Exploring Deeper Levels of Spirituality
Sometime back I purchased a book called Spirituality Simplified by Jeff Maziarek. It’s a wonderful book that addresses several issues that may be puzzling to a new spiritual seeker, but it also includes numerous good thoughts for those who have been on the spiritual pathway for several years.
One of the parts of the book that I especially liked was Jeff’s discussion at the beginning about the importance of being open-minded as you strive towards a deeper spiritual experience.
To me, this is where many of us get tripped up. We are so attached to our core beliefs that we reject anything that doesn’t agree with those beliefs.
We refuse to ‘open our mind’ to new ideas, new principles, new information. We continue to cling to the old ideas, philosophies, and viewpoints about ‘religion’ that we learned and absorbed throughout our lifetime and reject anything that doesn’t fall in line with our personal outlook on spiritual matters.
As a result, by choosing to remain in our ‘cocoon of comfort,’ we don’t allow ourselves to learn about and explore deeper levels of spirituality which, in turn, hinders our spiritual growth.
On the About page of this blog, I have a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) that includes these words: “As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
In other words, we cannot unequivocally know that our way of thinking about things is the correct way … the only way.
I believe once we accept this and open our mind to spiritual concepts and principles that may lie outside our comfort zone, the Universe will lovingly guide us towards levels of spirituality that we’ve never experienced before.
“To me, this is where many of us get tripped up. We are so attached to our core beliefs that we reject anything that doesn’t agree with those beliefs.”
That is so difficult to do. Our paradigms control our life. It usually takes a significant emotional event to cause us to challenge our existing paradigm.
Over 25 years I taught thousands of participants in something called continuous improvement mentality and I think about five admitted they had a closed mind. That is less than one tenth of one per cent.
Interesting to me was that those that admitted they had a closed mind were the most open in the seminar for giving change strategies being taught to them an opportunity. Go figure.
I pray everyday that my mind will be open for that days learning experiences but I suspect I pass up 99.9 of those learning opportunities.
I think the human species has only touched the surface of taking advantage of the learning opportunities that are presented to us each day.
“The Universe will lovingly guide us towards levels of spirituality that we’ve never experienced before.” This appears to be so; the universe is always every moment guiding us to spiritual perfection. Christ consciousness??????????
We hang on to our ignorance like it is a sacred child.