In the Garden of Spirituality – Mike George

“We are not on earth to guard a museum,
but to cultivate a flowering garden of life.”

– Pope John XXIII

The Wild Reed’s series of reflections on religion and spirituality continues with an excerpt from Mike George’s Discover Inner Peace: A Guide to Spiritual Well-Being.” This excerpt focuses on the “source of the spirit.”

________________

According to Hindu belief, atman (the Sanskrit word for self or individual spirit) is of the same essence as, but distinct from, brahman (the source of spirit.) One of many Westerners inspired by this idea was the 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman, who believed that true knowledge comes through union with the Self in its universal sense. At such moments of union (which Whitman called “merge”), we see the enhanced clarity and can read infinite lessons in common things. Our essential and original divinity of the individual spirit implies the equality of all and the universal responsibility we share for loving each other.

The idea of a transcendent spirit, or godhead, is present in most religions. Commonly this universal spirit is symbolized as light. It is also described as the source, a kind of inexhaustible spiritual reservoir to which we are all connected. This sense of derivation brings in the idea of parenthood – spiritually, we are the offspring of the source.

Try to hold these three ideas in your mind simultaneously: light, source, parent. But bear in mind too that no image or analogy is ever going to be able even to come close to conveying the true quality of the source, which to use an old-fashioned theological word is “ineffable” – too great or intense to be rendered in words.

In the same way that the physical source of life is the sun, the spiritual source is the divine, the eternal, the all-encompassing. We can recognize the reality of this within our own spirit with total conviction, but we cannot confirm that reality through the evidence of the senses or through the power of reason. Mystics have testified to their direct contact with the ineffable in language that is often powerful and strange; and people who have undergone near-death experiences have often described a rushing toward a light at the end of a tunnel or an encounter with a blaze of light that radiates underconditional love and acceptance. But if we wish to have a truer sense of the source, it is more fruitful to take a step inward, to the spirit, than to set too much store by the reported experiences of others.

Why do we lose awareness of the supreme source? Mainly because we are enticed by body-consciousness. . . . The heart of spiritual awareness is the reawakening of our relationship with the source. Our relationships on earth are horizontal and progress within limits. Our connection with the source of the spirit is the transcendent, vertical relationship that gives the deepest meaning to life, like the axis around which our world spins. Spiritual awareness is a moving current of energy that carries everything in the direction of higher evolution.

. . . Many people believe in God because they are attached to a belief system. They literally “hold” beliefs, hanging on to the dogmas and rituals of religion out of fear or habit rather than love (which keeps fear at bay). This dependence on systems and rules can prevent some people from truly connecting with the source. Purely intellectual belief has little, if any, transformative energy. One indicator that belief can be an attachment rather than an experience is the intolerance that we often find expressed toward people who believe in a different understanding of God.

When people tell us that the divine is everywhere, present in everything, yet requiring no obligations of us, we are witnessing a kind of spiritual draft-dodging. The obligations on us to live by the spirit, in love, openness and trust, are in fact profound; and so are the corresponding rewards. If we retrain ourselves to be open to the spirit from whom we came and to whom we will return, we will feel the rightness of this relationship, and we will also feel its joy.

– Mike George
Excerpted from Discover Inner Peace:
A Guide to Spiritual Well-Being
Chronicle Books, 2000
pp. 36-39

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence – Part I | Part II
• A Return to the Spirit
• A Sacred Pause
• Aligning With the Living Light
• Mystical Participation
• I Need Do Nothing . . . I Am Open to the Living Light
• A Season of Listening
• Returning to the Mind to God
• The Source Is Within You
• The Soul’s Beloved
• You Are My Goal, Beloved One
• The Beauty and Challenge of Being Present in the Moment
• In This Time of Liminal Space
• New Horizons

Others highlighted in The Wild Reed’s “In the Garden of Spirituality” series include:
Zainab Salbi | Daniel Helminiak | Rod Cameron | Paul Collins | Joan Chittister | Toby Johnson | Joan Timmerman (Part I) | Joan Timmerman (Part II) | Uta Ranke-Heinemann | Caroline Jones | Ron Rolheiser | James C. Howell | Paul Coelho | Doris Lessing | Michael Morwood | Kenneth Stokes | Dody Donnelly | Adrian Smith | Henri Nouwen | Diarmuid Ó Murchú | L. Patrick Carroll | Jesse Lava | Geoffrey Robinson | Joyce Rupp | Debbie Blue | Rosanne Cash | Elizabeth Johnson | Eckhart Tolle | James B. Nelson | Jeanette Blonigen Clancy | Mark Hathaway (Part I) | Mark Hathaway (Part II) | Parker Palmer | Karen Armstrong | Alan Lurie | Paul Wapner | Pamela Greenberg | Ilia Delio | Inayat Khan | Andrew Harvey | Kabir Helminski | Beatrice Bruteau | Richard Rohr (Part I) | Richard Rohr (Part II) | Judy Cannato | Anthony de Mello | Marianne Williamson | David Richo | Gerald May | Thomas Crum | Pema Chödrön | Peng Roden Her | Gregory L. Jantz

Images: Michael J. Bayly.