Live a spiritual life

01

Our lives can be roughly divided into two major parts, one large and one small. Most of the time, we farm, harvest, build houses, or 8 in the morning and 5 in the evening, plus squeezing into traffic jams, buying vegetables, cooking and laundry, giving birth to children, raising children, and serving the elderly. Then, we squeeze in some time to go out, play the piano or listen to the piano, write big characters or watch art exhibitions, read books or watch movies, go to the park or go to church.

The large part of life is called the material life, and the small part is called the spiritual life. Material life is used to satisfy our basic needs and must be utilitarian, but spiritual life is not—Hegel divided the Absolute Spirit into three major spheres, art, religion, and philosophy, which do not seek external utility, but only the manifestation of the spirit itself. Most people have to be pragmatic and pragmatic most of the time, and don't have as much time to show the spirit itself.

The material/spiritual pair is old-fashioned and overly general. Spiritual life must at least be at the level of listening to Kunqu opera and reading Borges. Watching TV series at a fixed point every night and watching variety shows on weekends doesn't seem to have anything to do with spirituality, so we call it cultural life. If a variety show has no cultural content, then call it entertainment. Walking alone or in a group in the desert, that is the spiritual life, crowded traffic jams to travel to crowded scenic spots, ah, maybe leisure?

Of course, spiritual life also has to deal with material things, and to paint oil paintings, you have to nail the frame, stretch the canvas, and adjust the paint, let alone make sculptures. Find a cave to practice, eating, drinking, and Lazar are still inevitable, and it is also very troublesome to prevent wind and moisture and repel insects. You sit on your knees, close your eyes and chant for days, but you have to have a few little monks to take care of firewood and rice.

However, no matter how much the various spiritual forms need material, they always end up with the "manifestation of the spirit itself". The beautiful forms of Greek sculpture are not intended to seduce the desires of the flesh, but to show the Greek spirit. Benjamin called this feature of the work of art aura, which translates to aura and aura in Chinese. The same goes for other spirit forms. No matter how profound the subject matter of an academic work is and how rigorous the argumentation is, the bosom friend can feel the spirit in it. Of course, I am not talking about the large and small projects awarded by government ministries and commissions, they are practical activities to earn profit and fame, and are not within the scope of spiritual form.

Material life is pragmatic and effective, and it is inevitable that it will be boring and even heavy. However, the baker not only deals with the oven, he also deals with his fellow neighbors who are spiritual. Washing diapers is certainly not a mental activity, but growing with children is not just a business, and the co-growth of diapers washing is different from the co-growth of not washing diapers.

Human nature is not only about food, but also about spirituality. A life without spirituality is like winter dust, and a person without spirituality, whether he is a successful person or a failure, is equally dry and boring. Isn't there spirituality in the mountains and rivers around us? Benjamin's aura is not just a work of art – "On a summer afternoon nap, your eyes touch the outline of the mountains on the horizon, or the branches that cast shadows on you, and you experience the aura of the mountains, the aura of the branches." ”

02

The meanings of the words "spiritual" and "spiritual" overlap in a large way. However, to me, the spirit is more connected to the world, to art and philosophy, and the spiritual life is more to be connected to religion.

Compared with practical life, art and philosophy are more transcendent, but compared with religion, art and philosophy belong to this mundane world. Spirituality is more appropriate to portray Jesus praying or meditating. Orthodox expert C.C. Bruges noted that the ancient Greeks often used the metaphor of the circle, in which the spirit transcended the limitations of affairs and returned to the self and achieved the perfection of the human world, while the metaphor used in spirituality was the path of ascension.

Each religion and sect has its own special method of spiritual practice, but in plain terms, the purpose of spiritual practice is to get rid of the desires and demands in which mundane life is indulged, to allow the blocked spirit to regain its vitality, to ascend to another world, to associate freely with the world of gods, and to gain awareness of the inner side of the world.

William James, in his book The Variety of Religious Experiences, quotes many believers about this type of awareness, and here is a quote: "I remember that night, that place at the top of the mountain, that my soul seemed to be opened to infinity, and in that infinite realm the inner world and the outer world rushed together...... I am alone with the 'Other' who created me, and all the beauty in this world, and all the love and hurt, even the temptation. …… I felt that my spirituality was in perfect harmony with Him. The everyday perception of the things around us is gone. At this moment, all that remains is an indescribable joy and ecstasy. It is impossible to adequately describe this experience. …… I know that people might rightly call it a mystical experience. ”

We often associate mystical experiences with "indescribable". In fact, not only spiritual experience cannot be fully described, but all the inner awareness is not easy to describe, the faint stomach ache, the fragrance of the dragon well, are like the spring river plumbing, only the experiencer knows himself. Ecstasy is not only the unity of God and man, but also the joy of drinking and singing. Dionysus was originally a religion, and in ancient Greece the worship of Dionysus was more spiritual than the worship of other gods.

It is indeed difficult to distinguish a spiritual experience from the experience of binge drinking, orgasm, and intoxication in terms of feelings alone. However, spiritual awareness is not just a feeling, it is also an awareness, an awareness of the inner side of the world, as the priest quoted above, in his spiritual experience, is aware of "all the beauty of this world, and all the love and hurt, even the temptations". The desire for good wine adds a stronger desire to all desires in order to overpower or overshadow other desires, while spirituality aims to dissolve desires and allow spiritual consciousness to arise. The Sufi practice of Islam is full of ecstasy about the unity of God and man, and the meditation is more calm and subtle, but these are not a blank slate of drunkenness.

