Spirituality is like the power plug of your life. When you are plugged into the creative Power of the Universe, you get healing, re-creation, inner restoration and transformation of life.
Spirituality is a view on the world which comes from an understanding of the world being in a number of dimensions. There is firstly the physical / structural dimension of the world understood through the five senses and interpreted by the rational mind. Then there is a secondary dimension of the world where there is a Higher Power …. More real and powerful to some than the first dimension ……. In this invisible dimension (invisible to the rational / visible eye) …….It is understood intuitively rather than rationally with the mind. There are universal gateways of a successful life which can be experienced through this understanding. Some people try and get this from religion which is quite different to spirituality.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RELIGION and SPIRITUALITY:
Religion is explicit (outwardly evident and defined) and is marked by four things: a cult, creed, code (ethics) and community (which is more inward looking). It ends up being very law-centred …. Focussing on precise ways of living life ….. ends up with very defined expectations and precise programs. On the other hand, spirituality is implicit (inwardly self evident and undefined). It refers to how an individual lives meaningfully with the ultimate questions of life, his or her response to the deepest truths of the universe as he or she apprehends these. It answers such queries as:
Who are we as a people?
What is the meaning of life?
What values should I live by?
• There are two forms of Spirituality:
• Horizontal and Vertical Spirituality. There are two forms of Spirituality:
There is a Horizontal Spirituality on the horizontal plane of life and a Vertical Spirituality in an external sense …….. it is important that you correctly relate the two together and not just have one vs. the other …... Horizontal Spirituality gives us directions on our relationship with the Earth, all other people and all other living creatures and leads to integration with everything …... with the whole of life ….. this spirituality is fairly impersonal. Vertical Spirituality gives our relationship with an infinite - personal Higher Power. ……. We do not seek it and find this Higher Power but it finds us when we are open to it in our inner persons. None of this can be rationally proved but it works in a very practical way with real results manifesting in healing, restoration and transformation of life from brain injury which the author experienced over ten years ago..
Another way of describing the above is by describing spirituality in this way:
The External Spirituality: ….. The Infinite-Personal Higher Power …. Transcendent .…... outside the Created Cosmos …. This is a vertical spirituality …. Any healing and restoration has to come here then spread out horizontally to the spirituality detailed below
The Internal Spirituality: …. The Interconnectedness of all life: The Spirituality of the Interconnectedness of all things … … Living and non living …. This is a horizontal spirituality
To understand spirituality more fully, we need to look at the whole topic of the nature of our being as this is the actual power plug in our analogy above.
Our Nature of Being
You are not defined by a label on the outside but what you are on the inside. Diagrammatically, it can be illustrated it like this:
It is the sum total of your attitudes to life, your feelings about life, your thinking ability, your wisdom in life and your ability to see or be aware of a whole unseen spiritual dimension of life beyond you of which you can be part of. With this perspective in the end, you can treat problems as tombstones or stepping-stones …. whatever you want. Circumstances are in charge of you or you are in charge of circumstances. ie. You can recover from a brain injury no matter what has happened to you.
More specifically, you could see life as related like this than the more general diagram above …. This is an abstract, hard edged, symbolic way of representing the idea … It more fluid like a flow of water between the different areas:
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