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You're making a great deal of unfounded assumptions when you suggest that I haven't invested any personal effort into investigating various spiritual claims. I spent nearly two decades of my life - from 13 to my early thirties - exploring religious and spiritual claims in great detail. What I concluded that it was just so much mental masturbation.
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You keep mentioning this 'spiritual path', yet you haven't defined what that is. It suggests that it's a path that a person's 'spirit' is on, but what exactly are you claiming this 'spirit' is? What verifiable evidence do you have that any such 'spirit' actually exists? Another example of putting the cart before the horse. FIRST you need to verify that this 'spirit' exists and THEN you can propose what path this 'spirit' should take.
Please try to distinguish my universal statements (which apply to everyone) and not infer that I am specifically talking about you, even though I am responding to your posts. I have made no assumptions about your own personal experiences here. However, things you write do provide clues about what you believe and what you might have experienced to get there. I am not the least bit surprised that you have investigated a lot.
So let me elaborate a little on what I specifically believe about spirituality. I do believe in absolute truth, and I do believe in an objective reality, but I do not view the physical world in the same way that most people do. Most people think their consciousness is a by-product of their physical brain. The electric signals passing among the neurons are what generates the consciousness. To that I say, no, that really is putting the cart in front of the horse. What we are is the consciousness itself. The spiritual energy that enlivens all things is spirit, and what we refer to as the soul in a human being is merely a unit of awareness. Reality and causality proceed from soul (spirit) to the mind and then to the body, not in the reverse direction. We believe something to be the case, we imagine that it is so, then our articulatory loop in our brain puts words to it which the ordinary mind of most people interprets as their thoughts. Most people believe they are thinking things and then they act upon those thoughts. It's actuality it's quite the reverse. There is a universal entity (not the true God but the god of most religions) which creates the entirety of this mental world. What you think of as physical objects are just thought forms which are vibrating slowly enough to gain physical presence. Instead of states of matter, I would prefer to refer to everything as states of spirit. Thought forms are a state of spirit which is vibrating slower than spirit itself in this description.
What are some of the practical ramifications of these beliefs, and how do they give me predictive power over my future observations? Well, consider what people are like. From my perspective, the humans I have encountered represent a very large range of levels in consciousness. Some people are barely able to survive, and are focused on survival thoughts like securing enough food, having sex, and living off the approval of others (other people's attention energy). In fact, most everyone passes through this stage within a given lifetime (as children) on their way to resuming where they were in consciousness in their previous lifetime. After this survival stage is an emotional stage, and in this mode people are focused on things like romantic love, family, and faith-based religions where they define their spiritual experiences by emotional reveries (singing in church, "feeling the holy spirit", etc.) After this stage is a mental / intellectual stage. A lot of philosophers, religious scholars, and scientists occupy this band of consciousness. They believe in the scientific method, and try to keep an open mind about everything, not committing to any knowledge unless doing so confers some kind of predictive advantage over future observations. Then comes a spiritual stage when one becomes tired with the mundane reality of being a human being and they start asking things like, "Is that it? is there nothing beyond wealth, sex, fame, accomplishment, and philosophy? What is the point of life?" With me so far?
Survival > emotional > mental > spiritual. I could subdivide this into stages but this is already going to be a very long post.
I have observed people for a long time and I see people in all of these various stages I have mentioned. From what I can see, most people don't really move much very far forward upon reaching adulthood. They get jobs, maybe get married, have some kids, and perhaps when they get older they ponder some of the big questions but for the most part they just wait to die, not knowing what happens in the great beyond. Here is where I make a plug for the existence of reincarnation:
if there were no such thing as reincarnation, it would be difficult to explain why there are people in all different stages of the spiritual journey, despite so little progress being generally made by an individual in any given lifetime.
OK, with regards to actual spiritual experiences, I too have investigated the major world religions and I am by profession a scientist. I have at least a university level of understanding of math, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and computer science. I have studied world history, and I have pored over various texts that seemed to have anything to do with spirituality. And after this study, I identified an underlying set of themes that all of the great masters seem to be saying. Let's just summarize so as not to put anyone to sleep:
1) A person is composed of several different parts. People think of themselves as a single human being, but actually they have several "bodies": physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Each part demands different things of you at different times. Your physical body might be hungry if you tummy is empty. Your emotional body might be distraught if your lover leaves you. Your mental body might experience cognitive dissonance if a previously entrenched believe conflicts with new data. Each time something happens, most people think that is them. No. You are not your experiences.
