There are many among us who feel a strong spiritual connection, yet do not identify exclusively with one religion. We may have grown up going to church, synagogue, mosque, etc, and felt that the organizations did not align the values written in the scriptures, or that perhaps our religion may not be the only answer.
I personally felt lost for a long time and quite guilty regarding this dissonance. I could not prescribe to the notion that one particular mythological story was 100% literally true, and that belief would save me from an afterlife of hell and suffering; while those others around the world who put belief in a different mythology were destined for hell after death, even if they walked the straight and narrow. As a teenager I started wondering how a Christian saint was any more "worthy" than a Hindu, Buddhist, or other far along any variety of spiritual paths. This idea was like a splinter in my faith, and I didn't know what to feel or do about it. I just knew that something was fundamentally wrong with the system I had been conditioned into. I was beginning to lose hold of my exclusive ethnocentric world view, but didn't realize that such an evolution in my structures of consciousness was a natural thing.
After years of struggling with guilt and confusion, I attempted to take an atheistic viewpoint but could not accept that there is no POSSIBILITY of God or a force that binds all of the universe together. This view point did not seem very rational given much of the discoveries emerging in the field of quantum physics regarding waves, particles, emptiness and the act of observing. (For more on this, look up the double slit experiment).
I began to consider myself agnostic. I knew that no religion had all the answers, but felt the core concept of Atman/God/Web of energy connecting all beings to be real.
Reading The World's Religions, by Huston Smith as well as Essential Spirituality by Roger Walsh, I began to consider where the world religions might overlap, and started to mend together my own spiritual path like an old woman sewing a huge blanket for her grandchildren. Walsh lays out seven principles common across all the board which I use as a foundation in my personal practice:
1) Live Ethically
2) Train Attention
3) Redirect Motivation
4) Transform Emotions
5) Refine Awareness
6) Cultivate Wisdom
7) Serve Others
Below is a link to an audio between Ken Wilber and Terry Patten in which Wilber outlines some basic but important distinctions between religion & spirituality. Wilber goes on to discuss human development in regard to states and structures. Click on the Wiber dialogue to hear it!
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