Thoughts and Ideas on the Spiritual Nature of Experience

What is the nature of spiritual reality? Spirituality is the nature of this experience on earth. It bugs me sometimes when people talk about life after death as the ultimate question in life. This to me is just not true. Spiritual reality is as real, well more real than the chair you're sitting in right now. I trust the physical reality of the existence of my soul over just about anything else in this life. Science tells us that matter is merely energy condensed into a slow vibration. Metaphysics implies that there are at least 11 dimensions. All cultures in the history of mankind acknowledge some kind of spiritual reality. Let us be enlightened by a quote from the French mystic Teilhard de Chardin:

“You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.”

-Teilhard de Chardin, (1881-1955)

A simple and very true thought from a spiritual man, but now let us look at the thoughts of a man from science;

"When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.”

-Albert Einstein

What is always interesting to me is the correlation between science and spirit. Here with these two quotes we have a perfect example of this. Comparing these two ideas we come across a theme - that first comes the basic fact of the spiritual nature of our reality, and then second is the physicality of this existence.

An Idea to Meditate On

This quote from German philosopher Rudolph Eucken reinforces the knowledge that this world we call reality is but a train stop if you will, on a much larger map. This is a good quote to meditate on, it brings to my mind so many different things I don't know where to start. Feel free to comment on what comes to your mind when you read it.

"Man is the meeting-point of various stages of Reality."

- Rudolph Eucken (1846 - 1926)

Music, Art, and Mysticism

The following quotes are from Evelyn Underhill's book Mysticism published in 1911. (Considered a classic by many in the realm of the study of spiritual consciousness.) What's interesting, is that in 1910 Wassily Kandinsky wrote his theoretical study, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, in which he examines the psychological effects of color with analogies between music and art. Music was a strong influence in his art, having learned piano and cello at an early age.

"The Earthly artist, because perception brings with it the imperative longing for expression, tries to give us in colour, sound or words a hint of his ecstasy, his glimpse of truth. Only those who have tried, know how small a fraction of his vision he can, under the most favourable circumstance, contrive to represent. The mystic too, tries very hard to tell an unwilling world his secret. But in his case, the difficulties are enormously increased. First, there is the huge disparity between his mind and the mind of the world. His audience must be bewitched as well as addressed, caught up to something of his state, before they can be made to understand."

(-Evelyn Underhill, p. 76 - Mysticism, London: Methuen, 1911.)

Another paragraph and a half down the page she goes on to say -

"Yet of all the arts music alone shares with great mystical literature the power of waking in us a response to the life-movement of the universe: brings us - we know not how - news of its exultant passions and its incomparable peace."

To Underhill, music was the closest form of expression to mystical literature, so it makes sense that Kandinsky, a painter heavily influenced by music, created the first formal nonrepresentational painting. (The same year he wrote his aforementioned study.)

My point is that abstract expressionism is a valuable form of mystical expression, more closely in tune with musical expression than classic painting depicting physical reality. Had Evelyn Underhill wrote her book a few decades later has abstract expressionism really begins to take root, I feel she would be inclined to agree with me.