My Relationship with Spirituality

An intense wish.

I grew up with ideas about spirituality that I would one day decide were only wishful thinking, too good to be true, and not the simplest, clearest explanation for how things really are in this world. As I learned more about how things can come to be without the intervention of a divine entity, that there cannot likely be a spiritual component to anything if we want to keep things simple, and that no matter how much we wish for it, I cannot convince myself that magic is real. Tell me, what is the difference between a spiritual world and for there to exist magic in this material realm? It’s evident that the things that were considered magic in the past are what we call technology today. Why should a spiritual component to matter be any different?

I am struggling with two different perspectives now that seem to give these questions a confusing answer.

Firstly, the religion I grew up with is Islam. In it, we are encouraged to believe that there is a divine power called Allah that oversees almost everything that many would consider inexplicable or magical to the naked eye and then proceeds to run these tests or experiments on us that some of us are doomed to fail in order to judge us and determine where we belong in the afterlife. Fair enough.

Secondly, I am studying Hinduism and there are concepts that directly contradict how I am used to seeing spirituality in general. It appears in this way of thinking, that each human being and creature has a divine component to their mind, or personality, or what would have been referred to as a soul, and this divinity that exists within all of us is infinite and part of a greater whole.

These two conceptions of how things work cannot be reconciled easily, but do offer two different interpretations to my theory that there exists a force within each of our mental worlds that produce our dreams and has motivations to drive us to seek something more. I tend to think of this entity as a creation of the same emergence that produces our own conscious awareness, in other words, something that can be reduced to neuronal connections in a physical brain. I tend to believe this because the alternative is highly overwhelming and terrifying. If I thought the Islamic explanation was too much, the Hindu explanation is even worse. Imagine if we are all doomed to contend with this divinity inside our heads that can manipulate reality like magic to get what it wants. It would be of utmost importance that all of us learn to lucid dream and compromise with our second kind, so we have some basis of control over our intentions and be free.

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