Spiritual Matters will soon be added to the site as a main section. Its first section will cover basic questions. The second and subsequesnt sections will seek to 'go deeper'.

In seeking to go deeper in Spiritual Matters we inevitably ask, 'Where to start'? All particulars, all parts, point to one reality, the Whole. Where else could they point? Answer: only to the hell of relativity, to a sea of disconnected bits. Even if that is not true it is part of the ‘fine deception’ though which we humans could lead kinder, more harmonious lives!

Since I seek to honour all of the great world-views my choice of a starting point is to place together a poetic fragment by the Zen master Dogen with a fragment by the great rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel:

From Dogen:

"This slowly drifting cloud is pitiful:

What dreamwalkers men become.

Awakened, I hear the one true thing-

Black rain on the roof of Fukakusa Temple."

Heschel says:

"Concepts are delicious snacks with which we try to alleviate our amazement." A. J. Heschel, Man Is Not Alone p.7

Perhaps everything is contained in these two, but I want to emphasize one or two points. The first concerns what we might call ‘excessive observance’ – I read recently of some meditator leaving his wife and children for ten years just to go up another level in his meditation. It is very difficult to see how such neglect can be seen as an instrument for truth, goodness, beauty or justice - or any other virtues. What is the point of spiritual practice if it doesn't enable us to act in the world with greater virtue?

Excessive desire for the unitive state can become lust in which no credence is given to the equally important 'living in duality'. In duality we give attention to the particulars, to the concepts, to noticing the wonder and awe behind the image or sound of rain falling on a roof. Compulsive anything can become the ‘world’ that comes between us and expressing the good. In any case this writer takes the unitive and the dualistic as being the two blades of the ‘scissors’ by which we engage reality – and, if you like, cut the cloth of our lives. Unitive junkies may not be as dangerous as fundamentalists (unless you have to be their wife or child) but they can be a distortion of their true selves.

Heschel points to the true state – of awe and wonder – which I take to be the same as the goal of the meditator in other traditions, but the wit of downgrading concepts to snacks should be seen as exaggeration for the purpose of restoring balance. Duality is as vital to us as is the unitive. It is from the dynamics between the two that we come to know. Talking is important as well as silence – but silence needs to be emphasized more. Attention to parts is important as well as experience of/in the Whole – but the unitive experience needs emphasis because so few of us have it satisfactorily in our lives.

Dogen on the other hand brings us back to the reality that each particular points…………….

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