Reflections on Spirituality

At a loose end, with all urgent chores out of the way, I sometimes look around for something to occupy me . I may turn to a hobby, or read a book, browse the net, go for a walk or listen to music, for example. I generally find something that keeps me interested for an hour or so. But every now and then, something grabs my attention in a way that I would feel sacrilegious to stop.

It usually happens with music or when out walking in nature, often after a toke of cannabis. After flipping between music albums arousing only a lukewarm interest, a song may start that mesmerizes me from the very first note. Suddenly I am hearing every note, every nuance, clear as a bell, and every waver of the music ripples through my body. Enchanted, I sit, or dance, through the entire album, hardly daring to breathe. When it ends I reach for more of the same - another album, probably by the same artist - but the magic is gone.

This doesn't only happen with music. I can be wandering along a nature trail taking a mild interest in the scenery when I round a corner and nature reveals its very being to me, stunning, glorious, every direction and detail more wondrous than the next, every leaf, every flower, every cloud glowing with being.

In meditation, too, I may sit for a while in a mild calmness when its 'tune' suddenly changes, resonates with my body, spreads to the floor and air into the wider world, where I open my eyes to gaze at myself in all my manifestations. Then the awareness slowly dissipates and I'm back to my normal self.

With people too, though this is a tricky one. In a casual social setting I may unexpectedly turn and find the sun shining out of someone's eyes and them seeing my heart - or I am seeing theirs. But people have egos and very few consciously acknowledge the exchange, or the curtain suddenly drops again. Animals and babies are different - they rarely let their egos get in the way of these precious moments.

And ahhh, those precious moments with a lover......

I value these moments now even more so, for I understood their spiritual value. You may remember in Physical Spirituality I described how the singing of the Cosmic Deity mediates our connective attention, such that our attention reaches its full potential when both it and the events we are attending to are attuned to the Deity's song. It is in these moments of magic that we have tuned in to the Cosmic Deity's song. I see them as our greatest spiritual expressions, at least connectively.

Spiritually speaking, it is these moments we're after, not the secrets of how the universe works! And they are well within our human reach.

*

The architective mode of consciousness has an ultimate purpose, to make things so perfect that God will come down among us. The connective mode of consciousness says God is already here, just stop the noise so we can get on with it.

*

Though the universe may be connected, not all events are connectively spiritually significant. In fact, very few are. Most events are either expressions of the natural free-for-all of the connective Yin/Yang dynamic or expressions of our predominantly architective environment.

*

While I see spirituality to be materially sourced rather than metaphysical, I see connectivity and architectivity themselves as metaphysical.

Does either have a primary status?

Without connectivity there would be no relationships for architectivity to constrain so there would be no objects and therefore no architectivity.

Without architectivity there would be no objects to have relationships and so no connectivity.

Supposing we could have connectivity only, say bosons only. A world empty of objects. Then we would not be here. But we are here.

There is a metaphysical necessity for both connectivity and architectivity. Metaphysics is therefore dualistic, with neither connectivity nor architectivity being primary.

*

In Physical Spirituality I suggest that our spirits are based in the material world rather than a metaphysical substrate. Just because they are physical doesn't mean we can perceive them directly, for their expressions tend to lie outside our bands of perception.

*

The idea that spirituality is an epiphenomenon of material reality means that our search for sentient spirituality should look to the areas of greatest complexity and profundity rather than looking into the micro-mechanics of the universe for its most basic operations.

This orientation is compatible with the absence of quantum exploration in Physical Spirituality.

*

With a metaphysical spirituality a phenomenon would need to violate a law of physics to show that it was spiritual and not material.

With an emergent spirituality, spiritual phenomena would not violate the laws of physics.