My spirituality

I started to think about this consciously tonight after watching a documentary about George Harrison, and in particular about his explorations with Eastern mysticism.

One thing that struck me in particular was a clip where he and the other Beatles were talking to an interviewer about what the purpose of a mantra was in meditation and they all said that the idea was to stop thinking or having thoughts, and if you notice yourself thinking you repeat the mantra over and over to blank out the conscious thoughts and get back to "not thinking". That contrasts somewhat with my own spirituality, and I'll explain exactly in what way in a moment.

So, anyway, because I feel myself to be a very spiritual person in one way or another, I started thinking consciously about what my own spirituality was, starting with this sense of comparison against that one thought and then spreading out to think about the other stuff that I've learned or developed ideas about through my living.

That word, "living", struck me as being a pretty important one in terms of understanding what spirituality means to me. My spiritualism is above all an embodied and experience-based spiritualism. Feelings, awareness, thought, meditation, even - all these things that are a part of a soul, spirit, mind, whatever you want to call it - are to me things that relate in some way to a body, and that body relates back to them.

This is not to say that we should focus on the sensual realm to understand the spirit: rather it is to say that, while some pleasures are undeniably sensual, those pleasures do not reside only in the body but in the soul as well: because the soul is where pleasure is experienced. Equally, some pleasures are spiritual in nature, but unless I'm doing ti wrong, these pleasures bring a feedback to the body and feel good in the embodied self as well: tensed muscles start to relax, breathing becomes easier, and so on. There are bodily changes, as the spiritual pleasure is experienced. We cannot divorce the body from the spirit or vice versa, and neither can we understand them as antagonistic or contradictory realms, as St Paul seems to view them.

Which leads me more or less to my differences with the meditation that was discussed in the George Harrison documentary. The idea of leaving earthly things, and of "not thinking" seems like an odd thing. Not impossible - I believe people who say they achieve it through meditation - but ultimately rather pointless. Of course, when the laser was invented they thought it was also a pointless exercise building such a thing, and now look at what lasers are good for, so it could just be a blindspot in my understanding. But to me, the aim of non-thought seems rather like building a musical instrument and then nobody ever plays it (or perhaps, writing a wonderful tune and then never playing it on the instrument it's written for). Instruments are meant to be played, and tunes are meant to be played on instruments (where instrument includes voice, or hands, or whatever).

There is also a personal thing: for me, the idea of aiming for non-thought feels just a little bit too much like the experiences of depression that I have, which for me involves feeling cut off from my body in a way that deadens the spirit as well (you can see where some of my view of spirituality comes from, perhaps!) There is research that suggests depression really does leave perception of the senses dulled and weakened. Thinking itself becomes sluggish and reluctant, almost, "why bother?" To aim deliberately for a state that sounds like that but taken to extremes, seems absurd. George Harrison talked about a feeling of bliss from his meditation, and I have no reason to doubt his reports of his experience. I just do not believe that it would feel that way to me.

But, I have tried meditating, or at least, something that to me seems like what meditation involves, after my own fashion. For me, the aim is something more like tuning the instrument in the previous analogy. It's about focussing on simple things of awareness, and experiencing my embodied self purely as a body at rest, with maybe just one or two sensations going around and really "listening" to my body in itself.

Another thing for me is that spirituality is about being open to the moving of one's own spirit. Most people when they talk in terms of spirituality seem to have a hierarchy of more acceptable or less acceptable feelings and sensations, with the acceptable ones being "spiritual" and to be cultivated and the less acceptable ones being "mundane", and to be avoided. You can see what St Paul thought about those by following the previous link!

I tend to be less picky in that way: I believe anger, fear, pain, and so on, can all be positive things and feelings to which we should listen and of which we should be spiritually aware and welcoming. Not in all cases, though, but then, there are cases when it is mistaken to be welcoming of pleasure, calmness, love, etc. Love can lead to very harmful actions where it is not understood (by the person feeling it) or it is misdirected. With both these things, it is important to listen and understand that link between the embodied emotions and the spiritual element. Being aware and alert to one's own state, I have found I have sometimes felt emotions and realised that something was misleading me; examining and looking for what lay underneath the emotion, I could find out why the potentially harmful feeling was there and dispel it or redirect it constructively. But sometimes, being aware and alert just allows me to give myself to my emotions confidently, or to deal with them.

Given my BDSM leanings, it may come as no surprise that my spirituality reflects, and is reflected in, my kink and how I relate to it. BDSM is embodied stuff, and also works on a mental level. It is very much the case that when I have a partner tied up and I'm beating her so that she cries out in pain, that I am being violent, I am being sensual, I am being embodied. But it is also a spiritual experience and, though there are those violent emotional components, in that moment I am typically also very calm, very aware, and indeed, in a form of blissful state on a spiritual level. Likewise, when I am the masochist and/or sub role, experiencing the pain brings embodied reactions, and there is a "negative" side to it, but there is also bliss, joy, release, and lots of the stuff that goes with "positive" spirituality.

I couldn't understand a spirituality that tried to separate the two, that said that there are feelings that are always bad, or say that the "earthly" things need to be left behind. There can be no transcendental without the mundane. The best things happen where the two meet. Yes, there are feelings that cause harm, and need to be understood and redirected or dissipated; but those cannot be classed as "hate is always bad, love is always good", because sometimes hatred is what motivates us to make things better, and sometimes love leads to us holding onto things that no longer help us but hold us back.