When people first wake up to spirituality they become open, like children, and many of them use drugs.  At such a stage people believe everything and become quite gullible.  That is because spirituality is openness... yet, it is so much, much more.

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In becoming so open people often take a position against "closed mindedness" of old-fashioned thinking, often called "conservative".  If spirituality is about accepting life on life's terms, how could it be about wishing for another reality and trying to change it?  Spirituality may elude and surprise both the New Age seekers, as well as the conservative minds.

 

If we compare spirituality to a radio, the radio needs to be "open" to receive broadcast frequencies out there.  Similarly, spiritual people need to be open to the frequencies of Higher Consciousness.  But, surprisingly, the radio needs to also be able to shut out frequencies in order to select a useful frequency.

 

We take the pop-understanding of spirituality as being "openness to a higher truth" for granted.  Is spirituality only about truth?  Consider these short stories:

 

A person is hiking through the forest, at night.  She is cold and afraid of the darkness that envelops her.  As she forges on, between the branches of the trees, she begins to see lights.  After a litle while she realizes they are the lights of a home.  She hurries up and arrives at a clearing, where there is a house.  She walks towards the house and she does not see a door.  The truth of the situation is "there is no door."  Is that truth useful?  After all, it is the truth.  Will that truth allay her fear.  Will that truth warm her up and feed her.  Will the fear of dark go away because she now sees the truth?  Is this truth, that there is no door, useful?

 

In yet, another case a man goes into a doctor's office and tells the doctor that he has bad abdominal pain and vomits blood after eating mushrooms he picked from the forest.  The doctor tells the client that his height is 5 ft. 10 in. tall, which is his, actually, his true height.  Is this truth useful?  Will this truth save the man?

I use such stories to shift people's thinking by illustrating a new understanding of spirituality.  Spirituality is not just about truth.  There are many angles of an issue that are true; but not all of them are useful.  The woman in the first story could walk around the home and see a more useful truth - a door, on the other side of the home.  Yet as the woman walks around the home to a different side of the house she turns her back on the first truth she experienced - a home without a door.

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Spirituality is about being able to select the useful perspective as you shut out whatever is not relevant (including irrelevant truths), an act called discernment.  We've taken the next step to spirituality - openness.  Without the ability shut out what is useless, openness provides merely an unintelligible cacophony of frequencies, some of which are useful in certain cases but not in others.  The ability to be closed to certain aspects of reality, far from being "non-spiritual", is merely a first step to spirituality. 

 

Spirituality is the integration of openness and closed-ness into wisdom.

 

In that spirituality is the integration of opposite principles, the "yinyang" (one word as the two cannot be separated) principle of all existence.  Far from being opposites, these principles are "complementaries" whereby each arises from its opposite, as the video below illustrates.