Spirituality Transcends Earthly Ideas

As we live in a world of duality, we often approach understanding all of reality with the assumptions we’ve learned in duality. As one example, we believe distance is a fundamental property of reality, so we assume someone can only be in one place at a time. As another example, we believe reality is this one big shared objective place (“the world”), and that we all are seeing the same thing. Neither of those assumptions are correct.

An assumption we bring to spirituality is: we tend to believe that some ideas from our world- for instance religious conclusions or scientific conclusions- are themselves fundamental statements about all of reality, and that others are not. We assume this in part because we personally discover that some ideas end up proving to be verifiable and true in our local world, while others do not. We naturally establish beliefs to explain our life experience and how the external world seems to work. We then almost automatically extrapolate those beliefs into the “Big Picture.”

Spirituality though is not fundamentally about a move towards one specific set of ideas, any more than it is about a person moving from one physical place to another. This is not to say that Earthly ideas do not have an important place in spirituality- of course, they do! We are having the meaningful experience of duality, so the ideas of duality are important, useful, and meaningful to us. They are the forms with which we work. I wouldn’t be writing these words, and you wouldn’t be reading them, if there weren’t some value in considering spiritual ideas.

But the spirit itself is something that fully transcends all the intellectual ideas and the many forms of Earth. The spirit in its actual nature transcends all the assumptions that we use to make intellectual judgments about reality. All intellectual judgments, and indeed all forms, occur within spirit.

Spirituality then is not just about ideas, but more fundamentally, about what actually is. Spirituality is about a “growth” of what actually is– an expansion in consciousness itself. That expansion transcends the forms with which we play, for it is not a growth strictly in the realm of ideas or actions, but it goes far deeper- to a growth in being. Spirituality is about the way in which we, as consciousness, meet our experience, and how What Is becomes more as a result. It is about experientially learning how to wield our fundamental power: our intent. Spirituality is about actually growing towards- and becoming- creativity and love. It is not fundamentally about selecting the correct ideas, though ideas are an important part of what is occurring.

If we truly wish to walk the spiritual walk, we must go far deeper than working with ideas. We must do something that is far more difficult than selecting an understanding or belief: we must face ourselves. We must face our actual experience, meet it with full presence, bravery, humility, and most importantly- Love! We must be willing to allow ourselves to change towards- and actually become- more present, brave, humble, and loving. We are what continues after the physical world ends- so what we are here to work on, is us.