You are the consciousness that is having the experience.
2) This leads us to another common theme I have identified: The soul is the central reality of existence. Nothing else can be confirmed except that you are having an experience. The true nature of reality is not accurately reflected by the physical senses. What you think of as the world is nothing but shadows on the wall. Ancient texts refer to self-realization, and this is when the soul realizes that it is not the physical body, emotional body, or the mental body. It is not memory, sensations, feelings, thoughts, or any kind of experiences. It is the one having the experiences.
Self-realization is the realization that one is the soul.
3) What is spirit? Spirit is the stuff everything is made out of, from couches to thoughts to concepts, emotions, and consciousness itself. Spiritual texts refer to the light and the sound, where light is the mental lattice that comprises the physical, emotional, and mental planes of existence. Sound is the vibration of the divine spirit, and this sound can actually be heard if a spiritual disciple carries out certain disciplines. Taoism refers to it as the Tao (or Dao, depending on your Chinese transliteration system). In Sanskrit it is refered to as the Shabda. Christians refer to it as the Holy Spirit. Certain other beliefs refer to it as the melody of the spheres. The Sound cannot be directly sensed by the mind. Only through contemplation / meditation when the mind is still can one hear the Sound.
4) What is God? God is the unifying conscious of all spirit. But unlike what most religions teach, human beings do not talk directly to god. An analogy helps here. I have a daughter, and before she could talk she could only cry and reach for things she wanted. She didn't really know who I was. Now she can talk and we can communicate, but there is still a lot she does not understand. It's like that between us and God. We can see a tiny portion of God's universal body, and being soul we are ourselves a part of spirit, but there is little to no direct communication. Why is it this way? I don't know exactly, but spiritual texts suggest that this is due to the immaturity of the soul. Quite frankly, we are too simple and too distracted to be worthy of speaking to God directly. So God sticks us into a sort of kindergarten for souls and this is what we know of as the human experience.
God realization is when we graduate from this kindergarten, when we have become one with God (again). Just knowing or thinking about it is not enough.
5) The human experience is a grand cycle of reincarnation where we live many, many lifetimes. Each lifetime has a primary purpose, and that is merely to teach us cause and effect. Human ideas about good and bad are largely inaccurate. From a spiritual perspective, the highest good is focusing the attention energy at the third eye waiting for the spiritual master to open the door and let us in. Bad is all the distractions in life that prevent this from occurring. We could talk about anything in the human experience, it's all just pleasure and pain that distracts us from concentrating our attention at the third eye.
My point is, ancient spiritual texts like the tao te ching (dao de jing) are full of truth but hardly anyone understands them. They are at once much, much simpler than intellectual scholars think but at the same time completely out of the reach of the mind. The problem is not one of intelligence, but rather one of identity. Everyone who thinks they are a mind is doomed to continue reincarnating until one day one is tired of thinking about it and actually commits to a spiritual life.
This is the "faith" I have been referring to. It is not some irrational belief in an arbitrary concept like "the Earth is flat." My faith is my willingness to devote myself to my spiritual practice in order to see if it will yield the results I want. And it has. There are secondary effects as well. I find that I am much more patient now. I rarely get angry at anyone anymore. I am now usually stronger than my mind's obsessive desires for things like chocolate, sex, video games, gossip, other people's approval, etc. I feel a great deal of love and I now realize that the true core of all spirituality is simply Love. Not the co-dependent, needy, conditional love that most people think of when they see the word. Spiritual love, love of spirit and God and his creation.
I'm very sorry this is so long. Without explaining at least this minimal amount, the opportunity for misunderstanding will be quite large.
TLDR: to achieve spiritual "enlightenment", one needs a true teaching, sincerity, willingness to learn, clear thinking, and devotion. Without all of these ingredients, one can spend as much time as one likes but direct communion with God will be forever out of reach.