Spiritual Basics
Thoughts on creating personal understanding from feeling.
There are basics and foundations to most things in life and a proper foundation will set you up for success. But an obsession with form won’t allow our natural creativity to manifest. It is the personal realization of truth, the personal creation of a framework for understanding that allows our natural talent to flourish.
There is a time and place for structure, but quite often, humans take it too far. We don’t allow freedom for unique understandings. We adopt, consciously and/or unconsciously , the ideas of others instead of forming our own. The understandings of others present as ideas to us, given that understanding is born from personal experience. We must travel the path ourselves, that’s the only way we turn ideas into understandings.
What is the difference between an idea and an understanding? The same as the difference between theory and knowledge. We avoid getting caught up in ideas, using them to be curious about the nature of existence and expand our beliefs about what’s possible in life. We also avoid being caught up in seeming to know or understand. We know life’s immeasurable depth provides the capacity for further understanding and knowledge. We do not attach our self to knowledge because we invite change. Change cannot be separated from growth. With both knowledge and understanding being born from direct experience, they provide vital information on our journey towards truth.
Is the search for truth necessary?
I’ve been asking myself, should we even look for truth? Should we look for signs? When you search for something, you imply you don’t have it. Isn’t the truth always within us and around us and all we have to do is notice it? Once you stop looking for something specific, you free your mind to find everything, freeing yourself from personal bias as to what’s worth noticing or not.
How fear opposes understanding
They say the brain throttles your attention and focus, otherwise the amount of feelings and sense impressions would be overwhelming. Humans are sensitive creatures and the world provides much stimulus for us and our nervous system. But is this throttling of awareness of feeling not simply a numbing of our human talent of sensitivity due to fear?
To feel deeply is a beautiful talent, one where someone picks up more information on and in life. We see it as a burden due to society’s ignorance and the resulting lack of consciousness. The spiritual journey is one of becoming more sensitive and less reactive. We fear how we will react in the face of life’s seemingly random occurrences, so we numb ourselves. Yet the spiritual journey is letting go of the fear of information in the form of feelings, and becoming mindful of it so we can understand more about ourselves and therefore life. The more we understand about ourselves, the more information we are aware of about our human experience, the more beneficial decisions we can make.