Spirituality – Outer, Inner, Secret

Spirituality is defined as one of these 4

• Outer: the belief in a spirit, an essence, something beyond the physical material world
• Inner: Means of finding relief from suffering
• Secret: A quest for the final truth of reality
• All 3: Self-improvement, self-realization

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Types of Spirituality

Spirituality can take many forms. There are almost a dozen quite common forms of spirituality, including monotheism, polytheism, pantheism, non-theism, and non-theism. Non-theism focuses more on the essential spiritual realities of virtue, such as the paramitas of Buddhism, or the arete of the Greeks. From this perspective it means that there is an essence that is non-physical.

Spirituality also implies a practice of spirituality, taking the belief in many gods or an animistic underlying essence, or a singular god, or transcendent virtues, or buddha nature, or what have you, and practicing with them, trying to utilize them in one’s life for a spiritual purpose.

All of these forms posit an essence reality that transcends the mundane physical plane. Some are not greater or better, only non-physical. Some include both negative and positive aspects of spirit – good vs evil is a common theme.

spiritual fraud / Charlatanism

An unfortunate aspect of spirituality is the need to trust an advisor or guide in many cases. This leads to the fraud complex. Many sheisters exist. Some are even honest and well-meaning and believe what they say, but they wind up making up their own spirituality, which has no evidentiary basis and is simply nonsensical.

Atheists and materialists accuse virtually all spiritualities of this, while these spiritualities criticize those for having a spiritual belief in the infallibility of science. This is a valid criticism as science has shown to make many errors in its judgment, and people have a belief that it cannot, that if science says it, it is true. But scientific claims have proved wrong so many times that this is clearly an incorrect belief.

This is the final and ultimate definition of spirituality. It’s seeking the truth no matter how difficult it is to face and put that at the beginning but there is a more profound definition that will close with, that will get to.

Buddhist Spirituality – Quest for Reality

Many spiritualities, even well-established ones that are widely believed, are incongruent with each other. Some are inconsistent within themselves from a logical perspective. This is why many people like science and why many atheists and scientists like the Buddhist philosophy. It uses a rigorous logic to attack its own underpinnings.

It’s often said that Buddhism is more philosophy than a spirituality. However, it’s clearly both. It uses religious trappings and religious sensibilities and religious ideals such as truth and compassion and so forth to achieve its aims. It also has a clearly not immaterial belief in terms of the rebirth of the mind-stream of the individual.

This is the final and ultimate definition of spirituality. It’s seeking the truth no matter how difficult it is to face and put that at the beginning but there is a more profound definition that will close with, that will get to.

Spirituality as Relief from Suffering

Spirituality can serve as a profound relief from suffering for many individuals. It provides a sense of purpose, peace, and inner strength which can be invaluable during difficult times. By connecting with a higher power or simply cultivating a deeper understanding of oneself and the world, spirituality can offer a sanctuary from pain and distress.

It can help individuals understand their experiences of suffering within a larger context, reducing feelings of isolation, despair, or anxiety. Many find comfort in spiritual practices such as meditation, prayer, or contemplation, as these can foster feelings of serenity, resilience, and hope. Therefore, spirituality can act as a powerful tool for relief from various forms of physical, emotional, and psychological suffering.

Spirituality as Self-Improvement

Another definition of spirituality is the quest for self-improvement. One could say that Dale Carnegie’s teachings and the habits of highly affected people and so forth fall under the category of spirituality. A more prominent definition or example of this would be meditation. Much of meditation is used simply to calm one’s mind and give one a better life without so much internal struggle. It easy to say that this does make one a better person. After all, someone with a calmer, easier mind is less of a nuisance to those around them. Meditation is frequently used to increase one’s compassion and wisdom.

This Buddhist approach to spirituality is to understand one’s own being and it’s very depth and to act in the world in the best manner possible for the benefit of others. Helping the Buddhist practitioner would strive to help others have a good life, first of all, but more importantly, to overcome the limitations of this life as a conditioned being and liberate themselves into greater reality beyond their limited view of life. In order to do this, a great deal of improvement on one’s self is essential. The mind has to be looked at and understood in terms of its neurotic identifications. There are many guideposts for this, such as the three or five poisons, the 12 nidanas.

Outer, inner and secret Spirituality

• Outer Spirituality: working with others, being a better person engaged in your life
• Inner Spirituality: working with your karmic stream to liberate yourself
• Secret Spirituality:

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Outer Spirituality

Understanding the challenges associated with being a human being and the challenges in relating to others in the world is an important part of that. Working with those challenges is actually an additional step. Most people put these backwards and want to work with themselves, but they don’t realize the critical necessity of understanding themselves first. Why do you do what you do? Why do you feel what you feel? Why do you act the way you act?

The best answers to these are not personal. You personally probably have your own specific mix of challenges and obscurations and difficulties and negative emotions and so forth to deal with. But each of these things can be examined separately. They can be defined under a limited variety of ways. It’s basically the teachings that the Buddha gave. There are five essential negative emotions: Passion, aggression, delusion, jealousy and pride with the three main ones and the two subsidiary ones.

Inner Spirituality

After the mind is understood, one can begin to see the karmic chain of events. How one impetus or thought leads to the next state, increasing its potency and force until it becomes a defining characteristic. At any time in karma there’s always some identity characteristic that is controlling the mind and it will cause rebirth in the next life. Working with this thread, usurping it, and taking it over so it becomes a beneficial karmic strain rather than a harmful one is an essential feature of the Buddhist path.

So once our own karma and the general flow of karma is understood we begin to break apart the karmic stream by multiple methods. One is seeing the activity of karma in play, softening it, giving it space, not making negative decisions but releasing them as they arise. The second is replacing them with virtuous karmic activity, almost purifying them by developing an identity as a good compassionate and wise person.

Secret Spirituality

The third one is called the secret method. There’s the outer method of changing one’s behavior to be good and decent, not lying and stealing and killing, no harsh speech and so forth. The inner method is working on one’s virtue and overcoming one’s karmic entanglement.

The secret method is to see through the illusion of existence altogether. This is overcoming the fundamental ignorance about the nature of reality, in the most simple sense that overcomes the ignorance about the nature of the self, which is that it does not exist as a singular independent eternal entity. It is made up of parts. It is constantly in flux with the world, constantly changing, and it changes so much that there is no part of it that maintains itself over longer periods of time. Everything dissolves and becomes something subtly different and completely different given enough time. There is no singular essence called the soul or called the self.

On a greater level, it’s applying this idea of the illusory nature to all of reality. This is a frightening aspect of genuine spirituality from this perspective takes tremendous courage. It’s not easy to look at the emptiness of relative reality. It can feel very nihilistic, frightening, unmoored, or groundless. In the end, however, there’s no reason for fear. No one is creating something new. We’re only seeing something that’s always been there. It’s never harmed us up to now, therefore it has no power to harm us. It can only help us to heal the wounds of believing in our own conditioned existence so extremely that we torment ourselves.

May all beings be happy

May all beings be peaceful

May all beings be safe

May all beings awaken to the light of their true nature

May all beings be free