What do you see when you look at the sunset? When the sky turns to purple and deepening orange and the evening star casts a point of silvery light, what do you feel?
Some people say they see God. Others are arrested by beauty. Some people become wistful, thoughts turning to dreams and longing. And some have no words and just stand and stare.
What everyone experiences, if they stop and observe long enough, is a feeling of transcendence before the majesty of nature. The impact is registered deep, in the heart and soul. It’s something that cannot be erased by the banality of modern human society or its indifference to nature.
Transcendence is the beginning of spirituality, which is the direction of human attention to what is beyond surface material form. I believe we cannot live without some level of transcendent experience and when that experience is not validated, channelled or adequately held by a collective human culture, it will be expressed unconsciously.
Our modern Western society is based upon rationalist materialism. God is dead, but the deeply ingrained impulse to deify, to find transcendent meaning in the world, has simply enthroned Man as the new God. This is something about which Carl Jung wrote eloquently. Man (for despite the successes of feminism society is still patriarchal) is the centre of all our hopes on planet Earth, capable of virtually anything, and is the beginning and the end. The great American novelist and humanist John Steinbeck, in accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, said: “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man – and the Word is with Men.”
In common, everyday life there are many examples of misplaced soul energy. Celebrities and sports stars are worshipped as gods. A rampant consumerism replaces the full and grand experience of life with an endless stream of possessions and distractions. The media and popular culture parade a variety of heroes and villains on whom we project the emotional contents of our inner depths. Widespread depression signals a desire but inability among many people to find meaning.
Spirituality starts with a simple acknowledgement that we are more than just flesh and bones. We have rich and deep lives that go beyond our obvious material needs. I was really pleased to hear about philosopher Alain de Botton’s new book, Religion for Atheists, in which he proposes secular temples devoted to qualities like reflection and perspective. de Botton wants the insight, ritual and tradition that religion once carried in the West to reappear in ways more appropriate to the 21st century so as to animate people’s lives in depth.
Spirituality is fundamentally about connection. The deeper we engage with our own lives, the more we find that ultimately we are expressions of an essence that is the fabric of the universe. This can be called Life or God and has assumed a multitude of names in different cultures over millennia. By linking with this essence, we experience greater connectedness and meaning. We find ourselves at home in the universe and not just isolated individuals. This is not merely an abstract, cerebral exercise – a genuine spiritual orientation leads to concrete changes in a person’s life. An alignment towards soul inevitably means service in the world.
Two of my favourite authors, Jungian David Tacey and the American pagan activist Starhawk, finding inspiration from indigenous cultures, write about a spirituality of earth and place. I think the future collective spiritual awakening will come in the form of an earth-based spirituality. If we are to protect and heal the planet, we can’t be strangers in her midst. We need to learn her cycles, her moods and whims as they are revealed where we live. I am stunned by how little I and most other city dwellers know about the very ground we walk upon. For instance, what are the characteristics and properties of the trees in the neighbourhood? What is their energy? How do they affect us and we them on subtle levels? Building our knowledge and understanding from an intuitive and feeling point of view, as well as rationally, we radically rediscover ourselves as intimately connected to all life. We can’t but help then protect it, celebrate it, nurture it. As if the trees and the purple and orange sunset were us and we them.
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