The No-Thing-Ness of Spirit

I have a few scattered remarks about spirituality. Spirituality is not an achievement, a salvation, an accomplishment, a technology or technique for living. It is not an ideology, not dogmatic, has no scriptures nor practices. These experiences belong to paradigms alien to spirituality. These experiences are heavy and are attempts to anchor our existence to something for purposes of security.

There is not a way, path, exercises, ideology, teaching, dogma, etc. that one uses to find it. It finds you, sometimes gradually, sometimes slowly in mini insights or maxi insights that happen to you but that you do not propose or cause to occur. There are many ways of talking about it but none of them can get you to it. All one can say is that if any of the above are what you are looking for, spirituality will escape you.

[I love it when people make up a story to explain their non-linear insights. These can range from magical people & animals, to aliens & accidents. The one about the pirate and the magic stone is great (Mormon), and the alien overlord brainwashing alien ghosts is fantastic (Scientology). However, my favorite has to do with worlds resting upon the backs of giant turtles. The stars move overhead as the oblivious reptile swims through the galaxy, looking for a mate. New worlds are born as they copulate. (Talk about a big bang theory!) ]

There is an incredible lightness of being in spirituality. Light as opposed to darkness and light as opposed to heaviness.

Heaviness is often sought to anchor our lives down and promote security of salvation, a strong foundation to stand on, a belief system to secure us, a teaching or practice to keep us on the track to salvation / enlightenment / meaning /value / importance. Curiously, this stable, salvation grounded security is usually focused and considered as reaching fullness in some other existence than the present. Spirituality is about the present. It is always at hand. It is a way of experiencing life now.

It is incredibly light in that it is not anchored down to any "thing", mental, behavioral or otherwise. It is generally experienced as liberation in comparison to the slavery of the "egoic self". It cannot be calculated or measured by any calculation of degree or depth.

It carries no baggage at all. Liberation from the baggage, the heaviness of the above is, for me, it's most treasured quality. It is not-denominational, not subject to schools of teaching, not ideological, not achieved, not serious, not defensible nor convincible, in no way judgmental and not what most people associated with religion call religious, pious, or formulaic, not dogmatic, does not depend on exercises or paths which are as heavy and stilted as they can be. Zen, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism are suggestive substitutes for spirituality that all too often distract from spirituality. Zen, often considered the most transformative way into spirituality, is, in my estimation, a finger pointing in the right direction, but has been compromised in its traditions and organized "paths" and "ways".

Spirituality is full of mercy and compassion, non-judgment and empathy. Absent these qualities, what passes for spirituality is farce and illusion.

For many people, spirituality is often entered a few minutes before death. That is a shame considering that it is available from at least the age of 60 or on, give or take 60 years.

Subjectively, it feels like a huge burden has been lifted from one's shoulders. I am often asked how it happens to one. Sometimes it's like a flash of lightning in a life, most of the time it beckons to us in suffering or the daily upsetness or stresses of our experiences or in situations when our world is falling apart. When one becomes sick of the sickness of not experiencing life spiritually, the opportunity for entering it opens up. Sometimes one slides into it as easily as a hot knife cuts soft butter. Whatever way it happens to one, the happening is not a paradigm, a technique, or a path for others to follow. It's not something you have, it has you, and then you find it leaves you being a liberated you with a lightness of being beyond previous imagining.

The entrance into spirituality is always idiosyncratic and always involves the loss of the mind-made self and a discovery of the actual self.

I cannot say any more about it. Experience it and let me know what words you might use to talk about it. Like mine, they will always seem as articulate as a baby babbling.

(Thanks to: excentrik-spirituallity.blogspot.com for the wonderful phrase-ology!)
----------------------------------

The Way that can be told of is not an unvarying way;

The names that can be named are not unvarying names.

It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;

The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind.