Remembering Spirituality

Remembering Spirituality


1.

Each human being is the descendent of a great and unique lineage, a single flower from a single branch, upon which is built an individual experience that nothing has ever known before. Each of us a node of possible ways to become a person and a new path to this end. By the very brute fact that everyone is different, so too is every spirit, and so too is every spirituality. However, amongst the multitude variety of flavours and tastes and colors in human beings, the spirituality passed between common hands and expressed in common language is no less very similar.

2.

The spirituality for everyone is a powerful lie; but for a race of salesman and customers, always insatiably trying to become a creditor to each other, it has become a useful tool. In the mouth of a dogmatist—one who sees his own spirituality as a necessary consequence of not only his life but the lives of other people—is his prideful attempt at domesticating those around him, to become a shepherd of a flock of sheep by irrationally assuming that his spiritual development pertains to everyone else. The suggested rules and conditions of a spiritual or moral dogma are always the subjective opinions of its creator, and instead these supposed truths amounts to no more than an attempt at art, to weave a series of maxims and reflections into something that people can see and generate ideas from. Moralities, metaphysics and world-views are always relics of culture and not rules of spirituality. At best they are products of pure creativity, art that may or may not please our individual tastes, but at worst a fine lullaby for the half-asleep, who are not quite fit enough to separate art from reality, let alone to produce their own.

3.

We are idolaters when we see art as truth, as law, as guiding hand. It is impossible to look at a painting and say “that is the truth”. We are superstitious when we give divine authority to the ideas of certain people, and not our own. Nothing more.

4.

What stands before us in matters of art is not truth, is not law, is not the answer, but is the muse, the inspiration from which the imagination of individuals generates ideas upon seeing it. The presence and very form of it is arbitrary, material, however beautiful, but its being stimulates the spiritual faculties of imagination, wonder, and curiosity. Such art is capable of inflicting change in another—idea generation, inspiration, imagination—the chaotic movement of newly formed patterns of thought. But the art loses this power once presented as truth—truth as the lowest art-form, dogma—for it attempts to enslave the imagination, rather than set it free.

5.

We cannot be everything, and therefor we must choose a path, and negate other paths all the same. But no path can be preconceived nor followed due to the inherent individuality of persons and our inability to see past the moment. No one can walk in the steps of another. The path must be forged.

Nonetheless, each individual is biologically equipped to create his own spirituality, but may not be inclined to do so. In that sense, we are biologically altruistic. Like a honey bee, who upon stinging something eviscerates his own insides, we always sacrifice ourselves for the greater good. Our spirituality is our weapon, but when we get down on one knee and present it to our spiritual conquerers, we too eviscerate something: our body, our individuality, our spirit, ourselves. We commit self-sacrifice and spiritual suicide in our very refusal to be spiritually sovereign, to become the creator of culture rather than products of it. As a result—domesticated, tame, house-trained, the submissive pet—seeing through a lens of compromise and routine.

6.

Culture feeds upon itself, every individual a cell of its body, feeding it, giving it a chaotic momentum. We control it and affect it with our spiritual expression, our art, no matter what truth we pretend it contains. In that sense we have power to affect the whole with our own spirituality, without the need of any spiritual dogma. For the individual to seize that power and use his imagination is where spirituality has always remained: To remember the originals we know ourselves to be.

good read. I agree with you.

it seems like these days, showing your originality in any way is highly is encouraged by many, but when one does have the courage to do so, they are like the nail that sticks out, suddenly everyone wants to hammer them back down.