This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

Find Your Spiritual Path: What Do You Believe?

There was a show on HGTV for a while called “Find Your Style.”  In this series, a designer took couples who couldn’t pull a room together and, with deceptively simple steps, helped them identify and fine-tune their decorating style.  The host designer helped them looks for clues in furniture pieces, accessories and architectural details they already had and then came up with pronouncements like:

Your style is "Arts and Crafts with organic features."  Or, "Your style is contemporary with classical elements."  Or, "Your style is Ethnic Eclectic."  So, using a similar approach, I decided to use the Find Your Style approach to find my spiritual path.  This was an exercise I went through a few years ago when I was at a crossroads and trying to define and put words to what I believed in at this point of my life.

When I first thought about “my beliefs” I had a hard time putting any words to the concept.  What do I believe?  Surely I must believe in something, in which case there must be words to describe it.  I could more readily think of things I knew I didn't believe in.  But what do I believe and what do I value, and why?

Find out what's happening in Mission Viejowith free, real-time updates from Patch.

So I looked for clues in my likes and dislikes and these are some "belief elements" I identified while trying out various spiritual paths, on the way to identifying my preferences:

1.         I believe in life long learning, involvement with life as sort of an ongoing unofficial graduate school, with a chance to major in just about everything.  Albert Einstein said, "Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it."  Learning makes the whole world and the people in it more interesting.  Learning makes us interesting not only to others, but to ourselves and helps us to value our own company.  By learning a new technique, skill, or concept we increase our value as a person and our value to others and the world

Find out what's happening in Mission Viejowith free, real-time updates from Patch.

            An important subset of life-long learning would include travel – traveling near home, within the US, and to foreign countries.  I have learned the most amazing useful, and not so useful, facts, factlets and factoids through traveling.  And with luck I will continue to learn more.

2.         I believe self-esteem is essential to having a full and meaningful life.  Self esteem is so intricately woven into who you are that it literally controls your thoughts, which in turn, control your actions.  Whether we realize it or not, we are always in the process of either gaining or losing self esteem.  And by extension, we are either building or tearing down someone else's self esteem just by the words we use every day.  Treating people with worth and dignity involves building self esteem.  That should extend to ourselves – treating ourselves with worth and dignity and not being brutally hard on ourselves when we fall short of the mark or make a mistake.

3.         I believe in goal setting.  If you don't set goals, you have a tendency to sort of drift through life thinking "well, that would be nice to do some day.  But I have lots of time - I'll get around to it.  Maybe when I retire.  And then one day you blink and you're 63 years old and you haven't done most of those things - or maybe only one or two - and now you have arthritis, or cataracts, or other health problems; even though your mind is still willing your body isn't being so cooperative.  Your goals can be in the form of written affirmations or New Year's resolutions - but it is important to make some and be clear about how to achieve them, and in what time frame.  Compile a reading list, and revise it at least once a year.  Get a degree or two, take graduate courses or adult education classes, take a cooking class, join a gym or yoga class, run a marathon, walk a marathon, read War and Peace.

4.         I believe in sophrosyne.  Sophrosyne is a concept that comes from the Greeks and has to do with harmony, balance, self-control and moderation.  It relates to being in a harmonious state of rational control of one's desires and one's life.  The idea is to have balance in all aspects of one's life as the best way to achieve harmony.  So one should have a fully actualized intellectual life, as well as physical pursuits, a well-developed spiritual life, interests in music and the arts and so on.  If any one aspect of the self is over-developed or underdeveloped to the detriment of the other aspects, the person is not in harmony. (You can read more in my essay “Lessons from Ancient Greece.)

5.          I believe in spirituality.  When I say spirituality, I don't mean in a religious sense necessarily, but having a sense of connection to the greater universe.  I believe spirituality comes from a sense of mystery and wonder.  I believe that we as people, at some level,  need to find meaning in our lives;

  • To feel fulfilled, rather than empty;
  • To find purpose beyond today or this world;
  • To connect with our true inner selves;

I believe we can find spirituality in simple things, if we show up and pay attention.  There is spirituality in music, in song lyrics, in a Mary Oliver poem, in some sermons or lectures, in great literature and drama, in nature and the cosmos, and in small faith communities.

6.         I believe in individualism.   Individualism regards every man as a sovereign entity with an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.  Individualism holds that a civilized society, or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights-and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.

7.         I believe in self-reliance.  My mother used to have a saying she repeated often.  She said she heard it from her mother.  "Love many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe."  According to the internet, it is a proverb attributed to Billy Two Rivers, Canadian Mohawk Chief.  It sums up several of the things I value, but especially self-reliance.  Self reliance leads to development of human potential.  If you don't learn to be self reliant, you never become your own person – you give up control of too much of yourself to others.  Someone whose opinion I value once said you should never give away your heart or your core self.  I agree.

8.         I believe there is something out there, greater than ourselves, that makes sense out of life.  I believe this "thing" that is greater than ourselves and yet to be discovered  is not necessarily God, but some force or energy, science or nature or whatever.  Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest, hinted at this in his writings when he talked about all aspects of the universe having energy or essence, even rocks and minerals, things we think of an inert.  He sought to integrate religious experience with natural science, most specifically Christian theology with theories of evolution.  He seemed way ahead of his time, maybe like Galileo.  And he was looked at askance by the Catholic Church as a result.  But I think he was certainly on the right track with his questioning mode, his open mind, and his hypotheses.  Alex Fillipenko, professor of astrophysics at Berkley said "It's like the Universe has a consciousness."  And, I suspect that when or if that is ever revealed to us, by the Galileo or Stephen Hawking or Alex Fillipenko of the next millennium, that it won't be anything at all like the fundamentalists currently perceive or portray God.  But it could start a new era of enlightenment, maybe a second Renaissance.

To sum it up - if I were to put a label on my spiritual path - my spiritual path is secular humanist in training with eclectic and spiritual overtones.   Secular humanism is a way of thinking and living that aims to bring out the best in people so that all people can have the best in life.  Secular humanists affirm that we must take responsibility for our own lives and the communities and world in which we live.  Secular humanism emphasizes reason and scientific inquiry, individual freedom and responsibility, human values and compassion, and the need for tolerance and cooperation.

I’m also open to changing my mind if science comes up with some discoveries that turn the world on its ear.  I think it would be foolish not to be open to those inevitabilities.

And while I'm in the process of decorating my psyche in the style of secular humanism for now, I'm always looking for like-minded people to invite along on the journey as my fellow students in learning and becoming.  It almost always makes for interesting conversation. 

 





We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?