Our spiritual journey is not about shifting from our basic needs to our self-fulfilment needs or self-transcendence. Our true spiritual journey is embodied and so traverses all our needs. We are no longer living in the Victorian Era, our thinking needs to evolve with our new knowledge.
In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need we tend to think our basic needs must be met before we can progress to our psychological needs, onto self-fulfilment needs, and then self-transcendence. So we need food and water, safety and security before we can even think of friendships, relationships or self-esteem, never mind what comes next.
And yet there are many examples of people struggling with their spiritual life, even when their basic and psychological needs are not being met. In my new novel ‘Fermented Spirits’ we see this struggle being played out in Caroline Beverage, a mother and wife in the early 1900s in the slums of the Gorbals, Glasgow. She struggles to feed her family, trying to keep some order even while suffering at the hands of her once loving and gentle husband; now gone to the drink.
Caroline sees no way out of her situation. All she can do is make the best of it for her sons, while complaining inside, digging herself deeper into despair.
We now recognise that when we are too deeply attached to the chaos of our lives we can see the world from a distorted perspective. We make judgements and victimise our self, and when things are really bad we tend to blame God, or the universe, or anyone else ‘bigger’ than us. But if we have a spiritual striving, as Caroline does, the guilt then sets in. Who are we to criticise God? Do we not deserve what we get? And so the spiral goes on.
But we are no longer living at the end of the Victorian era. We now know so much more about how the brain works, about our blockers to a spiritually embodied life, about healing, and change. We recognise that happiness is transient and fulfilment is long lasting. We even understand more of the ‘esoteric’ technologies to help on our spiritual journey; the chakras and our energy channels, reiki, meditation, which can now supplement the talking approaches of coaching and therapy.
Having said that, we are still seeing many people stuck spiritually.
In the West we tend to take a very linear view of things, being out of sync with the more esoteric. For many this can be equated to the old left-brain over right-brain approach. And yet, we now know that we use both the right and left parts of the brain when thinking things that traditionally would have been viewed as belonging to one or the other. An example of this is language, which is left-brain, and yet tone and nuance which accompany our words comes from right-brain activity.
What this is telling us is that it is not whether we are right or left brain, but how we understand and articulate the interrelationship between them. Unfortunately, we also tend to be cognitive misers, a term many dislike with its negative tone. But that aside, we tend to accept what fits rather than think through various scenarios. This saves time and confirms to our already held beliefs. We now recognise this as a form of conformity bias.
Caroline Beverage did not have this knowledge and understanding to hand in the early 1900s in the slums of the Gorbals, Glasgow. But we do now. It is beholden on all of us, I would say, to make use of our new and amassing knowledge to build a world where reaching our self-fulfilment and spiritual needs are as natural as striving for our basic needs.
Bringing it all together
Our spiritual journey is not about shifting from our basic needs to our self-fulfilment needs or self-transcendence. Our true spiritual journey is embodied and so traverses all our needs. The new finds in the various fields of neuroscience, aligned to the ‘esoteric’, offers us clear route maps. Maps slum dwellers at the start of the 1900s did not have to hand. We owe it to them and to ourselves to use our new knowledge wisely.
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Email me direct if you are interested in mindful, trauma-informed, intimacy or spiritual coaching, or if you would like to join my new Pink Tantra Towards Awakening group for chat rooms, video channels and in-person workshops around tantra and intimacy practices robert.pinktantra@gmail.com
See my personal development / personality profiling book DISCover the Power of You published through John Hunt Publishing Ltd, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-78535-591-2
And for a bit of light reading, see my first historical fictional novel Fermented Spirits published through Austin Macauley Publishers, 2022. ISBN-13: 978-1398437159