One Step at a Time – Destination Unknown but Certain.

(Reflections on my inner journey)

Several months ago I suggested to a good friend of mine,Paul, that I might write ‘one side of A4’ to outline where I feel I am on my spiritual journey. Ten thousand words later I decided to try to summarise what I had written. This is the result. Not quite one side of A4 but close!

My inner journey revolves around the question ‘What is life all about?’ The answers revolve around my confidence in what I can only describe as my ‘inner knowing’, although intellectually I make sense of much of this by drawing upon ideas from various schools of psychology and by using pictures and concepts from the Christian and wider religious environment that I have spent much of my life in.

Over the past 40 years, and starting as early as age 5, there have been several key moments of insight, revelation or inner knowing. This inner knowing, somehow more real than head knowledge, but difficult to describe and capture in words, is fundamental to my spiritual journey. While I grew up in a religious environment these moments of inner knowing seem to me to have had a depth and a quality well beyond any understanding that one might call explicitly Christian, religious, theological or doctrinal. It is a knowing that is ‘just knowing’ and which begins to lose something as soon as I try conceptualise it or express it in words.

These moments of insight have combined with the rest of my experience over the course of my 48 years to bring me to a point where today the following are important to me:

My inner knowing acknowledges the existence of a creator and sustainer of the universe; a ‘being’ who is revealed in everything that is. It is something I sense most clearly when I am in the mountains, by the sea, when my children were born, when I relax deeply and allow myself to just BE. The words of Wordsworth still take some beating….

I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

I sense ‘the hand of God’, purposeful coincidence, synchronicity, call it what you will, all things working together for good. There is a sense that my experiences are not random, that they somehow fit together with a bigger master purpose and that they are in some sense overseen by something that is good and has good intentions for me.

I believe that this something, this Other, the infinite, let me call it God for now, is love and truth.

That God being love means, amongst other things, that ‘it’ exists for the universe and not the other way round.

That God being truth means that when we meet, recognise, accept truth, we meet, connect with, interact with, God. And I know that Truth, both with a big ‘T’ and a little ‘t’ has the power to liberate and guide.

I also experience an inner guidance system that knows truth; that will often indicate a course of action in a given situation. A guidance system that is in touch with a deeper source of truth than just my own set of inner rules of oughts, shoulds and must nots. And for me life ‘is all about’ learning to live in harmony with, consistent with, this inner awareness of truth.

I also experience the world and other people as personal and I cannot conceive of this ‘God’ other than as an infinite being who has some characteristics which we would recognise as personal. A being who is love, who exists for the good of its creation. A being, in some senses at least, separate from me, but with whom I can connect, form a relationship and experience a oneness. A being big enough to be both mysterious, unknowable and awesome and yet also able to know me intimately. 

At the core of my inner knowing is the knowledge that, in the eyes of this being, I am okay! That I am loved, accepted, valued, as I am, warts ‘n’ all.

The final key aspect of my journey is a growing sense of why I personally am here, what my contribution is. For several years it has been encapsulated in the short life motto:

“Awareness, acceptance, wholeness.”

Awareness of who I am, acceptance of who I am and journeying from where I am towards wholeness.

Awareness of who I am, of my place in the cosmos, of my conditioning, of why I do what I do, of the NOW, of other people.

And, helping others to come to that awareness for themselves.

Acceptance of myself as I am, knowing I am accepted by ‘God’ as I am with my imperfections, accepting the NOW, accepting others as they are.

And helping others to discover that they too are loved and accepted, with their imperfections.

And always journeying towards wholeness, integration, alignment, integrity, being true to myself and the inner knowing, towards greater awareness and more complete acceptance.

And helping others to do the same.

So, here we are. I am pleasantly surprised to have achieved a summary. It ignores almost completely the intellectual models of the cosmos I have created to make sense of it all. But there is reason behind that. The map is not the landscape, nor the menu the meal. And while my inner experience seems pretty consistent my models keep changing and evolving.

Anyone who is interested in reading more about how the journey has developed and what those models currently look like is welcome to a copy of ‘One step at a time’, should I ever stand still and finish it! Keep watching - I may publish it here soon!