My friend – author, teacher – Lara Owen posed a question in her blog today: What is spirituality?
Good question.
To pose the question is to acknowledge the problem. The problem is the perception that our Being-ness is separate. To think that spirituality is a separate “thing”, a category that we can focus on 30 minutes in the morning when we meditate, or once a week when we go to Temple or Church, or in that “click-moment” when we donate to charity, is to fall into the illusion that parts of us are separate from other parts, and that parts of our living are separate from all of creation.
Spirituality is the great flowing river of All – we can tune in and pay attention to it, or not …. Either way, we’re IN the river.
River
Rabbi Gershon Winkler titled one of his books The Magic in the Ordinary. The title alone is a teaching about tuning in to the river. Where do we put our attention? Do we look within, and dive deeply into our moments infusing them with intent, or do we lose ourselves in the surfaces of the things of our making? As Proust wrote: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” How do we learn to have new eyes?
One of the ways that I teach new eyes is by dreaming. To dream is to be present to our experiencing. It is to dive more deeply into the Self, and into the relationship we have as Self to the great river. We dream all the time – you’re dreaming now as you are reading this. Learning to be conscious to our all-the-time dreaming is learning to be conscious to our experiencing, which is to see with new eyes.
Be sure to check out Lara’s blog. And for more on dreaming, take a look at some of the videos on my video page.
Happy dreaming!