We also experience beauty, love, injury, and temptation in the mundane world, which are triggered by such and such things, and are entangled in all kinds of causes and effects, but now, "the daily perception of the things around us is gone", and beauty, love, injury, and temptation are no longer tied to mundane cause and effect, but are detached from pure spiritual existence, and call each other accordingly to form a spiritual world. I entered into the spiritual world, without the connections of the mundane world, and I was "alone" into it. Spirituality belongs to each individual, and being part of the spiritual world is a highly personal experience. People portray this experience as a perception of the "true self" or "deep self." The true self is 180 degrees opposite to the selfish self – the selfish person attaches all utilitarian ends to himself, while the true self consists entirely in "oneness of one's own spirituality with the higher spirituality." The true self is only present in the awareness of a higher being. A deep humility is characteristic of spiritual experience.

Spiritual experience is highly personal and difficult to verify through description, which is why mystical experience is easily confused with fantasy, superstition, and strange powers. Indeed, there are all kinds of weird and absurd things circulating around the spirituality. C.H. Bulgakov spoke of the inner path of the Orthodox Church, "This path is not only difficult, but also dangerous, because on this path it is possible to confuse and damage the spirit." ”

In fact, spirituality has nothing to do with strange forces. Let me quote Bulgakov again: "Mystical experience has objectivity, it requires going out of itself, it requires spiritual contact or encounter." "Mystical awareness, in terms of everyday perception and physical cause and effect, is neither conjecture nor superstition. The correspondence between spiritual phenomena is not a physical causal type of connection, and is not within the scope of physical explanations, but the so-called superstitious people precisely explain spiritual phenomena with fake and shoddy physical causation. Whether or not spiritual connections are "objective" is another matter, but our awareness of the inner side of the world is not limited to spiritual experience.

We can't tolerate insults to corpses, why? We try to express the truth that, for example, the dead are as dignified as the living. We pray to the Lord, we call to heaven, and indeed, there are some things that not only you know me, but God knows it. No matter how these actions and expressions are interpreted, they cannot be interpreted as God hiding on the roof of the confessional chamber listening to our prayers, and the dead will sneak out in the night to punish the body of the insulter. Not believing in the gods may be stupid, and superstition is suspected of condescending the gods.

Spiritual awareness is highly personal, but the path of practice is not untraceable. After warning that the inner path can also be confused and damaged spiritually, Bulgakov continued: "So here there is a need for personal guidance, with the elders instructing the trainees, and the more experienced instructing the less experienced. "Whether or not we end up cultivating to the Independence of the Mortal Realm, or to the Great Circle of Victory, but practice is first and foremost a practice that depends on the practice tradition.

What's more, there is also the original spirituality in ordinary life, according to Nan Huaijin's popular saying, the realm of bare cognition, not only those who chant Buddha and Zen, but also those who practice Tantra, often appear, ordinary people, poets, and artists often have this realm. Chen Ziang ascended to Youzhou Terrace, thinking about the world and the world, how could it not be "the soul is open to infinity"? In other words, if there is no rigpa in the human world, there is no way to start spirituality. It's just that the spirituality in life is scattered among all kinds of practical activities, and we are aware of it, and we act on it, not in the consciousness itself. It is as if the spiritual practitioner collects and purifies the spirituality of life in order to reside in rigpa.

03

He is back to the source alone, and he is doing the bottom business? Whether it is the ecstasy of the unity of God and man or the subtle realization of zazen, isn't it the believer's own enjoyment? What good is it for us in the world? He's consuming some of the resources of the human world, just to make a good feeling for himself?

We must not take the benefits too seriously. The aura of the mountains and the wrinkles of spring water are all connected with our spirituality. A rainbow that shines from it, and we share the brilliance. He has reached out to help others, he is doing things for the world, and the cultivators are already cultivating for all of us—they are far away from the hustle and bustle, and the spirituality of our people who are scattered in all kinds of practical activities find guidance and echo in this gathered spiritual life. Of course, we can't directly experience the spiritual practitioner, but he still reveals signs that give us a glimpse of the path.

Kind eyebrows, good manners, good manners, and wisdom—no matter how much you get out of the world, you can't completely cut off from the human world. No matter what secret method it is, it always has something in common with the worldly law. The Sixth Patriarch even said: Buddhism is in the world, and it is not separated from the world.

In traditional Chinese society, spirituality is more integrated into daily life, integrated into labor and production, farming, building houses, and raising children, not only based on efficiency. With the transformation of modernization, spirituality has been squeezed out of all kinds of activities—the labor process has been separated from the whole of life and has become a mechanical operation, and the daily life has been separated from the society of acquaintances to a considerable extent, and transformed into the practice of the atom individual.

Even the aura peculiar to works of art has gradually disappeared in the age of mechanical reproduction, as Benjamin said. We have too many desires, and we are urged day by day to be busy and nervous, and to fill our busy leisure time with entertainment, as if the surface of life is not covered with affairs and entertainment, and we will fall into the emptiness beneath it. Fortunately, there are also ways to go to church and practice yoga to lead us laymen to find our spirituality. I do believe that if you can take one day or a few days out of the year, alone or with three or five people, to retreat and silence, it will be beneficial to restore the vitality of the body and mind.

Of course, this kind of restoration is still from the perspective of the human world - I myself have always been a human being, and I can only look at it this way. In this perspective, spirituality is not the only way we can become spiritual. Art, love, and philosophy are all remarkable ways of spirituality. And the beginning and end of all this is to realize spirituality in life: without spirituality in life, spirituality has no beginning and no meaning—becoming a Buddha is not a practitioner's self-attainment of immortality, but because people in the world need guidance.

In this sense, building an earthly spiritual city is perhaps an even more arduous practice, and even in a highly utilitarian realm as politics can be infused with spirituality by people like Mandela. To make such an achievement, it is in response to the saying that "enlightenment does not have to become a Buddha".

Text/Chen Jiaying