“Serving the Truth becomes our life instead of just an isolated event. It takes the abstractness out of spirituality. Thatâs the opportunity of real spirituality: to be in service to the silence of the heart.”
~Adyashanti
âSpiritualityâ is a tricky word, even though itâs commonly used in our culture. To me, itâs a vague term that leaves me wondering what it actually means.
And if a word is open to interpretation, there is room for the mind to chew endlessly on its meaning. âWhat do you think spirituality means?â âWhat do you believe?â âAre you a spiritual person?â
These are fine questions for conversation, but they donât help us to actually understand the magnificent and all-encompassing nature of life itself. And they donât free us from the prison of the belief that weâre limited and separate.
For me, spirituality refers to our natural state that we experience directly and not through constricting mental beliefs or concepts. Knowing the endless peace beyond peace, itâs our natural state to be happy, relaxed, and at ease. Itâs natural to feel whole and calmâand to experience an expanded sense of well-being beyond any learned ideas about ourselves. No longer trapped in the contents of a stressful mind, we realize weâre free of the pain of feeling separate from life.
What is the spiritual path? Itâs an ongoing invitation to come home to the truth of ourselves. Over and over, we let go of our interest in the content of the mind and deepen into the realization of boundless presence here and now.
Someone recently asked me how to stop disturbing thoughts about a painful past. And the truth is that we canât stop thoughts from appearing.
But the essence of this question is really, âHow can I be happy?â Isnât that the question we all have? Donât we all want to be happy?
Happiness isnât âout thereâ and available at some future time. The path from suffering to peace opens into our present moment experience to see what may be masking the realization of the truth of who we are.
This path takes us into the stories we take to be true about ourselves, other people, our past, and the worldâand to the realization that they are a false description of the reality of things.
It takes us into our judgments, expectations, and ways that we resistâand shows us how these arbitrary thought patterns that define the personal self are what make us suffer.
And it takes us into the murky stew of our emotions to liberate the life force from its trap of anxiety and lack.
We make the stunning and utterly remarkable discovery that the happiness/peace/sense of being okay weâve been longing for has been buried within us all along. It comes to light once the structures that make up our personal identities fall apart…like a house of cards in the wind.
What we might call the spiritual path is an expansion beyond all objects of the material world. We live in the world, but we take it lightly because we know itâs not the absolute truth of who we are.
Who we are is the formless open space thatâs infinitely alive and aware. And knowing this, we have the amazing insight that we can actually live according to this truthâsurrendered, getting out of the way and letting things unfold, intimate with all things, noticing love everywhere.
Call it spirituality, happiness, consciousness, the ultimate realityâwords only point to what can only be known in direct experience. And this is the invitation: to turn toward ourselves, to be utterly still, and to know that weâre one with the vibration of life.