The Spiritual Life in a Nutshell

With SRH coming into resolution an oddly related issue and the centre of this Blog also coming into view.

How can there be joy in poverty? Is not poverty just deprivation and suffering.

Well no this is not true. What is suffering is Conditionality. Your happiness is only as secure as the thing you base it upon. Similarly to SRH we are looking at the security of foundations. The SRH points to the problem of basing things upon them self which has a practical example in people basing their life on themselves. The full spiritual life is actually very simple.

You are only as secure as the thing you base your happiness upon.

For most it is the body. But as we know the body dies and that is the great crisis of life. But it is only a crisis when we base our life on the body. Much science and mythology about how we relate to our bodies but not getting into that. Sufficient to say it is a choice to base your life on the body.

So at some point to escape death we need base our happiness on something other than the body. The historical way to do this is to place our life in the hands of God. This uncouples us from the body and so frees us from death.

God takes many forms. Pagans base life on Nature and the Earth Goddess. This is enough to escape death. Seeing all living things connected, and the great cycles of birth and death show that we are not alone in dying but just a part of a great turning circle of life. That is enough to escape death. But there are other versions of this with increasing levels of abstraction of God.

However even basing your life on God is fraught with issues. God can reject you and send you to Hell. God's take sides and you suffer if they side against you. For many people following God is not a complete submission of self and there is still suffering, even when offered eternal life. Most extraordinary as Jesus offers us.

The end point of this search for peace and happiness is to give up all foundations. It is perhaps shocking that the world and us exists all by itself with no foundations. This is called Sunyata in Buddhism and is quite unsettling at first. We like to feel our feet firmly on some solid grounding. But this need to have foundations is our upset.

We do not need foundations, and any foundation we chose will be the source of our suffering.

It is said well when people say "start where you are". Indeed "where you are" is also the end. It is the foundation and has no foundation itself. It has the mundane name of Home too. 

So whatever form our spiritual path takes, even if it end up hanging on a cross, it is all to do with giving up our firm foundations, in particular our mortal and private individual Self. Shining through this self are all the higher ones with fewer foundations.