Spirituality Guide

Intolerance of people with different lifestyles, beliefs, and any other little difference seems to be running rampant in today’s world. While fear and persecution all of all that is ‘different’ to those in power certainly isn’t anything new, it’s sad to see so many people haven’t learned over the centuries.

Even so-called spiritual ‘gurus’ who have claimed to have found a higher path beyond the structure of major religions sometimes gather together to form elitist groups who look disdainfully at ‘the unenlightened population’.

As far as I am concerned, if you have that sort of elitism in your heart, then you are not on a true path of spirituality.

Before you start calling me a lovey dovey tree hugging pacifist (smiling), I am not here to preach at you about loving everyone and every thing no matter what they do to you.

In the world we live in, I believe acceptance is more powerful (and more reasonable to expect of people) than forced love. I don’t believe most of us know enough of what love is to ‘love thy neighbor’. Acceptance, however, is a step towards love and is something we can most definitely learn.

Given how similar we all are – we’re all human, whether we decide to have sex with a man or a woman, believe in God or Allah or Amun-Ra, or believe everything has a spirit – it’s not exactly a surprise that we point out the differences to distinguish ourselves from the group.

However, using differences as a way to persecute each other is where we stray from the path of light and acceptance.

A good first step for finding your spiritual path is to identify your prejudices and examine why you have them. Perhaps in examining them you can find and root out false believes and taught prejudices.

“You’re either with us or against us.”

How many times have you heard that phrase?

I said in the last post: “Shades of grey belong to the open mind, while the closed mind faces only black and white. The closed mind may have a simpler and more organized existence, but it will never see all the true beauty the world and life can show it.”

We are living in a world where it increasingly becomes ‘if you’re not for, you’re against’, leaving little to no room to abstain or find a better way of doing things. While abstaining is often the path of not getting emotionally involved (and thus not hurt) in anything, but having that option is still something that needs to be respected.

A world of ‘for or against’ is a close minded world that does not acknowledge differences but seeks to destroy them. ‘For or against’ is how people get other people to blindly follow things that they might not agree with.

Better to serve the wolves than die with the sheep?

What can be done about it? That’s up to you.

If you so choose, you can go on your spiritual path to find your personal shades of grey. You can also spread the word about what you have found.

Or, you can submit.

The choice, as it has ever been, is yours. But as we walk as a race more towards ‘for or against’ it becomes more of a requirement for you to take action to not submit to your other human beings.

We live in a world where many people, sometimes even without realizing it, will take advantage of good intentions. That’s why it’s up to you to explore the spiritual path. The help and well meaning of other people will only get you so far.

Find your shades of grey and stand up to keep them.

Perhaps it is the never-ending questioning of what is truly right and wrong that has brought about the New Age movements and furthered spiritual studies. Or perhaps it is the other way around.

While spirituality, finding Self, and seeking Truth are certainly not new to more of the eastern philosophies, we are at a point where the ‘people of the west’ are exploring more into these subjects.

Why I say perhaps one has caused the other or vice versa is because when a person begins on the path of finding spirituality and self Truths, the journey will be filled with questions. It is very possible you will question every piece of your knowledge.

In questioning, you will find answers. You will often find even more questions, though, as frustrating as that is. But it is in the questioning that we find shades of grey. It is there we realize the beauty and complexity of even ‘simple’ life.

You are reading this post for the first time in this moment. Now that moment is gone. You can read the post again, but never again can you live in the moment that you first read this post.

Simple, and yet complex. Why can’t we go back? Why do humans have a longing to go back? Is there any way to stop the process of life? Is moving ever forward the true process of life?
You begin to see what I mean about questions.

The path to inner peace can be a complicated one but so fulfilling. The path to true spirituality and acceptance begins with an open mind. That is why shades of grey are so important.

Shades of grey belong to the open mind, while the closed mind faces only black and white. The closed mind may have a simpler and more organized existence, but it will never see all the true beauty the world and life can show it.

I mentioned yesterday that in the modern world (and in history as well) situations involving right and wrong are almost never black and white.

Take, for instance, killing. There are still rampant arguments today about whether or not the death penalty is morally okay to do.

Moving beyond the death penalty, we have people who kill each other for various reasons. Is an abused spouse who kills his/her spouse in self defense any less wrong than a mentally ill person who kills a random stranger?

‘Yes! Of course!’ you might say. But the spouse knows s/he is killing his/her spouse whereas the mentally ill person does not hold the same concepts of life and death that we do.

I’m not trying to start a debate about who is more justified, if killing is ever right, if ignorance is an excuse, or the other arguments you could get out of what I have said so far.

I am making the point that even in something that means so much to us – life and death – there is no black and white. Good, bad, right, wrong…these are all words that are filtered through the censors we have developed in our mind thanks to family, religion, media, and other social influences.

If you would like two book recommendations that will have you thinking about what is truly ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, then I recommend you read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Speaker of the Dead. The second book especially (which you should only read after the first) deals the subjects of life and death and human beliefs surrounding them.

*Picture by Justified

Yesterday I went shopping for a few storage things. The store was going to close soon, so I hurried to the cash register to check out.

When I entered the isle, I saw a fifty dollar note on the floor. The cashier wasn’t looking for it and hadn’t noticed it. I looked at it for a moment, picked it up, and then handed it to the cashier telling him that I had found it on the floor.

I later told my husband about the fifty and received a reaction I didn’t expect at all. He told me I should have kept it. There was no one in the isle to identify as the person who had dropped it, it wouldn’t go to the cashier, and the store would simply absorb it without a second thought.

But… But…

He was right. The store would not miss or love that fifty, and my husband and I could certainly use the extra money. The greatest good for the greatest amount of people would have been to keep it, but it didn’t belong to me.

The definition of moral is “concerned with principles of right and wrong or conforming to standards of behavior and character based on those principles”.

But what is right and wrong? Would it have been wrong for me to keep the money?

It’s not always a clear matter of black and white to know what is right and what is wrong.

More to come later…