Spirituality and Objectivity

September 21, 2007

Many times, when working to improve ourselves, we find a strange line of demarcation when it comes to spiritual improvements versus objective improvements. We find ourselves one day certain that our improvement lies in the objective actions we take, the work we put into our goals. The next day we become convinced that our improvement lies within our own minds and creating the correct thoughts. And still on the third day we decide that the target we’re aiming for is somewhere in the middle. We know we must combine our spiritual growth with our objective growth, but figuring out how these two fit together is a bit more problematic. The question isn’t which of the two holds more importance. The question is, is it even possible to strike a balance between two things which are, on the surface, complete opposites.

Spirituality

To begin to see how we can form these two schools of thought together, we must first form a definition of the two to make sure that we are all on the same page. When I say ?spirituality? I mean many different things. The most broad and all-encompassing definition is ?that which is unseen.? All of those things that we categorize in our lives, yet cannot physically touch. We talk about God, luck, the soul, fate and the spirit, but we cannot visually identify any of these things. I don’t want you to fall into the trap of thinking that spirituality is religion. It isn’t. It never has been. Religion is something all together different. Religion is to spirituality what academia is to learning. Religion and academia have set up self-satisfying systems that attempt to create one, concrete method for their respective subjects. Religion says that there are rules that must be followed when it comes to experiencing your spirituality and if these rules are not followed, your experiences cannot be accurate. Don’t mistake these two animals. Spirituality isn’t bound by dogma, it is something defined in its own way, in its own time.

Now for those of you who are big into the law of attraction, I personally would put it under the heading of spirituality, as would I put metaphysics. These are things which can be experienced and conceptualized, but can never truly be seen. We can’t see the law of attraction at work, we can only see what it produces, the actual production is a complete mystery. We say that ?like attracts like? but that isn’t a real answer. That is a concept, a theory which, after seeing it through the lens of experience may be proven correct or incorrect. You may disagree with my placing metaphysics under the heading of spirituality and that’s okay, the labeling of the thing itself isn’t important. I simply want to make sure that as you read this article we are all on the same page, talking about the same things.

For the rest of this article when I talk about spirituality I mean everything that can be conceptualized, but not materialized. Your thoughts, feelings, prayers, miracles, your soul all of those things will come under this heading. This isn’t to say that they aren’t real, or are of any less importance than those things which are labeled objective, we’re simply giving ourselves a broad spectrum in which to explore.

Objectivity

If spirituality is all that is unseen, it would follow that objectivity is everything that has form and function. While your thoughts may be labeled spirituality, your brain is labeled objectivity. Your brain exists in the physical world. You can see it. You can, in theory, touch it. Your brain is matter. When I talk about objective improvements, I mean everything that must be changed through some outer effort. If you want to get into shape, that is an objective improvement. If you want to learn how to speak a new language, that is an objective improvement. We won’t spend much time on defining objective reality because it’s fairly straight forward. If you can see it, smell it, touch it, hear it, or taste it, it falls under the heading of objectivity.

The Balancing Act

When we talk about combining the practices of spiritual improvement with objective improvement, we are talking about combining unseen forces with physical forces. Here in lies our problem. We know intuitively that these two paths must converge for us to find true happiness, but we find that hard to swallow because they seem to be such opposites. We spend time flip-flopping back and forth from one form of improvement to the other, always worried that we are neglecting the form we aren’t using and are therefor making some terrible mistake and ultimately wasting our time.

Let’s say we focus for a period of weeks on strictly objective improvements. This works for us, but we are worried that perhaps there is some spiritual lesson, or mindset that we are missing and because of this we aren’t achieving our goals fast enough. With this in mind, we switch over to spiritual improvements for a period of weeks, only to repeat this cycle any number of times. This type of neglect is, in fact, what most of us do. We put one or more issues on the back burner until we cannot deny them any longer. This isn’t an effective method for growth because it represents a gross unbalance.

The problem we tend to face when trying to balance the spiritual with the objective is that we assume that, since they are both necessary, they are also of equal importance. While this may be true on a grand scale, from day to day it doesn’t pan out. On any given day I am going to need to concentrate on one more than the other. Taken even further, from minute to minute I am going to need to concentrate on one or the other. During my daily workout, I can’t be contemplating God, I could seriously injure myself. For that hour, my focus needs to come away from the spiritual and into the objective. When you go to bed at night and say your prayers, you can’t be thinking about how to increase your productivity at work. The two thoughts are incompatible and so you are going to have to block out the objective for the time being.

We cannot hope to combine these two methods of improvement in an equal balance so it seems that our first step should be to put each method in its place. Decide what you need to focus on and when. Leave room in everyday for a little time of each. This is working synergisticly. You aren’t monopolizing one at the expense of the other.

Conception and Experience.

Let’s approach this from the angle of conception and experience, or theory and experiment. Spirituality is that which can only be conceptualized, while objectivity is that which can only be experienced. They are two halves of the same whole, one leading to the next. We create our theories and then devise experiments to test them in the laboratory. This is how it should be in life.

The only reason to conceptualize an idea is so that it can be experienced, otherwise a conception remains incorporeal, or without manifestation. How can you explain the concept of the color blue to someone who is blind? They have no terms by which you could communicate the idea of a color. This is the same idea. A conception is useless without the experience of that conception. You can conceive the soul, but you will never be satisfied until you have experienced the soul in whatever fashion that experience may take. Conversely, an experience without a concept behind it is a complete mystery.

So we see that a balance of the spiritual and the objective isn’t truly feasible, nor necessary. Combining these two methods of improvement into two equal halves is not how they are meant to be experienced. We need to approach them in a more synergistic way, by working on both individually and never neglecting either. Think of this as ?a place for everything and everything in its place.? We don’t need to combine the two, we simply need to make them work in tandem, one flowing naturally into the next. There is a Japanese proverb which put this synchronicity best:

?Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.?

Posted in Emotions, Goal Setting, Happiness, Law of Attraction, Metaphysics, Self Improvement, Success, The Mind