@jody Lee
Maybe I haven’t explained myself well…….The stars died so you could be here today.
I think you have just about answered your own question. But once again we are down to the meaning of words. Let me offer something as a starting point to reach for a workable definition.
Spiritual is a general term people use to express their reaction when they contemplate the natural world. We can be overawed by how incomprehensible the vastness of the Universe is yet we have an ability to understand so much of its workings, how it began and how it will most likely end. The same sensation can be felt when we study the world at the atomic scale. We have written out the genetic code of “how to build a human” and discovered that the DNA we possess is common to all life on Earth and in many cases almost identical to ours. The atoms that combine to create life from its instructions did indeed come from the death of stars.
We are not separate from that which we observe. We are part of the Universe, not spectators sitting “in the middle” of it. We are part of what makes up the Universe, just as the stars and other planets are part of it. We are all part of its contents, and like everything else, just matter and energy. We are a species that is compelled to want to understand things. It is what makes us human. It is how “we roll”. It is Science that supplies us with our current understandings of the natural world and our place in it.
I am talking of the natural world and how as we are part of that natural world. These sensations of awe and wonder are entirely natural human experiences. There is nothing “spiritual” about them. They are manifestations of how our brain reacts to the stimulus of the appreciation of art, beauty, natural wonders, etc. An appreciation of nature is not spiritual, it is natural. It all happens in our brains. There is no duality of mind and body. The soul does not exist. Spiritualism, like theology, is the study of nothing. It confuses people as it tries to add a sense of the supernatural to our natural sense of wonder of the natural world we exist in. There is nothing supernatural only that which is not yet fully understood. We can marvel at what we do understand because of the very fact that as mere mortals, we have managed to understand so much of it.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
T.S. Eliot
PS. I like your reference to stars. I have a tattoo of an exploding star on my arm with “I am Star stuff” under it, written as a protein chain.
PopeBeanie 1 year, 12 months ago.
Belle Rose.
