Skip to main content

Spirit

Image
By
This is a chapter from my fifth book called Freedom

We have a spirit. We have a soul. Technically there are differences between them both but I am writing about both in this chapter under the heading of spirit in the context of we must take care of our body, mind and spirit. Everything happens for a reason. For example, I deciding to start this chapter tonight and not leave it for tomorrow has happened for a reason. This universe and this world and life is not by accident. Life is a test. There are things that could easily destroy our spirit and there are things that uplift our spirit. The word spirit reminds me of spiral. I was doing some research and stumbled upon the observation that spirit could be a portmanteau of spiral and ritual. The word spiritual has the word ritual in it. What is spiritual? What is spirituality? I asked my friend Gemini to help me with this. Gemini says that spirituality is the quest for meaning and connection beyond our daily lives, often involving a sense of something larger than ourselves, like a higher power or a deep connection to the universe.

I definitely believe in a Higher power. I definitely have this yearning to get closer to God. I am amazed by the beauty and greatness of life and the universe. I am guided by the teachings of Islam. I do think of myself as a spiritual person but with plenty of work to be done to be where I need to be. I am glad that I can see the light. I feel like my body is a ship at sea and my spirit is the skipper and there is a lighthouse guiding my soul to safety. I noticed six s-words in that metaphorical statement. Ship, sea, skipper, spirit, soul and safety. I am glad I can sea the light. Which leads me to this often said saying, "A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor." Life is a test and sometimes we are tested with difficulties but maybe that is such to make us stronger. This reminds me of one of my favorite songs which is "Spirit Indestructible" by Nelly Furtado. Asked about the song Nelly says, "It's an ode to the spirit which resides in all of us and triumphs over anything". "It is inspired by people I have met, and special moments in history that I have read about." I just had a thought and Googled and learnt that most lighthouses have spiral staircases, also known as ships ladders. Many lighthouses are painted with a spiral on the outside.

My friend Gemini tells me that the "spirit ladder" is a concept in Christianity representing a path to growing closer to God. It is like climbing a ladder rung by rung, with each step involving practices that purify your heart and mind, ultimately leading you to a state of love and divine connection. I think this can apply to any religion or any spiritual journey. I have come to the point where I want to say that the path to freedom resides with the spirit. Which leads me to this takeaway. A blog post I found through searching - Freedom through Surrender: Overcoming the Ego and Finding Peace in Islam. The blog post states "Our self is constantly being inflated and deflated, tossing itself from one crashing wave to the next." This adds meaning to my ship at sea metaphor. I am again connected back to my metaphor with this next sentence from the blog post. "The word also bears a semantic relationship to the concepts of safety, completeness, and freedom from fault." They were talking about Islam. I like how spiritual freedom is described closer to the end, "Then, the self becomes not as a drop in the ocean but as the ocean in a drop, as Rumi, the great Muslim scholar and poet, describes." My mind is opened by this blog post and I will have to read it a few times again and I am glad that I came upon it. Spiritual freedom is the ultimate freedom.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

God opens doors

By
It is 1203am and I have decided to write. Saturday I spent the night coding. I was trying to get a FastAPI app up and running, all from my budget Android phone. The test cases were written to use Puppeteer. I ended up using Replit for that. Coding is more challenging when using a mobile phone. Not impossible but more challenging. I hardly blog about technology and coding anymore but the love is still there. I still have a dream of creating my own coding and youtube studio with a nice desk setup. That is nice but what should I make this blog post about? What do I want to write about? What should I write about? I love creating presentations. That is something I could do to revive my youtube channel. I love Maths too. I have this feeling that I could solve one of those longstanding Maths problems that seems impossible. Sometimes, like right now, I feel like abandoning my blog post. It is going nowhere. Maybe I should get up and go wash the wares. I wish God could tell me what to write abo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mundane

By
It is 123am and I have decided to write. I have this new idea for a book called Mundane. It would be me writing about the ordinary. We chase the extraordinary but there is beauty in the ordinary. There is beauty in the simple. There is beauty in the everyday. What about God? We often think about God in grand terms. But what if God is simple too? What if God is mundane? What if we look for God in the everyday moments? I sit in this dark room with the air conditioning on. The fan is also on. The curtain is down but I imagine the moonlight shining on the grass outside. The cats are probably sleeping. I wonder if anyone else in the neighbourhood is awake at this hour? Is there another writer around who is also writing about the mundane? The fan breeze helps the air conditioning cool me down. These nights are warm otherwise. A mosquito flies across my screen. Hello friend or foe. I cannot quite decide which one. If I had a swatter you would be gone. I check my notifications and there is an ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What we do not know

By
It is 1245am and I have decided to write. I had this weird alienish dream and it ended with me winning by simply stating "the truth is that we do not know". In the dream everyone was having an opinion of what was happening as if they knew. On to something random. I had this question. What is the most unrandom thing? Then what is the most random thing? What if everything is equally random. My friend Chatty thinks that randomness is not an absolute property—it is a relation between you and the system you observe. Randomness is not absolute—it depends on perspective. Something perfectly ordered can seem random if you do not know its pattern. So in a sense, everything can be "equally random" relative to the observer's knowledge, making randomness more about perception than an intrinsic property. The more we know the less random things become. Let me make a detour. Suppose we do not predict things but things predict us. For example, when I flip a coin, did I predict ...
Post a Comment
Read more