Spirituality is a progressive awakening to the inner reality, which is
other than our mind, emotions and body. It is an inner aspiration to
know, to enter into contact and union with a greater reality beyond,
which also pervades the universe and dwells in us, and, as a result of
that aspiration, a turning, a conversion, a birth into a new being
(Ghose, 1997).
Although the above sentence belongs to Plato, it is directly connected
with the wisdom of Heraclitus (c540-480 BC) as expressed in his famous
Panta Rei: everything is in flux. Contemporary physics entirely agrees
with this Heraclitus; from the scale of quarks to the scale of stars
everything seems to vibrate, move and flow.
Almost a century before Plato, Heraclitus said: "Upon those who step
into the same river different and ever different waters flow down”:
despite the changes (different waters), the unity (the river's flow)
persists (Heraclitus, 2001). It is the motion, the changes, the
dynamics, through which the unity of the universe manifests. The
recognition of the existential unity in dynamics is an essential
component of human spirituality and ethics of all times.
"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part
limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and
feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical
delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison,
restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few
persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by
widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and
the whole nature in its beauty" (Einstein, 1993).
By understanding that everything is united with everything else through
a never-ceasing motion sustained by universal forces and energies,
which
keep the totality of existence - the wholeness of the all-embracing web
of existential forms, phenomena and processes, - we are making our
first
step towards fulfilment of the task that Einstein speaks about in the
above-quoted text. The motion is the vehicle, which the Universal needs
in order to realize itself - its limitless self-organizing power -
through the Individual.
As far as the existential web has ever been, one can conclude that
every manifested form has an infinite past based on infinity of
relationships, which cannot exclude anything that existed, exists, or
is
liable to come into existence in future. This stream of thoughts has a
strong spiritual connotation, as it reveals humans' interconnectedness
with one another and with every other form, phenomenon, and process
through motion: changes, evolution, transformation.
According to the oldest sacred text of the ancient Hindus, Rig Veda,
(written in its present form between 1500 and 1000 BC), the existence
'started' with motion activated by “impregnators” and “powers”:
"The non-existent was not; the existence was not at that time. The
atmosphere was not, nor the heavens which are beyond. What was
concealed? Where? In whose protection? Was it water? An unfathomable
abyss?... What was below, what was above? There were impregnators,
there
were powers: powers below, impulses above" (Diniger, 1982).
Powers and impulses ‘cooked’ the primordial soup on our planet and
extracted out of it the first proteins and then the first cells and the
first simplest organisms. After innumerable loops of the spiral of life
- a spiral full of spontaneous emergences, bifurcations and
transformations - the humans appeared. So we all were interconnected as
potentialities in the common source of the flow of life on the planet,
and we continue to be interconnected through this flow: we contribute
to
the changes of this flow, and its changes change us also.
Human beings’ interconnectedness does not mean sameness at individual
level; every individual has unique ‘motion’, a unique path towards
fulfilment of his or her urge to comprehend the Universal. The
differences between the individuals, their uncommon singularities, feed
the integrity of the web of their interrelationships and interactions.
Each individual singularity reflects the urge of the Universal to
realize a specific aspect of its infinite variety through the
self-organizing dynamics of the Individual. Unfortunately, the Social
obstructs the realization of this urge: along the whole history of the
human society there have been always social forces trying persistently
to kill the uniqueness of the Individual by imposing social orders
based
on oppression, exploitation and violence.
"If we fall only by a hair's breadth into the error of supposing that
'we' and 'they' are different things, not one, or supposing that all
things are the same, not different, weariness and envy and shame and
fear succeed one another in an endless train" (Zen).
You are welcomed to read the rest of
the chapter in the book. Please, be so kind to tell us your e-mail,
and we'll inform you immediately after the book is published. Thank
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