Spirituality

As I say on the homepage of my website: Spirituality is where science and religion meet.

This is a quote that comes from the Conversations with God material written by Neale Donald Walsch, and it fits perfectly with my vision of how we should view mental health and illness.

There are two aspects here that create a third aspect. We have science, and then religion, and when these two combine we have what we can call spirituality.

When we take both of these aspects, science and religion, we can begin to see how spirituality works.

Going into metaphysics and seeing how life works is the easiest path to understanding these three aspects. Metaphysics looks at the spirit, but also the mind and the body. It incorporates knowledge of all areas of life, and it looks at human health with both the scientific and the religious, which forms the spiritual understanding. We can think of metaphysics by looking at things like the chakras, which are the energy system of the body. There is a vast amount of knowledge about the chakras and how they function, and how they can lead to health and wellbeing. So much so, that when you start to study the chakras, you inevitably go into things that work for the body, and the mind, in being healthy.

We have practices such as yoga, meditation, stretching and exercise, diet and supplementation, environment, relationships, past and future, purpose, and much more that involves and comes from looking at all three aspects of who we are: body, mind and spirit. Looking at one part of our spiritual-psycho-physiological make up means looking at all of it, such as the chakras, which influence the mind and body.

Spirituality simply incorporates science and religion into itself to create the combined understanding of both aspects of life. Science, being the study of the physical world, and religion being the study of belief and, essentially, the mind. These two combine in a way that creates a deeper understanding of both, which forms the basis of spirituality.

In seeing this, we understand that body, mind and spirit are all interconnected, and that all of life is interconnected. The physical, mental and spiritual worlds are all part of the spectrum of life.

When all of our understanding of the physical meets all of our understanding of the mental, we have an understanding of the spirit.

And when science and religion meet at the central aspect of spirituality, they must take from each other at this point of convergence the understanding of each aspect and be able to complement each other in our philosophies and understandings of life and nature.

Science and religion can continue to move onward after this meeting that creates spirituality, but they must be able to entwine the philosophies, practices and understandings of both the scientific and the religious and be able to see how they connect in the world as it really is. This is seeing the wholeness of life. It is upon which the foundation of spirituality is based.

To be healthy in body, mind and spirit, we must incorporate all of our understanding of religion, science, and spirituality - the combined aspect of both.

In order to create spirituality, all we have to do is look at both science and religion, and then see how they connect for us in our understanding and implementation of both the study and practice of the combined aspect of spirituality.

So in looking at mental health and illness from a spiritual viewpoint, we must look at that which supports the body and our scientific understanding of life, and also what supports the mind, and our religious understanding of life. These two combine to create our third understanding of spirit, or what we can call metaphysics. And when science and religion combine to create spirituality, they not only use all that each aspect holds within their realm, but they transcend to create something that functions at a whole new level. This actually creates a deeper and more intricate view of life, something that is not only seeing us as body, or mind, but as all three; body, mind and spirit.

Viewing ourselves from this precipice, we can justly look at ourselves as everything that life is: physical, mental, emotional, astral, ethereal, spiritual, vibration, matter, psychology, frequency, elemental, personal, etc

With this new understanding we have of the convergence of science and religion, we can see the full scope of how life functions, and how to keep it stable and healthy. Looking at ourselves from the viewpoint of spirituality will help us to attain new frontiers in the development of the future of humanity, thus giving us the ability to fulfil our divine purpose and potential.