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We offer coaching and mentorship on enjoying ongoing spiritual
experiences,
experiences that we often call Lasting Happiness, Integrity ... or Soul.
Science, Happiness & Spiritual Development
People in our scientific society read and write more
about spiritual life, spiritual growth and spiritual development than about
science. Yet, although most people consider spiritual development to be
important, our definitions of spirituality, spiritual practices and spiritual
relationships are often different.
Your sense of spirituality affects how you live your life -
and how you express love. Perhaps your
relationship behavior most strongly reveals your spiritual development. You
expose your
spirituality in your happiness, fulfillment and integrity. These are relationship
qualities - not individual skills.
A spiritual path requires spiritual coaching; with mentors and
teachers. As spiritual coaches can only assist people who know less than they do
- some guidelines about how to recognize who is spiritually advanced or
spiritually developed or even spiritually healthy would be useful.
Let's start with spirituality.
Spiritual
Coaching for Soul Mates .
Is our Soulwork "New Age"?
What is Spirituality?
Spirituality appears to be an integral part of all
human cultures. Spiritual development may be regarded as connection to something
external to the self, or as an internal experience, or both. At its most basic
it can be called luck. A lone survivor of a disaster may be called
holy or chosen.
Spirituality is often defined as reverence for
sacred objects, learning holy chants and special songs, repeating body movements
and reciting dogma. If so, spirituality might then be measured in terms
of ability to repeat chants, copy body movements or remember dogma.
Spirituality may be perceived as success
without effort, in which unseen forces are assumed to cluster around
certain individuals. Some people measure spirituality by unearned material
success. Others by the profundity of their statements, e.g. "If you're
here and now you're nowhere."
Spirituality includes unusual varieties of human experience,
including an ability to create relationships with what are often called gods,
spirits, ancestors, or other non-physical realities. Spiritual evolution can
then be assessed as ability to channel esoteric
information.
Spirituality includes approaching external spiritual
agencies through their symbolic manifestations - interacting with perceived
spiritual agencies with fear, respect, gratitude, or reverence. Spirituality may
be assessed in terms of ability to bribe spiritual agencies,
evidenced by good luck for the community.
Spiritual Experience
Spirituality includes descriptions of experiences.
Obsession with sacred images, chants, mythic language, incense and ritual
can provide religious experiences.
Shared experiences both prove a dogma and form community bonds. Through
our Soulwork we offers experiences of connectedness that can survive death of
the body.
The validity of spiritual experience
is easily questioned. Similar experiences of a relationship with an esoteric
agency may indicate a saint in one culture - and a schizophrenic in another.
Experiences following the ingestion of psychotropic substances may indicate
the presence of the spiritual in one culture - and the absence of spirituality
in another.
The qualities of a spiritual experience vary
between cultures. It appears that many practices taken for granted in Western
civilization were once "spiritual experiences" of the
highest order. These once-spiritual experiences include: writing,
spelling, mental arithmetic, planning and guesstimating.
Dr William James, in his lectures:
Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), described four qualities
of mystical experiences. Dr. James said: "These four
characteristics are sufficient to mark out a group of states of
consciousness peculiar enough to ... be called the
mystical group."
- Ineffable: cannot be described or appropriately
verbalized
- Noetic: deep insights into non-intellectual
truth or reality
- Transient: short-term - not all-of-life
- Passive: not willfully created
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