A New Spirituality

A new approach to spirituality is required today. One that has two equally important strands to it, strands that reflect the world as it is and the world as it is becoming by which I mean the eternal verities of God and the evolutionary changes of Man.  Both are needed if we are to move forward as individuals and as humanity.

It is no longer enough to follow authority, either old or new, conservative or progressive. We must find the truth within ourselves so that we start to become it and do not remain outside it.  We are not expected to be passive subjects of the divine any more but should actively cooperate with it. It is not enough to obey, we must know and for this imagination and intuition need to be developed. These are the creative power and the inner knowledge of the soul. A spiritual person who lacks these has no contact with the soul and is therefore a spiritual person in name only, an appreciator of art perhaps but not an artist. It is spiritual artists we are called upon to become now. This is in line with the unfoldment of human consciousness which gradually transforms an individual from the state of passive ignorance to that of a god, a developed son or daughter of God, able to work with or even beside the Father.

However, the development of imagination, the creative principle, on its own is not sufficient. That may take us beyond the limitations of the material world but it will not take us to the spiritual, or not the true spiritual anyway. A simulacrum of spirituality might well be encountered and mistaken for the real thing, and this is a common modern error found particularly among this who confuse the magical with the mystical. But imagination is like spiritual fuel and it needs something to light it to make it burst into flame.

That something is, of course, Christ. Without him any spirituality we might have will remain, at best, natural which is to say we may attain something like enlightenment but we will not attain salvation. I define the difference between these two in the following way.

The Buddhist goal of Nirvana exists even if it is only rarely attained. Much more rarely than might be thought by the literature and teachers devoted to it. On the other hand, states of consciousness that are similar to it are frequently encountered by spiritual aspirants. These can be called samadhi, satori and so on but all amount to more or less the same thing, a condition of mind in which the self is seemingly transcended and consciousness made one with the whole universe. Now, this is a true psychological state. It is not an illusion but a real part of God's creation. Nonetheless, it is within the creation not beyond it. It remains part of man's psychological make-up and is not a spiritual state in the true supernatural sense notwithstanding the fact that it might feel like that in comparison to normal consciousness restricted to the physical plane. But it is not salvation which is the only thing that can take us beyond the merely human and the creation and which is only found through Christ.

Spirituality without Christ cannot take you to heaven which is the only place truly outside the earthly creation. But, at the same time, we should now be moving into a new understanding that requires us not just to follow Christ as external saviour but to allow him to transform us from within. We need to contact Christ inwardly and this we do through faith, imagination, intuition and love. But note that all these qualities, especially the last, have been subjected to misinterpretation, distortion and reduced to humanistic terms. They must be God-centred or they are not spiritually focused.

Two things then are required for this new spirituality and they can be called intuition and tradition. One relates to individual spiritual awareness, the other to revelation. One is God in his immanent form and the other is him as his transcendent being. We must respond to both. The former needs to be checked and balanced by the latter if it is not to veer off into (possible) illusion and narcissism. The latter needs to be supplemented by an inner realisation that turns bare bones into a living thing and makes the universal personal.

God is the same today, yesterday and forever but he is always making all things new. Truth never changes but our capacity to know it and live it grows and deepens. The new does not deny the old and if it is not built on the old it is a false new. But it does transform the old. We have reached a point at which we can take a great spiritual leap forward but if we move in the wrong direction we will be lost. As always, it's up to us.