Is spirituality a phase from which you return back from or a life-long pursuit?

Originally Posted by lemex

I think this a great observation.

Thank you, but personally it's common sense.

Originally Posted by Miss Hepburn

Oh, I missed this ...excellent and profoundly true. Deeply true.
Spirit is the glue holding everything your eyes see 'together'.
I wish for everyone, one day, to directly experience this for themselves.

Thank you

One of the questions of mine that has never been answered is; if the experiencer and the experience are one and the same and we are Spirit on a human Journey, how can we have anything but a Spiritual experience? Don't people believe their own narratives?

"A key component of mindfulness is the practice of bringing our awareness into the mundane, so that the stuff of everyday experience which lies between the extremes, becomes transformed by the quality of our attention. When we pause and look deeply enough to notice, the ordinary becomes extraordinary."
https://www.embracemindfulness.co.uk...nary-ordinary/

Originally Posted by pixiedust

I’ve heard that said a lot in the prison system but every spiritual teacher that has lived has been very clear on what spirituality entails - including Carl Jung

It's said in many forms in Spirituality but here we are anyway, unwitting victims of the differentiated conscious of the ego. And that same ego creates its own personal definitions of what Spirituality is or isn't that it only has meaning to the person that uses the word. Spirituality doesn't come from nowhere.

And Jung would have had an explanation for that, most likely the Persona. Jung was a scholar of Advaita Vedanta but personally I think he would have had the sense to keep his Spiritual and scientific aspects of himself separate, as he kept his models of the ego and the self separate from the Ahamkara and the Atman. He's been slated for crossing the line between science and Spirituality.

Personally, I don't draw the lines but then I'm comfortable with myself. There is just Brahman and what is Brahman is Brahman, what is not Brahman is also Brahman. It seems that while there is no separation, that separation exists. Same as there's a separation between practice and preaching.

Sometimes Spirituality isn't about Spirituality, and the ones that want their Spirituality to exist in splendid isolation don't want to understand that. I dare say Jung would have been comfortable enough with the realisation that his belief in God was one of his archetypes playing through.

Sometimes it's simple human nature, but because people want to distance themselves from themselves all they end up doing is getting caught up in the traps they're trying to leave behind. There's no running away from who and what you are.

The less Spiritual you become the more Spiritual you become.

[Altair]

Originally Posted by Greenslade

There are a few possible answers to this one. One of them is escapism, sometimes people either can't or won't deal with the 'real world' so they try and run away from it, but the problem is that if they are as Spiritual as they'd like to think they are they'd find out that the 'real world' was their creation all along.

I like to remember the many NDE accounts I've listened to. People 'come back' for reasons, often even due to the advice of someone in that ''other world''. What does that say? This world isn't one to escape from. It's one to live in. What comes after comes after. But each to their own.

[Altair]

Originally Posted by Greenslade

One of the questions of mine that has never been answered is; if the experiencer and the experience are one and the same and we are Spirit on a human Journey, how can we have anything but a Spiritual experience? Don't people believe their own narratives?

It's the human mind/brain, it's how it makes sense of its surroundings, through categorizations. This is useful and part of being human, how we evolved, but also creates limitations. Limitations which we may start to view as objective truths.

[iamthat]

Originally Posted by Greenslade

Jung was a scholar of Advaita Vedanta but personally I think he would have had the sense to keep his Spiritual and scientific aspects of himself separate, as he kept his models of the ego and the self separate from the Ahamkara and the Atman. He's been slated for crossing the line between science and Spirituality.

An interesting article on this at

https://www.idrlabs.com/articles/201...fluenced-jung/

While Jung certainly studied Vedanta I am not sure if that makes him a scholar of Advaita Vedanta. In particular, he disagreed with certain fundamental concepts.

From the above article:

...(Jung) nevertheless disagrees with Indian traditions such as Buddhism and Vedanta when these traditions assert that the individual is able to achieve complete liberation from the personal ego the way that Vedantins achieve moksa or Buddhists achieve nirvana. On this point of disagreement, Jung’s philosophical outlook is distinctly Western in the sense that he asserts that any complete negation of the personal ego is by definition impossible. As Jung would have it, should a Hindu or Buddhist master actually succeed in shedding the personal ego entirely, he would soon find himself in a state of psychic death.

Some of us would question Jung's understanding and conclusions. He was not infallible.

Peace

[Altair]

And Jung could also still be correct. I think it may boil down to what is meant by ''ego''.
Are people talking about the same 'thing'?

(not a fan of these ''West'' vs. ''East'' distinction as it's usually limiting itself to specific traditions. What is the ''Western'' outlook or the ''Eastern'' outlook? Depends on whom you ask! An Indonesian Muslim isn't an Indian Jain, and one Muslim isn't another, etc.)

[JustBe]

Originally Posted by traceyacey12

Hi everyone,

Is spirituality a phase from which you return back to the material world or a life-long pursuit?

Thanks :)

As you come to realize more, you integrate deeper into your own body and life experience. Whatever you may have experienced previously in your life, continues to move you ever deeper into those realisations. So you could say, your deepening continuously. In this way, the spiritual nature moves one with you as your human experience, experiences itself. As long as your alive you can continue to realize yourself through the vast array of life experiences. The spiritual pursuit in this way becomes a quest to understand more, of you, of life around you. You as all forms in this body can be.

So in this consistent spiralling, we are continuously moving deeper into our true nature, which is more than just our humanness and this material world.

When people become more aware, open and realized, you’ll notice that they’ll align to nature more so, want to own less stuff, live more simply. It’s often a correlation to being more alligned to their true nature that no longer views through materialistic containment’s. Which of course when you leave this world and experience, your more inclined to leave in peace, without those attachments in you still in conflict.

Originally Posted by iamthat

Some of us would question Jung's understanding and conclusions. He was not infallible.

Who is this 'us'?

I watched a BBC documentary of monks in a monastery who had successfully 'transcended' their egos. They were being spoon-fed and had their nappies changed. In psychology, severe emotional trauma can cause the ego to collapse into the self and leaves the sufferer dysfunctional.

By the way, Jung also gained great accolades from the higher echelons of Advaita Vedanta for his work on bringing aspects of the religion/philosophy into the Western consciousness. Did any of the 'we' who question his understanding achieve such acclaim, and what standing do you have in the science of psychology to contradict?

The clinic definitions and the opinionated definition that most people have are two very different things. Most Spiritual people have the opinionated version.

'I am' is the ego, 'that' is the 'content'. In a truly egoless state - which I have achieved for short periods - there isn't very much at all. If you want a good tip for gaining brownie points, don't use the words 'self' or 'ego', especially in threads about them. The world and his cat have an opinion and another one gets lost. Use words like 'Atman' and 'Ahamkara' instead.

Originally Posted by Altair

And Jung could also still be correct. I think it may boil down to what is meant by ''ego''.
Are people talking about the same 'thing'?

One of the problems is that there are too many people in this forum who think their opinion passes for expert psychoanalysis, that's why the threads on the ego have been nothing but a mess for years. That's why nobody is any the wiser about what the ego is and how it plays a role in Spirituality.

The delicious irony is that the Spiritual people who say psychology has nothing to do with Spirituality then talk about the ego don't realise that what they're talking about is psychoanalysis. So much for being oh so spiritual. The discussion of the self is just as messy.

Jung took his model of the self from the Atman and his model of the ego from the Ahamkara. Over the years I've seen many discussions on the ego and I know you've seen them too. I have yet to see one on the Ahamkara.