What is "spiritual"?

Lots of people in my circle like to say that they are not “religious”, but “spiritual”. I understand how someone might not want to be identified with any specific religion – but what does it mean to be “spiritual”?

We like to think that certain activities or experiences are somehow more spiritual than others – maybe meditation, prayer, chanting, etc. We even think that some people are more spiritual than others. Then we complicate the whole mess further by using terms like “very spiritual”, “deeply spiritual” or – my favorite mess-creator – “spiritually evolved”.

Let’s come at it from a different angle. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. This one works for me. But what does it mean?

For me, the fundamental spiritual reality is that all of life is totally connected – there is no seam, no in/out, no better/worse, no higher or lower. Seeing life in terms of those antagonistic pairs is dualism – I wrote about this in an earlier post.

Having a human experience means that we got crammed into a body, with a sensory apparatus that sees things as separate - and a mind that functions largely by analysis, by taking things apart, by assigning things to categories. Our language supports this: subject – verb – object. This separate being does something to that separate being. In science, the mechanistic view of the universe (being challenged now by quantum physics) sees the world in terms of billiard balls enlessly bouncing off of each other. Causality – this caused that.

The spiritual perspective is the dawning awareness that all truly is one, that nothing is separate. Every bit of the mix is totally connected with everything else.

Then, from this viewpoint, what thing or experience could be more spiritual than anything else? Who could be more spiritual than anyone else? A “spiritual experience” might actually be the momentary glimpse of a reality where no experiences are any more spiritual than any others. It’s the big game of hide and seek. We get progressively more peeks, intuitions, subtle messages that there is something more going on under the hood.

Someone who totally gets it, so that now their awareness of this oneness never wavers, is called “enlightened” or “Self-realized”. They realize that, under their small s self, there is this one ocean of life that is all of us. Being enlightened, they take their small s self lightly – they know that it’s not who they really are.

It’s all connected, but the game we got plugged into makes it look like we are separate, different. Why did it get set up this way? Maybe so that, when we get it about our essential connectedness, we really get it.

The Course in Miracles says that we all have already come home to this awareness, the game is over and life (which is all of us) has won – but we are still caught up in a big dream of separation, a dream from which we gradually wake. Some quantum theorists say that it’s all happening at the same time.

If everything is connected, that would mean not just everything now, but everything, period – regardless of what time tag it has on it. When we have a precognition of some event that, when we separate the present from the future, has not yet happened, we’re not really psychic. We have access to that information because we are completely connected with all that is.

Same thing for centuries-old memories. We don’t have to posit “reincarnation”, we don’t have to think, “That was me back there.” If nothing is separate, then “we” have access to all that information, all the time. When people ask Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master, about reincarnation, he points to the ego-trap in thinking that there is some fundamental “me”, separate from the endless flow of life. He says “I teach that I am not the same now as I was a minute ago. So who is it that would be reincarnated?”

One of my teachers liked the metaphor that we all came out of one big batch of cookie dough, but we got shaped, pulled apart, cut up into all these different pieces. Then we walk around thinking we are all different.

Is it the taste or the smell that breaks down the illusion? Is being caught in the illusion somehow less spiritual than starting to see through it? Ah, there’s that dualistic trap again. We want to break off one experience from another. Oh, well, little by little….