The Emergence of Spirituality
I'm feeling a bit tired after an exhausting week. Today I'm thankfully on leave; so I spent the morning running errands and only now do I have a chance to take a breather. Actually I feel like taking a nap now to recharge myself.
The human body is such a fascinating thing. It has such remarkable powers of self-healing. Over the years I've learned how to listen to it carefully. If you are attentive, your body will indicate to you what it needs. Tiredness is an indication of energy depletion. The body needs some time-out to do its maintenance work.
Discomforts are signals that the body sends to us. The uncomfortable bloated feeling that we experience when we overeat, is an indication that it is bad for you. I think we tend to eat a lot more than what we need. If we are to fine-tune our awareness of our own bodies, we could calibrate our habits and activities for optimum health.
A holistic awareness is difficult to achieve when we are driven by external goals. We are systems implemented in hardware and software. The biological body makes up the hardware and firmware while our software is encoded in our genes and brain. A lot of the software operates subconsciously. We only focus on our conscious everyday pursuits--chasing materialistic goals and pursuing procreation opportunities. The human animal simply seeks to protect its genes and pass it on to its offsprings.
Is that the purpose of our existence? It is, at the level of biology. But a complex biological system like us also has emergent properties: spirituality. We seek some kind of fulfilment that goes beyond meeting our basic existential and procreational needs. We want to know our place in the universe: who am I? Where am I going? What does it all mean?
The emergent property of a biological system is something that arises naturally whenever it reaches a certain threshold of complexity. There's something that is larger than the sum of its parts and these properties that emerge, become the fundamental properties that define this new layer of existence.
An ant on its own seem to go about randomly seeking food. But hormonal secretion from each ant cause them to be attracted to each other, resulting in an army of ants working in tandem to seek, carry and store food for the colony. The emergent ant colony appears to be an intelligent being of its own.
The complexity of the body's bio-chemical and electro-chemical interactions bring about emergent properties like dreams, hopes and spirituality. Becoming spiritual is a natural evolution of a self-preserving system, just like how a 'selfish' ant ended up being an instrument of the colony.
Part of spirituality is to become a part of something even larger than ourselves. When we practise and embrace a religion, we believe that we are trying to save our own souls. But soon we realise that when the religious path is pursued correctly, we experience a sort of awakening.
Inevitably, our selfish pursuits morph into something that reflects true spirituality--being a part of the universe. Our consciousness expands beyond our biological bodies to embrace other sentient beings, even the planets and the stars. And this awareness allows every action of ours to be in harmony with the universe.
Emergence brings about the spiritual being. What other beautiful properties shall arise when spiritual being blends with an even larger whole? That is for each one of us to find out.
