Spirituality

I find that I lack a certain coherence in a particular arena of my life. I sometimes experience very profound moments, and I don’t know how to qualify or categorize them alongside the quotidian things I experience otherwise. Sweating profusely all over my bike while zipping along smooth single-track in forested mountains in Vermont. Looking up at the night sky on a windswept night in Southern Australia and seeing all the stars, with the faint glow of the Milky Way as backdrop. Listening to Loreena McKennit just after twilight on a crisp Autumn day as a teenager. Looking deep into my sweetheart’s eyes while we make love, and feeling like our souls are intertwined.

These moments are also characterized by feeling a deep connection to the world or other people. Sometimes this connection feels diffuse like when I feel like I understand the people around me better without necessarily knowing them. Sometimes I feel like a miniscule speck of dust in the midst of some vast space, like when I stare out across inconceivable vistas in the American West, or when I see Jupiter, Mars, Saturn and Venus tracing out a bright arc across the twilight sky. Other times I feel tiny in the face of the course of history, like when I saw that sundial walking around Istanbul. Sometimes the connection I feel is specific to an individual or small group; here I feel an almost tangible tendril reaching from my heart to theirs, binding us in mutual understanding and love.

I think the thing that unites all these experiences is that they feel like they are somehow greater than the sum of feelings and sensations arising in my body in a given moment. It’s as if my body and mind can’t contain everything happening within so the boundary that normally separates me from everything else temporarily dissolves or becomes permeable. My perception and sense of self temporarily extend beyond the limits of my body, encompassing more space or time. This experience isn’t a greedy one in which my self is attempting to overtake other peoples’ perception, but rather it is grounded in mutual consent and curiosity. When I feel connected to others, it feels as if their self is encompassing me as well, like two soap bubbles that merge together as they float lazily through the air. Obviously this expansive feeling isn’t permanent; sometimes it lasts just a split second.

How does this all relate to spirituality? The expansiveness of self that I’m talking about here is greater than me. Perhaps its just an artifact of my psyche, but I like to think that some other mechanism is at play here. What exactly that mechanism is, I don’t know. I guess from some biological perspective its just neurons firing in my brain, but that same brain finds that explanation deeply unsatisfying. I don’t willingly ascribe to any religious or spiritual dogmas¹ so I feel like I don’t have any vocabulary to describe the nature of this mechanism. I don’t have any framework in which to situate the types of experiences I’ve been describing. I grew up going to church, but we talked very little of anything mystical. Rather, we spent a lot of time establishing a sort of moral framework by which to live our lives. Perhaps they left the mystical stuff to the adults, but I stopped actively practicing Christianity when I was about 14 or 15².

At the end of the day, I feel confused and somewhat adrift when I think about these beautiful, profound moments. Perhaps I should just enjoy the brief moment of expansiveness that they entail, but part of me wants to understand how it works. Part of me wants to know if its possible to tap into that expansiveness at will. This is appealing to me not just because that expansiveness brings about a sense of calm and peace, but because it facilitates deeper understanding of the people and world around me by attenuating the powerful reality filter that is my ego. I feel like I’m able to be a better friend, son, brother, lover, and colleague when I’m able to disengage from my ego. I feel like I’m able to be more content in my life.