.) acquire their compulsiveness from a misdirected spiritual drive.” 
        David R. Loy. “Lack & Transcendence. The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism.” Wisdom Publications, 2018. 

     So an innate aversion to spirituality does not eliminate our spiritual drive, but may actually ramp it up in a distorted manner. That's why so many of us are addictively "looking for [depth of meaning, community & fulfillment] in all the wrong places": electronic devices, alcohol, food, shopping, drugs, gambling, work, porn, etc, etc).

     But what exactly is spirituality?

     "Spirituality is a broad concept with room for many perspectives. In general, it includes a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves, and it typically involves a search for meaning in life. As such, it is a universal human experience — something that touches us all. People may describe a spiritual experience as sacred or transcendent or simply a deep sense of aliveness and interconnectedness.
     Some may find that their spiritual life is intricately linked to their association with a church, temple, mosque, or synagogue. Others may pray or find comfort in a personal relationship with God or a higher power. Still others seek meaning through their connections to nature or art. Like your sense of purpose, your personal definition of spirituality may change throughout your life, adapting to your own experiences and relationships." https://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/what-spirituality

     "Spirituality addresses qualities of the human spirit that include love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, a sense of responsibility, which brings happiness to self and others. It as well includes a basic concern for the well-being of others. And it has an emphasis on contemplative practices cultivating ethics, stability, and prosocial mental qualities." Dalai Lama 

     “Politics and spirituality are the two sides of the same coin. Politics is the driving force visible to the outside; spirituality is the internal force driving the consciousness to open up to the world and conjoin it. Politics bared of spiritual awareness always leads to violence and the abuse of power. Spirituality without political engagement resembles an escape from the world.” Gundula Schatz

     "Spirituality is about getting out of the conceptual realm of spiritual fantasy and theology. It’s a deep exploration of the direct experience of being. It’s not an attempt to escape the direct experience of being, which is often what’s happening." Adyashanti

     “Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there.” Vine Deloria Jr.

     In the following, "soul" IMHO is used very much like "spirituality":
     “I don’t use soul in a religious sense but rather the way psychologists Carl Jung and James Hillman and the Romantic poets like Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake use it: to speak of the experience of depth in our lives. Soul invites the marginal, the excluded, and the unwelcome pieces of ourselves into our attention. Soul is often found at the edges, both in the culture and in our lives. Soul takes us down into the places of our shared humanity, such as sorrow and longing, suffering and death. Soul requires that we be authentic, revealing what lies behind the image we try to show the world, including our flaws and peculiarities. Soul doesn’t care at all about perfection or getting it right. It cares about participation. Soul is revealed in dreams and images, in our most intimate conversations, and in our desire to live a life of meaning and purpose.” Francis Weller 
 

Morning breaks on Eagle Lake

Doing & Being

     Just saw an insightful 2017 documentary: "I Am Heath Ledger." He seemed 'driven' to constantly create. Stardom came quickly & easily. He hardly slept, despite taking sleeping pills. At some point he became very interested in musicians who died young. He himself then died at age 28 - such a painful waste - he had so much more to learn, so much more to contribute. 

     Obsessively doing is such an easy, dirt-common addiction. But it's just an anxious, nervous, involuntary twitch. Please don't be proud of it, even though people may admire you for it and say "Oooooooh, you're sooooo BUSY!"
     WHO is busy? The puppet you, or YOU?

     “The purpose of life is not to transcend the body, 
      but to embody the transcendent.”                          Dalai Lama

     When we're open-heartedly engaged with whatever or whoever in the present moment, there's no thought of self, fear, worry, suffering, time, etc. When we ARE BEING loving awareness, we embody the transcendent. We can't be loving awareness, AND at the same time, do the fearful twitching bit. We choose, moment-by-moment, to BE loving awareness - or - to anxiously twitch. 
     We can & should of course act while being loving awareness - such authentic action feels effortless, timeless, peaceful, joyful.

On Nature

     Nature delights in discovering herself by manifesting infinite variations of phenomena.       Ralph Waldo Emerson? - please do send me the accurate quote & author
 

     "There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent."         Ralph Waldo Emerson


     “Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.” 
Ralph Waldo Emerson


     "When we pay attention to nature's music, we find that everything on the Earth contributes to its harmony."         Hazrat Inayat Khan


          “We are so lightly here.
           It is in love that we are made.
           In love we disappear.”                   Leonard Cohen 



     “The purpose of life is not to transcend the body, 
       but to embody the transcendent.”          Dalai Lama 
 

Courtesy of Buddha Doodles www.buddhadoodles.com

Rolling Through

     "And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man; emotion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things."                                              William Wordsworth                       www.wisdomatwork.com

Bess

Operationalizing Pragmatic & Sacred Dimensions of Mindfulness Practice

     "Even though washing dishes is one of life's necessary chores, and in spite of Thich Nhat Hanh's pragmatic approach to washing dishes mindfully (in order to enjoy the dessert which follows), he nevertheless (equally) sees washing dishes as a spiritual or sacred practice. As he elaborates:
     Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness, becomes sacred. In this light no boundary exists between the sacred and the profane. I must confess it takes me a bit longer to do the dishes, but I live fully in every moment, and I am happy. Washing the dishes is at the same time a means and an end - that is not only do we do the dishes to have clean dishes, we also do the dishes just to do the dishes, to live fully in each moment while washing them.
     With these two dimensions of mindfulness (being fully present in both ordinary, everyday and near transcendent experiences) established, a central challenge of the present study was to operationalize mindfulness ..."

       Brinkerhoff MB, Jacob JC. Mindfulness and quasi-religious meaning systems: An empirical exploration within the context of ecological sustainability and deep ecology. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 1999; 38(4): 524-42.

http://www.theweathernetwork.com

Developmental traps

     "transconventional psychotechnology ... is a kind of religion that is not centered on faith and belief, but rather on practice, on cultivating and training the mind. Authentic spiritual traditions, practices, or disciplines are psychotechnologies designed to train, tame, transform & transcend the mind."                                Roger Walsh MD, PhD

Roger Walsh Keynote Address 

Meeting in Non-dualism

     “we are convinced of the unity of mystical experience, within Sufism and across mystical traditions. 
     As the mystic’s practice advances, he or she remains constantly aware of the presence of one reality behind all appearances. This presence (immanence), moreover, does not impair worldly efficacy. It may well enhance such efficacy by making the world more transparent and, therefore, easier to understand.
      This notion will seem strange to many psychologists who view all experiences as products of the nervous system. Mystics, on the other hand, draw our attention to a nonlocal mind. Indeed, mystical experience can be seen as the method for transcending the local mind (the intellect and emotions) in favor of absorption in the nonlocal mind.
      ... reductionist / constructivist accounts of mystical experience will never be true to the actual mystical experience, although they may account for the effects of carefully orchestrated ceremonies designed to have specific psychological effects.
      In summary, if the transcendent mystical experience is regarded as just another construction placed on physiological processes of arousal, those regarding it thus have little more incentive to seek it than to seek an exciting sexual partner (perhaps less).” 

     Levenson MR, Khilwati AH. Mystical self-annihilation: Method and meaning. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 1999; 9: 251-7.