Today's post is a section of this morning's Zoom talk, "Spirituality, Plain and Simple", by Dr. Susan Nettleton, which will be posted posted on the website hillsidesource.com later this month.
"Spirituality is about a sense of connection to something greater than the self we regularly experience in daily life, and leads us to seek or find purpose, meaning, and connection with THAT. Religion has the tone of a more formal codification of spirituality with very specific rules of behavior and practice, beliefs and usually hierarchical organization, and clear obligations lived in community. Differentiating religion and spirituality is a contemporary construct that has become more popular as western culture shifted away from traditional practices and beliefs when they have seemed out of sync with our changing lifestyles and cultural understanding. Today, post election 2024, it's really hard to say, except to acknowledge religious conflict.
Our focus on the plain and simple today aims at the individual, but inevitably leads us back to our place in the whole of life, which carries the whole of human society and culture, as well as the whole of nature. I realize that collectively, most people are exposed to religious teachings at an early age by the surrounding culture. Depending on where we are raised, we i develop our ideas as aspects of culture; even if you are not brought up in a specific religion, most of us are exposed to it. Here I'm trying to get you to differentiate what you were taught v.s. what came to you from within yourself-- outer exposure versus inner discovery. Part of plain and simple is the reflection on early spiritual experiences that were probably not named as such. My earliest memory on this level was a kind of self-soothing discovery, at least that's how I would explain it from the psychological level. But having worked with so many people from various backgrounds, and heard so many early childhood stories, along with life turning points, I see there is a pull in us, toward the larger reality, that we can call a spiritual movement or perhaps primal memory that is the unbroken link, thread, to the Greater Whole, direct and spontaneous. My own early memory was at night, falling asleep with this kind of worked-through-puzzle, that I was laying in bed and my head touched the pillow and the pillow touched the sheet, and the sheet touched the blanket, and the blanket went to the floor and the floor touched the walls, and the walls touched the ceiling, the ceiling touched the light, connecting ceiling and floors to the hallway, and ...well everything, everything was connected, woven--the inside wall to the outside wall, to the ground and grass which ran to the pine tree. I was next to the tree, because I was touching the pillow ...It was a realization of the interconnections of everything....by then I was asleep. Now, it reminds me of that quote "This Is It and I Am It" (see link below),written by poet and filmmaker James Broughton. In his autobiography, he wrote of a childhood vision that introduced him to his muse, Hermy. Hermy announced Broughton would be a poet, and if he followed the game of life well enough, he would become "a useful spokesman for Big Joy."
Now it would be easy to dismiss either childhood experience as altered memory or dream state, but my point here is to look at innate spiritually. Why not talk in terms that include personal experience that is not influenced or "contaminated" by cultural shaping? I'm quite sure, no one in my family told me about unity of form, ever. And Broughton's experience was meaningful for him. To me, plain and simple spirituality is a return to direct experience.
In his book, The Song of the Bird, Anthony De Mellow writes of sitting with a Teacher who's sermon that day was only one puzzling sentence, "All I do is sit by the bank of the river, selling river water." De Mello comments,"I was so busy buying the water, that I failed to see the river". Life is flowing, always. What we need, what sustains us, directs and guides us, is flowing. But we are so busy trying to find our answers, have a breakthrough, or a demonstration, to use a New Thought term, we miss the given directive. (Susan Nettleton)
For some of today's poetry: https://poetrynap.com/this-is-it-by-james-broughton/
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/.../traveler-your... https://hellopoetry.com/poem/14511/just-now/