Sharing my sense of the Transpersonal

Perhaps one of the hardest things to define and share is our individual sense of spirituality. Too often the expression results in arguments about whose experience is the correct one.

I was baptised in the Calvinistic tradition, a group of Christians that fought hard for the right to profess their particular way of believing in the Divine, but also bloodied their own hands in the process, just as their adversaries did. I was then confirmed in the Anglican faith, the wonderful elasticated spectrum where catholic flavoured high church and protestant low church all live in relative harmony.

My way or the highway?

But these days, I wonder if either denomination wouldn’t kick me out of their buildings for holding views that are not in line with accepted doctrine. You see, I refuse to say; my religious way or the highway. It is my belief that all roads lead, not to Rome, but to that one Mystery that we can’t name, however hard we try. “There are as many of me, as there are of you, my face is manifold“, sings the Spirit in La Viviana.

I finally found some sort of spiritual home in an approach to psychotherapy called Psychosynthesis, a system of psychological thought made popular by Italian Psychiatrist Dr. Roberto Assagioli. Psychosynthesis is part of the Transpersonal school of thought. In his first book Psychosynthesis, he writes: “Psychosynthesis does not aim nor attempt to give a metaphysical or a theological explanation of the great Mystery – it leads to the door, but stops there.”

Why do people need spirituality or God?

In discussions about the nature of Spirituality I sometimes hear people say; human beings need to believe in something. In other words, spirituality and faith, or transpersonal realities, come out of a need to make sense of the insensible. And yes, we live in an insensible world. But for those of us who have this sense of an ongoing Presence in our lives, it is rather the other way round… It is there, and it is there to be heard, and seen and experienced. It is not something conjured up in times of stress, it just IS. And that is hard to explain. And so we try and find tribes that think in the same way, and we call these tribes our religions. But sadly, these tribes, these religions, often disagree, and so much blood has been spilled in the name of their true god, by all sides, that it doesn’t surprise me that people turn away from religion.

However, what saddens me is that sometimes the God-baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. At the deepest level of my being I believe that every human being has this connection with something Beyond, but it is deeply personal, and no words can ever really describe it properly. 

Find your own God

So when I write in these pages about the Divine, or Spirit, or Beyond, is merely what the experience means for me. But…. what it is for me is maybe very different from what it is for you. How it feels to me may be very different from how it feels to you. When I express my own experience, through articles, poetry and songs, it is not to say ‘look, this is how it IS, why don’t you feel the same way too’. It is, if anything, born from a need to share the sense of joy, and comfort, and inspiration that bubbles over from this divine uplink into a consciousness that is beyond mine.

Perhaps spirituality means nothing to you. Or perhaps your sense of something Beyond has gotten tangled up with religious conditioning, and you don’t really know what you feel. If anything, I hope that the Transpersonal aspect of some of the material here on Healthy Neurotics will inspire you to find your way, your connection, and to find ways of expressing that in your daily lives in ways that respect how we all experience it differently, while understanding that in the end it is one and the same truth.