As many of you would know, after resigning as CEO of an electricity generator, I pursued a career as an executive coach which I found extremely rewarding. Whilst I mainly worked in organisations where I was encouraged to enhance the personal development of executives, I was sometimes also asked to coach executives that were deemed to be “difficult”. This was often a “cop out” by the management of such organisations who were not prepared to do the hard yards when managing their staff. Whilst I was often concerned by the lack of managerial resolve to properly manage such individuals, I was more than happy to engage with them.
I could probably emphasise with them. After all, my mother had told me that my first report card from school had reported that I was “inclined to be difficult”!
I was engaged to work with a religious organisation and worked extensively with them. The Bishop requested I should work with one of their senior people proclaiming that he was not supporting the orthodoxy. I reluctantly agreed, believing it was unlikely that I could modify the man’s behaviour to be acceptable to the mainstream church. After I had a few coaching sessions with the miscreant (let’s for anonymity’s sake call him, John) I was at a church event and the Bishop took me aside,
“How are you progressing with John?” he enquired.
“Well to tell the truth,” I responded, “I find him an extremely spiritual man.”
“Humph, “came the Bishop’s reply. “Then it must be a very different spirituality from mine!”
“I suspect that is true, Bishop,” I answered.
The Bishop seemed to think that spirituality was underpinned by his Christian devotion and was manifest in his dedication to Christian ideals and Christian dogma. My client however, besides being educated as a Christian priest had ventured beyond basic Christian teachings. He was, in fact, taken by the Helen Schucman book, A Course in Miracles. Through this and other influences he had broadened his concept of spirituality. This gave me pause to contemplate what spirituality is all about.
In this essay I will take some small steps to try to answer that question.
In our book Humanity at Work, the good Dr Phil and I wrote the following:
As the child grows into adulthood there are three great sets of needs that dominate life, and satisfaction of these needs becomes the basis of the child’s sense of well-being.
The first set of needs is the physical needs, the needs we have in common with all living things. If we don’t supply our physical needs we die — physically. Fulfilment of our physical needs allows us to survive.
The second set of needs is the social needs, the needs we have in common with animals because, like animals, we have the capacity to be aware of our outer world and to respond to that world through the processes of thinking, feeling, and decision making. Like animals we are intimately connected through strong emotional bonds to our fellow creatures, particularly those of our own species. If we don’t find reasonable satisfaction for our social needs we die— emotionally (and sometimes even physically). Fulfilment of our social needs
allows us to cope emotionally.
The third set of needs is the spiritual needs — needs for meaning, the uniquely human needs.
We have these needs because, not only do we think and have an awareness of our social and physical world (just as animals do) but we also have a ‘watcher’ (what is sometimes referred to as the ‘spirit of our being’) that gives us the capacity to ‘watch’ our own thinking and decision making processes at work; at least the conscious tip of these processes. Hence, we are self-aware and experience an inner psychological world as well as an outer material world. Because we can access and ‘look over’ our memory banks we are consciously aware of the passing of time and look for some continuity of purpose in what we do day by day. In other words, we have a need to understand the meaning’ of our lives. If we don’t supply our spiritual needs and thereby fail to find meaning in our lives we can languish and die — spiritually (and sometimes socially and physically).
Fulfilment of our spiritual needs is necessary to a sense of personal worth. We must find meaning and purpose in our lives if we are to experience our full humanity. The meeting of these needs provides a sense of well-being that transcends the conditions of our immediate social and physical circumstances and thereby allows us to be better adjusted in our attitude towards such circumstances.
[Note: In other writings I have referred to the “Watcher” as the “Witness” as it is referred to in Eastern traditions This ability to observe the conscious atctivities of our minds iin fact creates what I have described as the “Theatre of Mind”.].
Now it seems to me that spirituality is a measure of our connectedness to humankind and indeed to the universe at large.
Arthur Schopenhauer, the great German philosopher maintained that, “Man is a metaphysical animal.”
Our spirituality is what we experience metaphysically. Note that spirituality is not necessarily a religious outcome. Whilst some of us are led to the experience of spirituality through conventional religious practices, many of us are not.
It seems also that we can’t learn about spirituality directly. We can learn various techniques and processes that may help us to come to this experience – but in the end it seems it is a personal experience. It is also a fact that the masters and sages who have come to this experience over the ages were not continuously in this exalted state. But it is undoubtedly true they could access it easier than most of us. Of course when you hear the anecdotal evidence, anyone who has had this experience would seem to be permanently impacted by it even if it were a once-off occurrence.
Spiritual experiences aren’t necessarily as dramatic as the purported encounter of Paul of Tarsus with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus. They are often much more mundane. Let me share with you some such experiences.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, the leading English poet of the Victorian era described his own spiritual experience thus:
A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from my boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name three or four times to myself silently, til all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade into boundless being; and this is not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life
It seems an extraordinary thing that a man might experience such a revelation. Let me share with you a little known poem, Vacillation, by William Butler Yeats, the Anglo-Irish poet and dramatist that described his own spiritual experience.
VACILLATION
My fiftieth year had come and gone
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
W.B. Yeats
Lest you think that such experiences are the province of hallucinatory poets, here is another such experience from an ordinary commuter quoted by internationally renowned cognitive scientist, Guy Claxton in his book Noises from the Darkroom
“Vauxhall station on a murky Saturday evening is not the setting one would choose for a revelation of God! The third class compartment was full. I cannot remember any particular thought processes which might have led up to the great moment. For a few seconds only (I suppose) the whole compartment was filled with light. I felt caught up in some tremendous being with a loving, triumphant and shining purpose. In a few moments the glory had departed – all but one curious lingering feeling. I loved everybody in that compartment. It sounds silly now, and indeed I blush to write it, but at that moment I think I would have died for any one of the people in that compartment. I seemed to sense the golden worth in them all.
