The Spiritual Instinct (avec personal theology)...

My strongest personal evidence for the innate spiritual nature of the human, comes from my early childhood experience.

Since my parents were atheists, I was not baptized, nor even provided a language for spirituality at an early age. Yet I remember praying before I had knowledge of the word prayer. Between the ages of three and five, I used to communicate with the place I called home… the place I came from and to which I had no question I would return. The way I conceived of it was as a place of white light where we were all One.

To this day I understand God as the Oneness. God is in and through everything (as a Buddhist monk once said to me; 'We are fish swimming in God') . We are a part of the Oneness that is God but God is the Oneness consciousness that has perspective on everything. And we are in dialogue with it at every turn. While I do not personify God (except for poetic license), I do understand it as a consciousness, greater than my own, with influence over mine. As a Pantheist, I believe all of life to be an expression of the divine. This universe is Gods masterpiece and our lives are the brushstrokes that compose its beauty. I consider God to be both the artist and the art. Since God is the originating source, it is also the substance of all that emerges from it. I interpret God to be the creative inspirational source composing the cosmos and correspondingly does my spirituality express itself creatively in relation to the divine. This is to say, I identify as a mystic and relate to spirit through art, poetry, music, movement and dreams.

My parents encouraged me to ‘think for myself’. They had concerns about the tendency for religions to provide ‘answers’ while discouraging questions. I find great value and inspiration in the wisdom teachings of the many paths to spiritual evolution. Yet, I am so grateful to be rooted in my own deep personal relationship with the nature of this unfolding Universe because, by it, do I wield a built-in measure for distinguishing what resonates as authentic to my soul’s progress. I am thankful to them for allowing me to evolve my own spirituality… for creating the conditions that would allow me to gather such personally irrefutable proof that we are, in fact, innately spiritual creatures .