The Spiritual Self

 

“You were born with your spirituality… Your spiritual self was born in a dream and when you dream, you are going home.” These are two powerful sentences and two transforming concepts from Thomas Moore’s new book, A Religion of One’s Own (2014). In this book he offers the idea that we do not need to go chasing after what we already have. We just need to open up to it by scraping the junk of our ego-selves off the cluttered desks of our mind (my image) and behold it, behold us as we really are. As I wrote some 35 plus years ago as the title of a meditation manual, Everything Worth Being You Already Are. However, back then this was more a platitude than a reality for me, more a hope than an actuality. Like everything else I had to grow into it.

At that time of my life I was learning new things about my profession and about myself and tended to follow the teachers I found at least until I felt that I had learned what I needed from them and moved on. I was absorbing new ideas at an incredible rate but had as yet to fully understand or integrate them into my life. Basically I hadn’t made the ideas my own, probably because they hadn’t come from or through me. Like Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat the Andrew Lloyd Webber 1970’s musical about Joseph in the Book of Genesis I was just tacking on beautiful patches to an outer garment given to me and reflecting nothing of the inner self.

Over time with the power of the soul to express itself through and in spite of me I began to turn inward only to find that all the teachings had been inside all along even though I had not recognized them as such.

Sometimes I still don’t look within for that wisdom that’s always there, that’s usually because I can get stuck in my ego-self and want what I want, when I want it, and damned the consequences. But it’s there urging me to transcend the self-serving ego and helps me to live beyond the pseudo-myth of my ego-self and get in touch with my real self that I now know is there anytime I’m open enough to recognize it.

It’s always a struggle because deep down this limitless power of creativity is quiet and subtle in nature and often gets lost in the noise of the everyday when I’m not paying attention.

Peace be with you.