What is spirituality?

[donq]

I think Laozi said it so well some thousand years ago:

The ablest students, when they hear of the Way (or spirituality), with effort can get started on it; Mediocre students, when they hear of the Way, it is as if they are lost and confused; With the dullest of students, when they hear of the way, they laugh aloud at it. But if they did not laugh aloud at it, it could not be considered the Way.

Talking about Laozi's Tao Te Ching (or Dao De Jing), I remember the following text I read when I was a young man and didn't get. Until I become an old man.

Fame or your health - which is more dear? Your health or possessions - which is worth more? Gain or loss - in which is there harm? When attachments are great there is bound to be waste; If you store much away, you are bound to lose a great deal.

If put it in a bit more modern, here is something from House M.D., the TV series:

The patient, "I just want to die with a little dignity."
House, "There's no such thing! Our bodies break down, sometimes when we're 90, sometimes before we're even born, but it always happens and there's never any dignity in it. I don't care if you can walk, see, wipe your own ass. It's always ugly, always.
"You can live with dignity, we can't die with it."

If you never got sick, you might not "understand" what House said. And I believe spirituality is the real understanding, not just knowing. It takes time and (a lot of) practice (experiences). Everyone knows that sickness and dying are bad. But somehow we will understand, really understand it, when we are losing our health and getting sick. And that kind of understanding might be too late.

There was a time when I wrote and posted something, and I hoped there would be as many readers reading my posts (kind of fame). However, nowadays, I just want to show that I'm still alive. And if someone reads my post, it also shows that you are, too.

Let me quote here:

"Do you come to the play without knowing what it is?"
"O, yes, Sir, yes, very frequently. I have no time to read playbills. One merely comes to meet ones' friends, and show that one's alive."
-Fanny Burney, Evelina, Letter 20

[gruntal]

I might show I am alive but some what contemptuously. With some obscurity like I didn't want just anybody to know about it. You would have to look hard to even notice. That would also save me the embarrassment in case my presence or lack thereof made no difference ...

[hera]

Not sure this fits here gruntal, but it has some extremely interesting points I feel. Worth a watch if you have an hour to spare.

[gruntal]

Mark Twain once quipped about how nice it was for God to create Heaven but make it so hard to get there. One of the most simple and eloquent statements (sarcastically) of the Rose Brotherhood was how the Human species could bear children and always forgive them but God the Father wasn't so forgiving. I recently was in the hospital and the Chaplain came by to cheer me up. Actually he reminded me it wasn't too late to choose Heaven or the Lake of Fire. I mentioned REINCARNATION and he fled !

[donq]

Hi Hera,

Thanks. I'm watching the video. This is its prologue for anyone who might be interested.
"What is the fair question or the biggest question in the world we get to ask today..."
"Why can't we solve the biggest problem in the world today and what is stopping us"
"And if a benevolent higher power exists why isn't life on earth any better?"...

A question: Why Walsch and Gruntal look alike?

Hi George,

About embarrassment, I've got that a lot, too.
More than that, I'm kind of lazy. More than two decades ago, there were some active spiritual sites (forums, boards, etc.) that I joined. Or when I joined here a decade ago, the forum was so active. But nowadays, well... And that really makes me feel even more lazy.
Anyway, as I downloaded tons of (free) e-books and videos (movies, TV series, and music ones) from the internet for my home entertainment and English study, I felt I am always in debt. For example, at the Internet Archive (archive.org), I know that it took time for any member to scan and upload those e-books. Not to mention uploading videos. Why did they do that? When most people who have some good stuff (books, etc.) never think about sharing them?

A question: you mentioned reincarnation just to shoo the Chaplain away?

P.S. One of the books I'm translating for paying my bill is "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" by Rainer Maria Rilke. Here's its first paragraph:

So, this is where people come to live. It seems to me, though, that it’s dying that happens here. I have been out. I have seen: hospitals. I saw a person who staggered and fell to the ground. People gathered round him, which spared me the rest. I saw a pregnant woman. With some difficulty she was shuffling along beside a warm, high wall that she sometimes reached out to touch as if to convince herself that it was still there. Yes, it was still there. And behind it? I looked at my map: Maison d’Accouchement.* Good. They’ll deliver her baby—they can do that. Further on, the rue Saint-Jacques, a large building with a dome. The map said Val-de-grâce, Hôpital militaire.* I didn’t really need to know that, but it does no harm. The street started to smell from every quarter. It smelled, as far as I could make out, of iodoform,* of chip fat, of fear. All cities smell in the summer. Then I saw a house strangely blinded by cataracts, it wasn’t on the map, but above the door and still fairly legible was: Asyle de nuit.* By the entrance there was a list of prices. I read it. It wasn’t expensive.
And what else? A child left sitting in a pram: it was fat, greenish, and had a distinct rash on its forehead, which was obviously healing and didn’t hurt. The child was asleep, its mouth open, breathing in iodoform, chips, fear. That’s how it was. The main thing was being alive. That was the main thing.

*Maison d’Accouchement: maternity hospital or birthing clinic.
*Val-de-grâce, Hôpital militaire: the church of the Val-de-grâce was built to give thanks for the birth of Louis XIV to Anne of Austria after many childless years, and was begun in 1645. It was turned into a teaching hospital shortly after the French Revolution and into a military hospital in 1850.
*iodoform: a disinfectant with a powerful ‘hospital smell’ widely used in the early twentieth century as an antiseptic.
*Asyle de nuit: night shelter or dosshouse.

[gruntal]

I wasnt going to make an issue of this but to a select few: I wound up spending 5 days in the hospital and wondered if I was going to make it out alive. I thought Hospital chaplains would be like the nurses and doctors when dealing with any and all types that were there for a common reason. Sick and fighting to stay alive. This chaplain seemed more interested in pushing Christianity. My serenity obviously confounded his assumption I would be scared and/or bitterly clinging to my sinful nature ans not repentant. That I was fully confident trusting the Devine using my beliefs should have rubbed off on him. Instead it rubbed him the wrong way !

[donq]

Hi George,

Like Rilke and you, I also used to be in a hospital. To make a long short here, when I was a young man, my appendix ruptured three days before I was in the hospital, and had to be in the ICU for weeks, if not a month.

During that time, my hands were tied so that I could not pull off my ventilator (with the tube inserting via my nasal cavity through the lung) or scratch my fresh operational wound. Once, I heard one of the patients there try to drown himself in the ICU's toilet because he could not bear the pain anymore. He repeatedly shouted, "Let me go! Let me go. At least I want to go home!" Another time I heard a patient went mad and try to cut the nurse's fingers with the scissors she just had snatched. I felt sorry for the nurse, but I also felt scared for myself. Come on! I could not move or flee because I was tied there!

As for that chaplain, I believe that might be the very big problem of spirituality (I've avoided the word "religion" here). Pushing! The extreme example here is:
A monk, "Meditate and everything will be fine,"

A folk, "Well, then, who will work his a** off to feed my children?"

When it comes to spirituality, I also believe that, even if that spiritual message is true, correct/right, and has benefits (though it might or might not please to hear), it still needs "the very right time" to deliver it.
My personal belief is that getting spiritual messages is like reading a dictionary; first, you have to choose the right one that fits/suits you. I read hundreds of dictionaries and found only a few that made me really understand the meaning of words I was looking for. That said, even if you can memorize every word and its meaning in dictionaries, that doesn't make you become a good writer/speaker. That's really another story.