This photo was taken at Angkor Wat. I have to admit that I went trigger crazy with the camera while wandering through the Angkor Wat complex of buildings and grounds. So many images, scenes, shadows, and all of these left me in a state of wonder. For a moment, I felt a connection with something deeper, more intense. I guess one could almost call it a spiritual feeling. Okay, I can almost here the questions coming – what do I mean by a “spiritual” feeling? Thanks to one of my readers, I have a pdf document written by John Dourley, a Jungian analyst and Catholic priest who lives and works in Ottawa, Canada. I will draw on Dourley’s words to help wrestle with the term spiritual. This is not the first time I have tried to wrestle with spiritualism, nor the first time I have borrowed from Dourley’s work. I will include the document for your reading if you have the interest by placing it here: The Foundational Elements of a Jungian Spirituality, 2006.
“Spirituality is a term that is currently coming into ever more prominent use. It is also a term that is taking on a wide range of meanings. In its narrower sense it describes the spiritual discipline and practice of a given tradition. One can speak of a Hindu or a Buddist or a Christian spirituality. In contemporary usage spirituality has taken on another and wider meaning. It has come to describe a religious consciousness and discipline entirely free of a relation to any religious institution.” (Dourley, “The Foundational Elements of a Jungian Spirituality,” 2006.)
I have to admit that I originally took the narrower meaning in my youth and early adulthood, a meaning that grew out of Catholicism. I “felt” awe when entering into a cathedral, a sense that was physical as well as of the psyche. Even when the belief in the church had evaporated the spiritual sense was still present.
I remember when I was forty something years old and found myself entering into a cathedral in Avignon, France one evening while there was an Easter service in progress, how the presence of something that was bigger than the cathedral was sensed by my self. Today I don’t discount the feeling or my understanding of it. Rather, I have only expanded my understanding of that awareness of the spiritual, a spirituality that has a “wider meaning” as Dourley defines it. Spirituality has grown within me as I become more and more conscious of my own being. That consciousness of self is framed in a consciousness of other and dim edge of consciousness that embraces self and other.
I find that in my journey through life, as I walk my path that takes me through shadows and light somewhat like this corridor in the temple complex at Angkor Wat, I pass through and beside darkened doorways that reveal mysteries when I am ready for the revelations. As I wandered through Angkor Wat, I felt the pulse of what I can only understand to be the source of my spiritual self, a pulse that I know is bigger than my limited sense of self, something that includes all life, and everything else, all possibilities as well as all realities.
