I have lived all my life with an ongoing set of inner experiences that have enriched me, guided me, and sometimes terrified me. The experiences come in the form of startling dreams and night-time visions; a clear personal voice that guides me; encounters with ghosts and other emanations from a seemingly Other world; clear visions of lives I have previously lived; and moments of powerfully transcendent joy where I experience the Oneness of all…well, of all Creation.
Those moments of clarity are filled with a sense that this world of which I am a living, growing, dying part is also living and growing. I do not sense its death – though I do sense its transformation. I sense that my personal death, too, is also a transformation – even if only a transformation into decaying flesh that becomes worm-food and from which something else will gain the sustenance to further its own growth.
I recognise that this way of being in the world is called “spiritual”. I do not cultivate it; don’t go out looking for it; don’t go on vision quests or take psychotropic drugs. It is just there. It’s not a matter of ‘believing’ in a spiritual world, but of accepting that it is part of my reality.
Right now the world is torn by a debate between something called ‘atheism’ and something else calling itself ‘religion’. The spiritual is a victim of the crossfire.
Proponents of religion often distance themselves from those of us calling ourselves spiritual. The Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, recently carefully spelt out his sense of the moral superiority of a Christian approach to living in this spirit thing from ‘mere spirituality’. See …ARCHBISHOP.
And those of us with a sense of a spiritual essence to our lives have historically been real thorns in the side (or pains in the ass) for organised religion. Declared heretic we’ve often been killed, exiled, excommunicated or just plain ignored as we’ve argued for our own personal and direct experience of the Numinous without the gatekeeping of priests.
Now we’re getting it from the other side, too. The atheists, the skeptics, the rationalists find much to fault in our descriptions of our lived essence.
What we are in agreement on is that the world is in real, physical danger. But we trade insults over who or what is at fault and how ridding the world of religion, spirituality, or atheism is the first necessary step to saving it.
But the world is in far too much real danger for those of us with a desire to save it to spend time quarreling over our different modes of perception: our different ways of being in the world.
How does living with a consciousness of this thing called ‘spiritual’ measure up against people who live with a consciousness of a thing called ‘atheism’? How do the two seemingly opposed groups communicate and co-create life on earth? How do these two seemingly opposed groups work together to overcome the global crisis facing us?
Can we reach agreement on, as a starter, working to rid the world of licensed murder, mutilation and exploitation – whether in the name of politics or of religion? Can we just put a stop to the practices, and quarrel about the philosophies as we go? Can we also reach agreement on ceasing the pollution of the earth before we agree on the ultimate causes of that pollution? Can we set aside these differences to solve world hunger and poverty?
How do we start a global dialogue between people who experience the world in such vastly different ways? Can we do it by first acknowledging that our own perception of the world is not the final version? The world is bigger than any one person’s perception of it.
Can we find a way to share our spirituality and our atheism, our rationality and our visions?
