@Anita

Some interesting points you raise there. I guess I believe spirituality to be based on personal experience. I used to think spirituality was synonymous with things like new-age, astrology, astral projection and mediumship – indeed I used to believe in those things whole-heartedly but I find the more I get older the more sceptical I am of such things. I like to think I’m “open-minded” but such things don’t really concern me much any more. I want to concentrate on the land of the living now.

As for the whole god thing – I often think about this quite a lot but I still class myself as agnostic. I wasn’t raised or brought up to have religious beliefs as such, but I guess about 50% of the time I do believe there is something else out there (god/supreme consciousness/the universal mind/whatever) and I believe that there is still a lot that human beings don’t have the answers to. I’m not entirely against the idea of god but at the same time I’m no longer the kind of person who could blindly accept and agree to believe in something else and live my life according to somebody else’s rules and expectations. Sometimes I do believe there’s something else, sometimes I don’t – I’m on the fence. I used to ponder and wonder when I was a teenager and it used to drive me mad – “Is there a God? What is the point to all of this?” but I guess over the past two years I’ve relinquished this need to know, this need to be in the loop. I guess not needing to know and not having answers became liberating for me in a weird kind of way. It’s the same with the afterlife – I finally admitted to myself a few years ago that I don’t really know what happens and I felt relieved. Hakuna matana and all that.

So what of this “personal spiritual experience” I mentioned in the first paragraph? The feeling of deep peace I get when I get to look at a beautiful sunset, or an overcast sky (I’m weird like that, don’t ask why). The feeling of wonder and wander I get when I visit a new place. The weekend I spent in Granada, Spain with just myself for company (I’ve always loved the idea of travelling alone). Looking at amazing artwork. Listening to music that really touches me and feeds my imagination. Playing with and talking to my pet cat. When the internal white noise is turned off. All of those mundane things are as close to a spiritual experience as I can imagine.

But I do believe it’s possible to be “spiritual” without being religious, or without believing in any kind of higher power. Not knowing the answers is liberating and enlightening for me (I’m still human and prone to making silly mistakes).

@Barry

I totally agree with you on this one – spirituality is an individual experience. Like I said in my description of what I entail as being “a spiritual experience” – putting labels onto it, trying to put it into words, trying to put it into a box…Experiences are different for everybody – what a person believes to be a spiritual experience will probably be different to what somebody else believes their spiritual experience to be – we all experience different things and it’s difficult if not impossible to put into words. When leaders label themselves as experts or giving off the impression that they know everything and speaking with absolute conviction that their truth is the only truth, they are putting themselves on a pedestal.

Maybe I have never experienced what a true, proper spiritual experience should be – the examples I gave are just examples of times where I can truly feel calm and peace without internal dialogue and thought processes, that’s to me the best I can think of when describing a spiritual experience. Maybe other people would describe spiritual experiences as having some kind of trippy altered state of consciousness and perception. I don’t know.

How would you describe a spiritual experience? Has what you have described ever happened or occurred to you?

Joe