Spiritual life is mandated within the world once consciousness arrives. It is not certain what brought up spirituality or what makes it so prevalent around the world, but what is certain is that spiritual life has been the norm in human living. Even if a deity ceases to exist, spirituality shall remain for without unnerving the human consciousness, humanity cannot survive. There is a blankness or emptiness about human life that needs to be understood and consciousness cannot understand it; only when the spiritual domain is activated can this understanding begin. And so by unnerving the human consciousness, by looking inwards towards the outwards, does the human find his spiritual core and thereby starts the conversation of spirituality.
When spiritual awakening happens for the first time, one does not understand it. It is like meeting a stranger for the first time. You are not familiar with the person’s culture, habits, accent, and body language. Over time, though, when the familiarity has settled in, the maturing connection with this person starts to reward itself. Within a spiritual domain, no benefit is received until the Seeker understands his position in the world. The usual understanding is that the world is limited but infinite; it is limited by human subjective experience but infinite in the objective sense. Within this understanding, he finds himself in expansion when he starts awakening to spiritual consciousness. The more he goes inwards, the more he finds himself going outwards. And then he continues to expand, breaking the ceiling of human consciousness until a time comes, after much trial and error, when he realizes what the spiritual domain is. And that there is such a thing as spirituality and spiritual life.
But often, it is easier said than done to explain what it means to go inwards. Going inwards is traditional. I can not generally represent it. For many, it is finding their deity; for others, it is as simple as finding a community with shared principles and values. If spirituality as expanding consciousness is optional, does it ever become a necessity? I am inclined to believe that it is so in many respects. Although human consciousness, I would argue, is enough, its limitedness is unjustified by the open nature of consciousness when the world within which it subsists by its very nature is expanding. Thus, human consciousness is enough for the human, but not enough for the world. And just upon the reflection that the world is of infinite nature, I would argue, the necessity of spirituality comes into play.
Thus, even though religious traditions may squabble among themselves and atheistic/agnostic motivation seeks redemption from all spirituality, nonetheless, most of them would tend to agree that there is an expansion to human consciousness in some sense—whether it be in the form of awareness of reality or an increased inability to process information with existing knowledge—when scientific study of the world puts into picture its infiniteness, and when visiting nature does bring about that truth into concrete realization. But the most important aspect of the necessity of spirituality can be understood when we think about the lost Seeker who finds his way through necessity.
The case of the lost seeker and what are the spiritual highs and lows
The seeker is the one with a broken or trembling heart. He does not find contentment in the world. So he has a natural tendency toward the spiritual. He looks beyond the world. He does not think he can find his solace in materialistic living, whether it be in the form of food, drink, sex, drugs, achievements or wealth. The world does not have what he wants. His only way is to find himself a world that explains his living world. But what is his necessity? This will be explained shortly, but before that, let’s detail how a seeker finds spirituality for the first time.
The lost seeker does find himself eventually entering into the spiritual realm. When he finds it for the first time, he feels a sense of tranquillity and calmness. He finds a home that he finds to be more homely than every other home he has ever called home. This new home does not judge, does not obstruct, and most importantly, does not demand (at least not directly). So, he finds himself in a place different from the world since it is un-worldlike in the following ways: the suspension of judgement—for example, one’s personality is irrelevant, only the dedication; the suspension of dealing with authority—there is no authority in the spiritual life if there is any, it is oneself; and lastly, endless rewards—such as unlimited access, the irrelevancy of time and space and eternal fulfillment.
Now, evidently, the first point of spiritual contact must be a spiritual high. It cannot be otherwise, especially for someone for whom it is genuinely their first encounter. But this high is not an interesting high in the spiritual domain since spiritual expansion is theoretically limitless. This expansion of spiritual consciousness is quite demanding. Most people would require greater self-restraint, time and commitment, and lastly, a strong desire to seek spiritual rewards. As the expansion goes up, the rewards also go up, but keeping up the motivation and discipline is where most would fail. To the degree that when rewards are not met, the seeker could outright fall into denial about there being any such thing as a spiritual experience.
