What Is Spirituality
The Language of the Infinite
When I pray or meditate, it is my attempt to connect with the infinite and the part of myself that is one with the invisible. The part that is connected to all life, which is so vast that it requires faith in the unseen to even approach the subject at all.
All I can honestly say about the spiritual part of myself is that I experience it, I feel it in my thoughts and even on my skin and in the marrow of my bones. I am aware of a life force that I carry that goes far beyond my physical body. But we cannot fully define that which exists beyond physical form, which is to say, beyond definition.
It takes a knowing and acceptance as quiet and sure as one finds in nature, in animals, trees, valleys, rivers, and oceans. It is the calm acceptance that while my body knows time through its changes, the life force within me is indestructible.
Even so, I still reach toward it with my mind. I use words like God, Mother Earth, the universe, the Spirit, the Holy Trinity, or whatever language feels meaningful in the moment, because I know I must accept the contradiction of it all.
Language is the art of defining reality as we understand it. To use language at all is to apply definitions to what is—to define our abstractions as best we can. Yet to communicate with that which lies beyond definition, I still need thoughts, and those thoughts reveal and organize themselves through language.
I am fascinated by how humans seem to inhabit two worlds simultaneously: the visible world of form, and the invisible world of thought, meaning, memory, love, purpose, mathematics, imagination, consciousness and spirit. We cannot hold these things in our hands, yet they shape nearly every aspect of our lives.
And I am okay with being an embodiment of contradiction, with accepting that I carry life even as I wait for death, and with seeking to know that which is ultimately undefinable.
Continue Reading
→ The Invisible and the Visible: Philosophical Greenhouse
→ The Seedbed
Related Topics
→ Time & Form: Consciousness, and the relationship between time and form.
→ Duality: Where opposites make experience possible
→ Human Nature: Each of us a gear that turns another, even as another turns us.
→ The Architecture of Belief: Where the tensions of existence become human choices.
→ Garden of the Mind: Where what we cultivate within becomes the world we inhabit.
→ Love: Where the deepest meaning of experience reveals itself.