Ways to have Spiritual Guidance in my life.

If I do not know how to move forward in my spiritual guidance, I get confused. Before it used to be solely the prerogative of the Church, however, there has now been a spiritual shift which has made our spiritual progress the responsibility of each and every one of us. There are signposts as guidelines:

1. It is important to know where I stand at this point in time. We

tend to fluctuate on this and sometimes function through

different parts of our personality, in a range from immature to

mature. We emphasize different aspects of our personality

according to our circumstances, family background etc.

2. It is important that with total honesty, we can examine what part

of the personality we are functioning from at all times, either the

mature or immature part without guilt feelings since it has

nothing to do with us but the circumstances we met up with.

3. A good indicator could be signs that the physical body manifests

eg. anxiety, fear. The physical experience reflects my thought

pattern at that time. When we wake up, the first hour is the time

when we take the decision which will give us our direction for the

whole day.

Spiritual Guidance – I believe that there is an inner push that is guiding me for full development whether I want it or not. If I accept it I move into a dynamic of collaboration, if not I get into a dynamic of confrontation and thus find myself in a crisis. The more we use our spiritual guidance to take decisions to enhance our life, the more we strengthen it. Sometimes, we choose the road of confrontation, and then experience life as fragmentation or negativity.

Unity of Opposites

Duality is an everyday experience which we move into on awakening. If I experience sadness, I am aware that there is the opposite of that and vice-versa. Everything has the flipside, thus duality. Some people take this as an experience of fragmentation and they can never find stability in life, thus it is the source of their unhappiness. So if something joyful comes to them, they always live in the fear of the sadness that might me awaiting them round the corner. In this way, they never live their experience of joy to the full, causing deep unhappinees in their psyche. This because they constantly live in fear that something will happen to unbalance them. This sometimes becomes pathological and does not let them experience long periods of peace.

Many spiritual traditions have unfortunately encouraged this way of thinking by creating a chism between what is good and what is bad. The duality is emphasized and people are encouraged to choose one part which they call ‘good’ if they are to be happy and save their soul. This has harmed many because it has created a conflict within some people since it has created a psychological struggle which to them ends at death.

In every spirituality, there are the rules of the religious part which is so to speak, the rules of the club which empasizes the duality part. However, every spirituality also has the mystic part which goes beyond, with the belief that duality is not the real human experience. The personality is experiencing wholeness through integration of the opposite poles. Thus it does not experience it as a split in personality but deeper integration and maturity. By rejecting one part one can never experience unity of opposites.

An example of this is the relationship some people have with their sexuality, where they are afraid of thoughts that come to them and struggle to reject them. This is an experience of opposing attitudes that come up of their own accord. Because of this, many people go through life riddled with guilt which is often misplaced. They can only achieve balance if they accept all their experiences as sacred, not to be suppressed or rejected. This can be done by unlearning some of our beliefs and basing our spiritual life on the mercy of God.

When in a conflicting situation, it is wise not to suppress one part but to allow both sides space to manifest in ones life. If we believe that ultimately all human experience is one of unity, it is only there that we can find balance and happiness, thus allowing conflict a place in our life.

Our Spiritual Identity

Where am I? Who am I? Where am I going?

The baby is totally connected to the body. It has no dilemmas with identity and is living the pure human experience. It is identifying with its’ true self by deriving its’ identity through the body. One cannot experience God through the mind. The baby’s smile is indicative of its experience in the human body where it is happy to be. In time, the baby begins to have different experiences because of exterior stimuli. This will create a different experience or identity called the false self which comes about because fo the reflective process and it is through this process that we suffer and feel pain, thus slowly losing touch with our initial process of joy. In this way we set off on a complex journey with a different path of identity.

The False Self is an imaginary self which we create as a by-product of the reflective process. This creates a world of its own, full of emotions and mental activity which gives us a false identity of who we really are. We then carry this false identity throughout our life, thinking and believing it is whom we really are. We then start with the internal dialogue which causes us to suffer because we are never satisfied and at peace because there is this sense of lack and the more we shift into this persona, the more lost we become because the mind continues to create situations where we then get lost because we cannot find ourselves and become slaves to internal dialogue.

We relate to the world and people through this internal dialogue – hurt, hopeless, extremely good etc. Therefore, we filter reality through the internal dialogue using the skills and mechanisms we have experienced in our life. People have difficulty relating because they create a world of their own i.e. I know who I am because of my problems.

We get to a point in our life where we have to take a decision. We might experience a deep crisis of identity which might require us to take a decision. This illusion of false self cannot feed us any more and we come up against a wall. This is the most fruitful moment because crisis will give us the opportunity to decide the path we wish to follow. It will show that the previous path we followed did not give us life. This will then initiate a process within us which will want to transform the way we live. Difficult experiences in our life like shock, degressions, end of a relationship, loss of a job etc will freeze our mind and internal dialogue. Our mind can no longer cope with these experiences of life and shuts down, thus giving us the opportunity to go back to the pure experience of the baby. The true self of human experience makes a comeback bringing us intense and short periods of joy, reflecting the connectedness with my being. Like the phoenix , new life comes out of the ashes. We then start to move again into a dynamic of human experience.

Paradoxically, I have found peace because I have always been dissatisfied. My moments of depression and despair turn out to be renewals, new beginnings. If I were once to settle down and be satisfied with the surface of life, with its divisions and its cliches, it would be time to call in the undertaker... So, then, this dissatisfaction which sometimes used to worry me and has certainly, I know, worried others, has helped me in fact to move freely and even gaily with the stream of life. (Thomas Merton)