The nature of spirituality

A couple of thoughts on the nature of spirituality.

The soul of communication is understanding what each of us says to one another, and in this world of spirituality and it’s discussion, being misunderstood is easy to do.

Let me start out with the notion that there is a map and then there is the territory the map represents. They are often called the same thing, but they are not. If I had a map and was planning a trip from Tallahassee to Pensacola, and someone asked me what I was looking at, I might say “I am looking at the road to Pensacola when in actuality, that’s not true. I am only looking at a representation of that road, an abstraction of the reality of that road.

That is what any discussion of the nature of spirituality is, an abstraction. Only an incomplete representation of a much larger reality. I don’t possess the words to properly describe it. I suspect no one possesses the ability to put into words that which is basically indescribable. So if that is true, discussions of spirituality will always be clumsy and woefully incomplete efforts.

One more thing… When a theoretical physicist studies sub atomic reactions, he or she does not use Newtonian physics as one of their tools. Newtonian physics are quite solid observations about how things in this world interact, but they are of no value when discussing how quarks and leptons behave. They don’t obey those laws.

In fact, it seems that the rules that sub atomic particles, and for that matter, the biggest things observed in the cosmos do obey is something called string theory, And one of the interesting things about string theory is it predicts quite a few dimensions more than the 4 we live with in this world. Maybe a few as nine, maybe more. And every one of those extra dimensions are basically indescribable as well. We can’t see them, we can’t touch them, can’t go visit them, and we can’t quantify them any more than we can quantify spirituality. Yet, it seems they are real enough.

They, the extra dimensions, do appear to manifest themselves in what we do see. I have found this to also be true of what I understand to be spirituality. My life is fundamentally altered by something unseen. On my mental map, I call that unseen force spirituality, others have other words to describe it, But maybe we are all talking about the same thing. It seems there is more to this world than just the things I can wrap my fingers around. Just because I can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

On the road to the good stuff,
Richard
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