Re: 'spiritual safety' vs. 'bodily safety', Cliff Briggie writes:
"spiritual growth, in my experience, is often an experience of
'groundlessness', 'spaciousness', etc., where the rug is continually being
pulled out from under one's feet."
Yes - I would agree with you here - an essential part of spiritual growth
is that feeling of having to face an inner abyss and let oneself fall into
one's own dark depths, and it is often only through allowing that process
to occur that we emerge 'into the light'.
What is the difference between the spiritual abyss and a real abyss?
Can one affect the other?
I remember a story told me by a friend who went on a week-long retreat in
a mountain-top ashram during a tour of India. At the end of the retreat, a
religious festival was celebrated lasting three days, for most of the
duration of which there was constant music, dancing and motion. Drums and
singing filled the air and became invasive, then welcomed, absorbed and
seen to be regenerative. At the end of the festival, the sound still
seemed to reverberate in the air and emanate from everything around.
Walking down the mountain ahead of her companions, she slipped on a rock
and tumbled down the mountainside for a couple of hundred metres ...
falling, tumbling, bounding against rock and stone, hurtling through the
air, gathering speed as she went ... until she landed on a plateau on the
side of the mountain, dazed, but without having injured a bone. On
describing the experience afterwards, she said she felt so light and
relaxed, that she felt herself 'go with the flow' and that she knew that
if she had been her usual tense self, she would not have survived. To this
day, neither she nor her companions know how she did survive. It was a
death-defying tumble.
You speak of religion - which you speak of as a 'sort of illusion'. Yes, I
would call it an icon to spirituality. A framework that points the way - a
symbol unfortunately frequently confused for the thing symbolised. I do
not think that the only way to spirituality lies through religion. The
rites, rituals, recurring cycles, periods of abstinence and fasting
prescribed by religion may all help awaken the spiritual in us. But what
keeps it alive is our own motivation and relation to it. This lies outside
the realm of religion and squarely in the centre of LIFE.
The encouragement to build this motivation is, I believe, at the root of
rites of passage (especially evident in the rites of Native Americans,
less so in Jewish, Moslem and Christian faiths, but still evident in some
rites in monastic life, for instance). Yet it is not exclusive to
religion.
Where spiritual growth is concerned, in my experience, there is always a
'safety net' - albeit invisible, intangible but there nonetheless. A net
that is not there where mere risk-taking is concerned.
What holds the net up? How can we seek to build the cornerstones from
which that net can be hung in our organisations?
Leon Conrad
The Conrad Voice Consultancy
website: http://www.actual.co.uk/conrad
--Leon Conrad <100755.1675@CompuServe.COM>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>