Whilst people seem to be reluctant to talk of such experiences, they are surprisingly common. The Allister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre has documented hundreds of such experiences.
In 1979 J M Cohen and John Francis Phipps wrote a book which they titled The Common Experience which is an anthology that collects and compares the spiritual, mystical and transcendental experiences of both ordinary men and women and famous philosophers.
In his analysis Claxton defined four qualities of such experiences.
- An Unusually Strong Sense of Aliveness
Such experiences are very frequently characterised by a heightened sense of energy and vitality. Though people often use metaphors of fire – such as Yeats’s ‘blaze’ or the Vauxhall ‘light’, to capture this intensity, it seems as if what they are trying to describe is simply an unusual clarity and sense of perception.
- Belonging: A Sense of Being at Ease in the World
The places where such phenomenon occur, can be very ordinary, inauspicious places. Yet there seems to come a strong sense of being at one with the world, and the ordinary world seems to be a marvellous place. Compassion and love even, don’t have to be ‘worked on’ – they emerge as entirely natural corollaries of belonging.
- An Affinity with Mystery
It involves a curious, almost paradoxical sense that all is well in the world, despite not knowing how things are going to turn out. Claxton asserts that the heightened sense of trust and spontaneity that comes with this state does not involve a complete abandonment of forethought. Rather, as the Sufi proverb has it, ‘you trust in God – but first tether your camel!’
- An Enhanced Peace of Mind
It enables the one experiencing the phenomenon the ability to shed some of the mundane anxiety and confusion that Buddhists call dhukka ,and to find oneself more often in a state of inner harmony and clarity, and less often conflicted and self-conscious.
In Buddhism it is asserted that dhukka (roughly translated as suffering) comes from dualism.
Dualism arises as a result of the self disidentifying itself from the universe at large. It is an act of rebellion of the ego which wants to be separate and special. Although we may each of us be unique beings, none of us is special.
In essence, this phenomenon –the Common Experience, so-called – occurs when the ego is dissolved. The French philosopher and atheist, Andre Comte-Sponville, calls this state the “oceanic feeling” He also maintains it is not necessary to have a belief in God to access it.
The French philosopher, Albert Camus, in his own rejection of dualism, described the state of monism as “a celebration of the wedding with the world”.
This is how he described this experience of joyous state:
I am fulfilled even before I can long for anything. Eternity is here and I was hoping for it. What I wish for now is no longer to be happy but only to be aware.
But, despite the eloquent words of Camus that which we desire most, this transcendent experience, cannot properly be described in words but only experienced. (The Tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao.)
In my own case, the person who stimulated me on a search for spirituality was that fabulous writer on transpersonal psychology, Ken Wilber.
Wilber wrote:
The mystics must be content with pointing and showing a Way whereby we may all experience unity consciousness for ourselves. In this sense the mystic path is a purely experimental one. The mystics ask you to believe absolutely nothing on blind faith; to accept no authority but that of your own understanding. They ask you only to try a few experiments in awareness, to look closely at your present state of existence, and to try to see yourself and your world as clearly as you possibly can! “Don’t think, just look!”as Wittgenstein exclaimed.
In chapter 6 of the Vedic text, the Chandogya Upamishad, the sage Uddalaka Aruni is reunited with his son who has returned from twelve years of formal education. The son seems rather full of himself so the sage undertakes to reground him. He provides nine metaphors to relate his son to the physical universe. At the end of each lesson he tells his son “Tat Tvam Asi” which is Sanskrit and traditionally translated as “Thou Art That”.
This is a profound spiritual statement. It declares that your individual self is not a separate individual entity as your ego might like to project it, but is identical to the ultimate reality of the universe.
This is indeed the unity consciousness that Wilber referred to above. This underpinned the “common experiences” I outlined before.
Unity consciousness(sometimes also called unitary consciousness) is a state of awareness where an individual experiences a complete dissolution of the ego-driven boundary between the self and the rest of the universe. It recognises all existence a as a single interconnected whole. That is the goal of spiritual awakening.
In my estimation then, if we go back to the anecdote which I related at the beginning of this essay, John was surely more spiritual than his Bishop!
And Another Thing!
In recent weeks political debate has been muddied by the argument whether we want Australia to be a Multicultural society or a Monocultural society. This has become largely an exercise in semantics. Once upon a time we were pretty clear in what we meant. We declared that we wanted migrants to assimilate into our society. By and large we meant that we wanted them to integrate into our society by fully participating in it. We wanted them to learn English, assume productive roles where they could, abide by the same laws and avail themselves of the same benefits as the rest of us. We wanted them to demonstrate religious and racial tolerance and we had the same expectations of them as everyone else.
In my youth we called such people “New Australians” in recognition of their commitment to Australia rather than label them with their countries of origin. But in this woke world of identity politics assimilation seems to have become a dirty word.
And these should be exactly the same expectations we have of our indigenous citizens. Nugget Coombs’ notion of separatism has ensured a significant number of indigenous people have not assimilated into our society. This has become the source of significant indigenous dysfunction and we are all the worse for it!