What is Spirituality? The Personal
The term Spirituality takes on different hues, like white light passed through a prism, depending on the different aspects of our lives. We speak of a person being spiritual, a spiritual connection to another person, a sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves, to name a few.
We’ll focus in this blog on the personal aspect of spirituality.
Intuitively we think of a person as being spiritual if the individual is aware of, and lives according to his or her higher values. We innately place values as being “higher” and our more physical and social needs, once a certain level of physical security has been met, as being “lower”.
Left to our own devices, most of us would follow a path adopting a balanced mix between the secular and the spiritual, but life and conditioning throw at us a lot of curved balls. Most of us are taught from early childhood to conform; we’re taught to strive for visibility and status. The fairy tales we’re read as children are filled with rich and handsome princes who finally marry the beautiful and obedient girl. Status comes from making a “good” marriage, having the “right” job, the lovely house, and this gets rooted deep into our subconscious. It may be a parental protectiveness for the child to have the best start in life but it also begins a process of separation between our day to day lives and the inner self. Charles Caleb Colton put it very well when he said: “pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out our brains to make room for it”.
Our society upholds pursuit of Status as highly desirable, but is there a lot wrong with this?
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, one of the most quoted theories of human motivation, tells us we all have an innate need to feel safe and secure; we all have a need to be held and comforted by an intimate partner.
We all crave to be welcomed into our families and communities, and to have a sense of belonging. Our desire for status is therefore to feel safe, to find a suitable partner in life and secure our position in our societies and be validated by them. This ticks a lot of the boxes for us as human beings and gives us clear objectives and direction.
There is a little hiccup with this though, and Pierre de Chardin put it beautifully: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience”.
That’s where it can all go wrong. Or go all right depending on how you frame it.
Our strongest drives, once our basic needs are met, come from the self-actualisation level and beyond - the spiritual:
to live in harmony with our higher values
to gain awareness of our life purpose, find our individuation and offer back to our communities
to live with respect and connectedness to each other and the planet
Most of us have never thought clearly about what our values are - we’ve never been asked to do that. Little wonder then that we often find ourselves in high stress situations often without knowing why. Take the example in a work situation if you’re offered a substantial raise which would potentially improve your standard of living but it would come at the expense of doing something you simply didn’t feel comfortable with, like having to whitewash or turn a blind eye to events or situations you consider unethical. Would you take the raise? Do you prioritise your family’s welfare or do you take an active stand to hold by your principles? It’s not so clear cut, but what is clear is the situation in itself breeds stress and if not properly addressed will erupt in an uncontrolled mess, possibly even in a physical illness.
In the example above, the simplest way to address this is to acknowledge accepting the raise will conflict with your higher values and this in itself is not viable in the long term. At this point you have several options going forward, for instance you can either decline the promotion, or you can accept it explaining your reservations to your boss offering alternative strategies for the company to work in a way that is more ethical which will have the knock on effect of improving the team’s morale. Another option could be to accept the raise and look for other jobs in a similar field but where the company’s values are better aligned to yours. The point is to address the issue with spiritual intelligence.
Similar internal conflicts of interest very often also develop on the personal levels - a poor choice of partner or career can often be traces back to a conflict of values with the family and community, and understanding and addressing this offers clarity, acceptance and solutions in line with the Self.
Does that mean you have to leave your job or your partner in order to be aligned to your inner voice shouting out your values to you? Of course it doesn’t as we saw in the example above. It’s about listening to that inner voice that keeps getting louder and addressing its concerns before it gets to a scream.
It helps to understand clearly what is important to you to re-establish sovereignty both emotionally and mentally, and it helps to rethink how you set your boundaries and long term plan - both personally and in a work environment.
So what does all of this have to do with personal spirituality? Spirituality isn’t a vague notion that’s the remit of people who’ve stepped out of mainstream life to follow callings; it’s an integral part of our flesh and blood, our day to day existence, and insisting on a separation breeds dis-ease. The more we pay attention to our spirituality, the more we listen to that voice that guides us to a true sense of security, to fulfilling ourselves in what we’re achieving, in what we’re contributing, and in our connections to the people we love. Secular life is about nothing if not that.
It’s not possible to treat spirituality as a separate from the “I”: Anything that has life has spirituality
