Lay Spirituality in everyday’s life

“The universe is, for you are. God is, because you are. Oh man why ignore yourself looking for another …?” (Swami Muktananda)

Man can not live anymore in a “widespread and shared space” and in fact the most damage to his attitude is destructive lesion of the deep connective tissue that we all use without much recognition. This fact returns us to the need to consider in our daily life the implementation of deep ecology and lay spirituality (natural or secular, as would you say)

This lay spirituality that we seek in Nature and in the relationship with our fellow people is not based on the slurred speech of litanies and prayers, but in the cultivation of the generosity of self, enthusiasm, unselfishness … everything that makes out man from Jail instincts, without enslave him in another prison, that is the religious intellectualism.

This attitude of experiencing spiritual communion in ourselves, when the affinities are compensated, give us spontaneous joy and we feel that our feeling vibrates in unison with the feelings of others. But this is an aspect of the emergence of consciousness and we can not determine who is “the best”, in the sense that someone or something is actionable …

I remember the Zen story of the butcher. A monk in search of truth, depressed because he could not find it, was wandering aimlessly through a city. Passing in front of a butcher’s shop heard a dialogue that took place inside. “I recommend you to give me the best piece of meat that you have” – the customer said – “Do not worry .. -Replied the butcher- here there is no piece of meat that is not the best ..!”

That sentence was enough to solve all the mental problems of the monk, that lit up instantly … and of course he laughed, himself and the world, but it was not a derisory laughter, but full of joy …

However, observing the reactions of others or even our own we can never determine when and how our mind will be awakened to the truth, if we conjecture about the truth we will not recognise the right moment…. So we can only remain open and serene knowing that we float in pure truth all the time and the only impediment to perceive it is our sense of separation and of difference … We shall not give much importance to impatience and naturally one day we will melt, like the famous statue of salt that immersed in the sea dissolved in it.

At the same time we must not isolate ourselves nor believing that to relate spiritually with others constitutes a social “duty”. The true Dharma is to scrape the human mind from all the superstructure, including religion, ethics and morals, and even the sense of solidarity, which prevent the spontaneous implementation of the wise and innocent human nature.

No need to advertise but to discover the natural “holiness” (read integrity) of man, beyond all do and not-doing. Occorr know, even if caught using examples and anecdotes from this or that religion or spiritual path for facilitating communicative exemplification, that these things (including the speech of explanation that I’m doing) are all “junk culture” from the point of view of “self-knowledge”…. It is only externalizing knowledge, like all empirical notions of intellectual speculation.

Paul D’Arpini