Indeed, that would be a spiritual low point. Some recover from it, others rebel from it, and yet others—this is what I am inclined to believe—spend a lifetime living a spectrum of highs and lows throughout their entire spiritual life. And many try to maximize it to the fullest potential only at the end of their lives since that is the time when one is closest to the spiritual realm. The question of necessity is gripping, especially when we consider what motivates the seeker to go up the spectrum. Here, the seeker’s initial desire, with his limited consciousness, was expansion; this desire is indebted to the human experience. But what is the desire once expansion has been acquired?
The spiritual necessities of the seeker
I believe it is the fruits of spirituality that motivate the seeker to seek expansion when he needs it. This is the seeker’s necessity in the strongest sense. In the end, if there is no end, why would anyone bother? Why would I write about spirituality if it is simply an obscure matter of interest? This end, I believe, is more profound now than ever before. In an increasingly isolated world, the domain of spirituality is becoming a great opening for many. An unhealthy opening could even lead to serious violence! But the normal spiritual experience, as it is for most of us, is rather an expansion in the right direction. The end to which it serves is not particular; it is a union of rewards, the greatest of which is limitless access to the experience itself.
For many, the objects of spirituality are mainly the seeker and the deity. The deity is not for everyone, for example, the atheists and the agnostics. But it is nonetheless helpful to think of the giver and the taker. Even if it is nature that gives, to understand the relationship and dynamics within the spiritual, it is helpful to ask what is the nature of the giver and the taker? While it is a broad question, the more specific questions are: Is the seeker a necessity in the spiritual domain? Since without him there is no deity. And is the deity a necessity? Since without him, the seeker is abandoned. And if the seeker is necessary and the deity is necessary, what aspect of their relationship is necessary?
Spiritual varieties: omnipresent, natural and individual
The seeker, when he does not publish himself, does not activate the spiritual domain. Does that mean the domain is spurious until then? In a way, without a seeker, the effective aspect of spirituality is not present, but the expansion of consciousness would demand that there be a place where expansion can happen. This paradox can be resolved, most likely, by thinking of the deity as ever-present, whose “seeker” requirement is fulfilled immediately when he, himself, is established. Thus, an ever-present deity does not really have an establishment period, nor does he have a need to fulfil the seeker requirement. Here, spirituality is omnipresent. But if a deity is not eternally present but has come into being, such as nature, then its seeker requirement is fulfilled the moment a seeker decides to enter, and until then he is not a deity, certainly nothing concrete in the spiritual sense. So, in this case, it is the seeker who controls the spiritual domain, and thereby, spirituality is naturalized. And lastly, if there is no deity whatsoever, the seeker himself is his deity, for he seeks himself, and here his spirituality is individualistic. The personal begetting of spirituality is a high point in the humanistic tradition, whose prime happens to be in our time.
In natural and individual spirituality, the deity is largely optional. But not so in omnipresent spirituality, where without the deity, the concept of a seeker is fruitless. But we do come across another paradox: since the seeker has to find something if there is nothing to find, how can he find what he is looking for? This is where it’s a bit tricky. In natural spirituality, the finding shall happen only if the deity is already a being. If it is not, it cannot be naturalized into a deity. But the naturalistic seeker would then hit a bug. He would not find what he’s looking for, and it would never make sense for him to activate the spiritual domain. One way around this is that the naturalistic seeker is limited by his experience, though this would only make things worse since spirituality is to seek the expansion of human consciousness. A seeker who is limited and is not subject to limitless expansion would only be pursuing a doubtful spiritual experience, not a genuine one. So the deity problem remains unresolved.
For the individualistic seeker, the deity problem is even more severe since he only needs to find himself, and in finding himself, one can hardly encompass the force of limitless expansion. It can be argued that finding oneself can itself be so difficult that the experience is limitless, though it is not genuinely limitless.
In the relationship between the seeker and the deity, the necessity is that the seeker needs to find the spiritual opening, reach a new spiritual height, or revisit an existing opening. When there is no spiritual need, there is no spirituality, and as a result, a seeker might be lost or a deity not found. Even if the world becomes increasingly irreligious, the spiritual need for expansion will always exist, and the core human experience of spiritual life will continue in various styles, whether the dogmatic omnipresent style or the more recent ones: individualistic and naturalistic. It is clear that where much is known when it comes to omnipresent spirituality, less is known about individualistic spirituality. Even less is known about how and why transformation happens to the seeker as he goes from one style to another. If he does transfer, does he find the redemption he seeks or is it that his needs have changed so much that the old style has become redundant?
