Open Yourself To Your Spiritual Part

Jorge Bucay narrates in one of his stories that once a prince met a beggar at the palace gates and when he went to give him alms, the beggar told him: “Do it only if you are capable, you, almighty and rich man, to fill my whole bowl ”. The prince accepted the challenge, but no matter how many coins, jewels and food he put in the beggar’s bowl, they disappeared. The plate was always empty.

The prince, surprised, finally said to him: “I surrender. Where did you get this magic bowl from? The beggar explained that after losing his plate he went to the cemetery and cut part of the skull of one of the corpses to use it to collect alms: “This bowl is not magical, what happens is that the skull still retains some of the properties that it had when it was part of the man’s head; and the head is always insatiable, ”he told her.

The head always wants more … but what does it want?

Our society is totally governed by the mind and thought, which leads us to a constant insatiability that we try to calm through the accumulation of material goods, achievements and success, something that, as the story illustrates very well, never completely satisfies us. We are always eager to feel whole.

The psychiatrist and writer Claudio Naranjo assures us that we have four brains: one instinctive, another emotional, another rational, and a fourth spiritual. We have been parking this one because the mental brain is a predator that tends to occupy all the space, not letting any of the other three have too much space.

In our culture, as Nietzsche explained, “God is dead.” Spirituality has been associated with a certain moral repression that in the Western world seems outdated because of the Judeo-Christian dogmatism that we have suffered.

The accumulation of goods, achievements and successes do not satisfy us completely: feeling full has nothing to do with the material.

We believe that religion becomes a limitation to our freedom, since the indoctrination that we have experienced has been more based on social control, repression and the material aspects of this world than on the transmission of love and wisdom, and on the made to heed the call of the transcendent.

However, it is also true that we are currently looking for new formulas to cover this need to feel complete through different paths: the spiritual brain that Claudio Naranjo speaks of demands it from us. Or as the writer Ramón Andrés affirms : “The innate and constant tendency of the human being to contact the transcendent saves us from the ravages of the rational and individualistic mind, which alone would lead to annihilation”.

What do we call spirituality?

Most religions and wisdom traditions speak of a connection, possible and desirable, with the Whole that fills us and gives meaning to our lives. That is to say, perceive that dimension of ours that transcends us and that is greater than our individuality. There is also talk of a totality of which we are all part, with which we stop feeling alone.

That Whole receives different names depending on the religion or tradition from which it is named: God, Tao, the Essential, Mother Nature … In contrast to this spiritual dimension, we find ourselves much more often under the influence of the ego, that is, of the rational mind that absorbs us.

And it helps us to remember often that we are much more than what our ego likes to identify with. For example, we tend to identify ourselves with our name, profession or gender when these only constitute partial and limiting aspects of who we really are. It is difficult for us to find a way to overcome or transcend them, to feel that we are also that greater, although this has not been the case throughout the history of humanity. In fact, the dominance of the rational mind is relatively recent, even though it encompasses all of documented history.

How to live spirituality today?

Thinking about how we can live in spirituality today, we are faced with many options … which we must carefully consider. While it is true that there is no single proposal, it is also true that not everything works. Therein lies the difficulty. It is convenient to eliminate and discard the promises of “express lighting”, those that promise us that the path to connection does not require involvement and can be acquired as if it were a consumer good; here too the phenomenon of fashions and economic interests has arrived.

It is not about creating another ego, this time spiritual, or that this helps us to feed it more.

In fact, the West suffers an avalanche of proposals, mostly from the Eastern world, based more on superficial and aesthetic aspects than on the essentials.

A personal and unique path

Access to spirituality should meet some minimum requirements:

• Present it as a process. A sudden “connection” is not impossible, but it is highly unlikely. Interestingly, when it happens, it does so in an unpredictable way and can affect people who did not have that expectation or were in any search path.
• Open up to the wisdom of others. Most traditions collect how we can access spirituality thanks to the bridge that helps us build another person who has lived before that connection we seek and who is genuinely interested in facilitating others.
• Want to learn. It is essential to have an apprentice attitude, recognize our ignorance and approach spirituality with humility, no matter how much our ego boycotts us and repeats that we already know a lot.
• Find your own way. It is about acquiring a mindfulness before anything in which we are occupied or immersed. Spirituality, with its different names, phenomena or deities, is everywhere, hence the way to access it must be the most appropriate for each person.

In addition, it is convenient to eliminate what we think we already know in order to open ourselves to a new way of feeling and perceiving, both ourselves and the world. This Zen tale explains it very well:

A rich man gets admitted as a disciple of a teacher. In their first meeting, the teacher serves him tea, letting the liquid overflow widely from the cup. The guest points this out to him and then the teacher tells him: “Before anything new can enter you, you have to learn to empty yourself.”

We are born with an essence, in childhood we build an ego to be able to live and we spend a lifetime to deconstruct what has been built and return to the essence, but this time with awareness.

Meditation, yoga, fasting or nutritional care, art, contemplation, contact with nature, prayer, altruism … All these paths can open us to what transcends us, that we do not see, but we need to feel.