As more humans turn towards spirituality for answers, it is essential that we investigate all paradigms and perspectives to assess if they serve us going forward. To explore if they truly answer the depth, breadth, and scope of what we are. To inquire into whether they meet our current needs as a species. Do these models grow us forward, into a more evolved humanity, or hold us back? At this point of desperation, one where we are at a collective and planetary crossroads—it is particularly essential that we look closely at those models that distinguish our spirituality from our humanness.
Since time immemorial, spirituality has been characterized—and not only by mystics, saints, and cave-dwellers—as a way of being that is above and beyond our ‘faulty’ humanness, and certainly separate from many of the chaotic and unpleasant aspects of our life experience. It is clear that these paradigms are no longer serving us, and will not be our answer or our remedy. It has been my revelation—through extensive self-exploration and truth-telling—that if we can come to embrace our spiritual life as indistinguishable from every aspect of our human life—and that includes the healing of our traumatic material—we will begin to organically develop practices that will both serve us, and save us, going forward. As with any of the social structures that influence us, the more narrow the model, the more imprisoned our consciousness and limited our possibilities. The more expansive the model, the more liberated our consciousness and limitless our possibilities.
At the end of the day, when all the other debates have been resolved, we will be left with the one that threads through them all: Human Consciousness. What does it mean to be wholly human and to live a truly spiritual life? In what ways are we the same, and in what ways are we uniquely constituted and intended? What is an inclusive, wholly integrated consciousness? If we continue to limit our visions of possibility to compartmentalized spiritualities, we will most assuredly obstruct our collective expansion. We will imprison ourselves in our own alienation. And many more of us will be led astray, walking a path that is not truly our own. To avoid this, we must embrace a conscious scrutinization of that which is said to be ‘spiritual.’ Nothing accepted at face value, no stone left unturned.