Blog Post Title One
Say the word spirituality and the mind conjures up images of crystals, robes, meditation, incense, gods, or maybe galaxies. It divides believer from skeptic, and faithful from secular. But before spirituality became a category or a branding mechanism, it was the path to a kind of truth that does not require our agreement to exist. It was not theoretical, nor emotional, nor logical. It simply pointed humanity back to the nature that underlies what we call the human condition.
Despite being largely conditioned to equate spirituality with a kind of faith, truth shows us that it is not optional to have a nature or to be moved by it. You breathe because you are built to. Your lungs fill before you decide to let them. The same force that draws the tide moves your blood. It opens your ribs, widens your iris, leans your body toward the light, and turns your life toward meaning. This is not a matter of belief. Despite this, we are taught about ourselves secondhand. Biology tells us what a body is. Psychology tells us how a mind works. Sociology tells us how to behave among our fellow humans. And you believe all of it, because you have been taught that truth is given to you from outside. You’ve been taught that knowing is something to be handed down.
One of the greatest misconceptions about spiritual work is that it is a form of belief. In practice, it is the process of unraveling belief to return you to what exists beneath the layers of culture, language, and societal conditioning. Call it energy, consciousness, awareness, spirit, soul, God... it is your nature, and it does not require your belief to exist and persist. No flower doubts its bloom. No bird strategizes its song. Only humans are capable of abandoning their original design, and only humans must venture down the path of conscious remembrance.
Unlike other forms of nature, humans forget that we are nature and not just within it. We have the ability to override our natural expression through the mind. We can suppress it, mistrust it, and even reshape it according to artificial stories. Unless we learn to discern what is natural from what is learned, we risk living lives constructed around myths that were never ours to begin with.
Since the era we call the Enlightenment, the world has been increasingly divided into names and definitions. In addition to reality becoming something to be classified and explained, humans were also categorized and taught about ourselves through external systems. Biology named the body. Psychology mapped the mind. Sociology prescribed behavior. And we believe it, because we have been taught that truth is given to us from outside and that knowing is something to be handed down.
Conditioning happens so slowly and pervasively that few ever question it. Our definitions of self and of the world feel natural because it arrives before we are able to consciously evaluate it. We are taught not only how to move through the world, but what the world is (and who we are within it) before we give those labels permission to become our forever truth. To begin questioning these foundations through mysticism or spiritual seeking has always been seen as disruptive, and even heretical, because it threatens the cohesion of conditioned collective myths. The world does not have a history of kindness toward those it could not easily explain or control. Witches, gypsies, mystics, and seers have often carried the cost of remembering what the world tried to forget.
Some people feel the pull toward self-knowing early. It is felt as a resistance to conditioning and a struggle to fit into systems designed for repetition rather than growth. These are usually the individuals whose designs are meant not to preserve what is, but to birth what is next. Time, in that way, is our participation in the lived experience of evolution. Some of us are here to hold the known; others are here to become the bridge into the unknown. Either way, nature remains the only reliable compass for us to continue evolving. And the essential recognition, which often comes painfully late, is that we are not beings who live adjacent to nature. We are nature. Of it, through it, moved by it. This recognition makes sense when we remember that nature does not stagnate. It grows, or it declines. When we find ourselves unable to grow within the structures we’ve inherited, it is nature signaling that we’ve outgrown the container and that something essential must shift.
The initial pull toward self-discovery or spiritual truth is rarely about seeking something new. It is a response to the deeper intelligence of life alerting us that where we are can no longer resist what we are alive to embody. If you’ve felt this tension, you are not lost. You are responding to the natural impulse to refuse confinement by systems of inherited belief.
