My Philosophy: Why Spiritual Foundations are Crucial
The Spiritual Journey is a Rite of Passage for Modern Times
The uncertainty of modern times is ushering many people to embark on their own personal spiritual journey. However, knowing where, or how to begin that journey is not so clear.
Historically many forms of spirituality and spiritual practices have been rejected, and this rejection has created a wisdom gap and a loss of helpful indigenous knowledge that otherwise would be readily available to us.
Before venturing into a spiritual journey—a rite of passage for these times—it is crucial to reduce this gap. We are vulnerable otherwise. An ethical approach to this is to first become spiritually literate, offering yourself the foundations of spirituality so that you can move away from immature spiritual discourse, culty communities, greedy grifters, commercial exploiters, and shallow spiritual platitudes and move towards confidently embarking on your own spiritual journey.
From my perspective, I see the foundations of spirituality across 5 stages: Awareness, Understanding, Development, Study, and Commencement.
Stage 1: Awareness
In this first stage you have become aware of your social conditioning but you are not free from it. This is what can make this stage incredibly painful. Perhaps you can feel how you are influenced by society, family, or perhaps the religion you are part of, but your decisions are made from a place of low agency. In this stage you are awakening to your hunger/desire to be free from such influence. The great news is that your awareness is the first step.
There are a number of individual and systemic factors that may make you feel this way (this is a short list): neuro colonization, group think, religious/spiritual upbringing, family, culture, society, learnings from school or university, personal habits, worldview, a history trauma or traumatic events.
To move away from low agency, and towards freedom you understand you need to break free.
Stage 2: Understand Your Worldview
In this second stage you do not yet depart or break away (so long as you are safe), but rather you excavate the foundation of your beliefs by examining the underpinnings of your worldview from a global perspective. You need to understand your worldview thoroughly. You need to see what is valuable here and important.
In stage 1 people can sometimes leap to stage 5, recklessly, making the idiom, “throw the baby out with the bathwater” all too terribly real and thus, detrimental. There is value in understanding how to understand what is driving you. Because as life changes around you, and you need to adapt, you will repeatedly evaluate what you believe or consider to be true, useful, and worthy of an update/upgrade.
In my view, both stage 2 and 3 can be addressed simultaneously or interchangeably.
Stage 3: Develop Your Courage
Breaking from the foundation we were brought up under requires a very specific type of courage—true courage—which asks us to take right action. True courage is a core strength we need as humans across our lifespan. If we do not cultivate this strength, we can fall into the dangers of recklessness or bravado or a brash decisions that can ultimately hurt us.
True courage helps us befriend fear, and guide us away from the unhelpful conditioning that we may be living under. True courage can give us the strength to reclaim our agency, and free us from being puppeteered.
Ultimately, the life we want to live includes a high sense of personal agency, confident to navigate uncertainty. In the process of reclaiming ancient wisdom and closing the knowledge gap, we develop our courage.
Stage 4: Upgrade Your Worldview
The fourth stage is about becoming spiritually literate through a process of study and preparation. The result is the organic shift if your worldview, and readiness for your journey.
We each come from lineages that, millennia ago, would have prepared us within the context of the unique community we would have been born into. These communities would be have been able to survive by remaining static—they were adept for change.
Now, because the wisdom and knowledge gap exists within a world with a vast number of cross-cultural spiritual practices, modalities, and studies, it is crucial to prepare (spiritual foundations) for your travel across the spiritual landscape.
Making sense of the spiritual landscape is an expansion for how we make sense of the world around us, enabling us to better identify the beauties along the way, and to steer clear of the dangers that lurk. Whether you choose to work with me or not, please choose spiritual foundations that are ethical, holistic, and globally minded.
In this fifth stage, having a bird’s eye view of the landscape and your proverbial backpack full of resources, you embark on your own spiritual journey—in whatever form that takes. You are becoming a person of higher agency, and capable of creating a world and a life of your own design.
This begins your personal rite of passage, where you will choose a path and cross the threshold into your initiation, what I sense our modern times are calling out for many of us to experience.
But for this fifth stage, it is very personal. You go this alone—perhaps with a community (or not), on a physical journey (or not). I do not make this journey for you, nor do I hand-hold for this stage. From the resources and materials I offer, you will have the ethical foundations that will help guide you in your life-long path, and I expect you will meet others, wise elders and keepers of wisdom, to help you on your sojourn.
In this regard, my teaching and my writing bridge the knowledge and wisdom gap, so that we humans may leap much further along, transforming our own lives and lineages — past, present, and future.
Stage 5: Begin Your Journey
