By definition, we agree on the word. Spirituality is a person's appreciation of the mystery of life in spiritual god or self. More than any word, it defies definition, thereby being open to interpretation. God has that singular quality, although by many is misunderstood as religion. Many people will argue that every interpretation is wrong, according to a need to have the exact understanding, and as well, historical definitions are asserted right because the meaning is an institution or passed upon by a pre-emptive authority, such as the Pope, or a leader of a belief system, or even Wikipedia.
Spirituality then means everything you have learned it means, for example, far eastern religions have a neat college religion course feel to them, yes that's it. People become spiritual, as a practitioner of buddhism for example, thinking American preeminence after WWII and the Cold War precipitate enough fear to renounce the strength of our roots, European Protestantism. But even that source acknowledges spirituality as something without a dogma, an awe of being, outside the church, the community. Native American spirituality is another example of a confusion of terms, even to the tribes converted to catholicism, a conversion of spirituality to dogma, the confusion reigns over a core need, but not a recognition of core being.
In the context of The American Spirituality Party (
here) the word American refers to a transformative period where a settling of people were cut-off from the church, nationalistic adherence, and territorial proximity (to Europe), and formed through self-reliance a new world view. In this process, beginning in the 17th century, people formed communities for security and social reasons, and while tending to the work of survival, were gradually brought to an new evolving creativity. Gathered by assertions of commercialism, productivity and military might to 1950's onward, when mass systems of technology and education and information brought the world's people forward. The flowering broke forth.
Spirituality is the power of expression. Power, but not in military power, rather a concert of voices all gathered, all creating, and more meaningful than nationalism, religion, because as the layers of communities multiply, many different voices sing a harmony of being, a story untold is unfolding.
Since before Homer the lyricism was profound to many, given to the people as their sound of knowledge, and with it story. Now it is the same only it comes not from one, or from on high, but from the body of All People everywhere. Listen. If you cannot hear it, you are blind.
Individually we create ourselves, within the milieu of family and locale and will. We ascribe our being to values given and reasoned. The learning now is the teaching, and teaching we learn. If we accept the learning given by the system, we cannot teach more than the system. By giving your knowledge, you teach others, and no community can be unless that is the case. By transferring your knowledge through video, others see what you see, and learn to dialogue with themselves. Recording and creating video is a step, it is a compendium of your choices and vision. A picture seen is not nearly enough, -without words the information is limited to interpretation.
We are the priests, ministers, rabbis, ceo, president, et cetera of our being. What we know truthfully in our self is what we can teach, and others will learn from what we teach. As they see to what depth we have made the change in our world, they learn to teach. That has been the mission of artists, poets, writers, filmmakers, and those who create the greater worlds, expressly for others. All People have this potential, but are sore on the butt from entertainment, sports, and activities of watching and listening, not speaking (forming thought and expression). Politics has shown people their fears, because politicians speak to those fears with their ally, the news media. We can persist to accept this relationship, knowing we are weak, or we can go around and create the world of being.
Creativity is electric and it lifts you off the seat.
Work with yourself as a video, then with your communities, teaching others how to create videos that others may learn what it is to be in a community, for we are many many overlapping communities in America. The pool of spreading communities, as rings in a puddle, as raindrops combine, is our power sublime.
The core of this dogma is the understanding that being (alive) is the creativity of being instruction (teaching/learning through doing). Everybody is given certain human traits that are automatically fulfilled, such as breathing, then, as we define the physics of life by grasping our understanding into that existence, every object and sound and taste and the emotional jungle of human environment, we begin to discern that we are being instructed. At this point, we can follow the course into our adulthood and future past, by citing the knowledge by rote, that is, we are able to recite what it is that we have been told, as we can quote other sources, as to what substantiates our thought. Or, we can go the other way, and embark upon the testing of grounds within our self, in relationship to what we are told is right, and that is
the creativity of being instruction, finding that which comes from you whether right or wrong, it is the found self, our highest sense of being.
In the freedom of inalienable rights, it is that creativity which propels us on to the the new day, the future of now. For example, the freedom of the press is not the right to blab or politicize, but the essential need to find our evolving place in the stream of variables which are the concern of life on earth. To politicize is to garner votes for the power to take from other communities, to grab at the wealth apparent. To learn to teach, and teach to learn, is to transmit understanding on an individual interpretive level. Passing on knowledge is discovering the self. In a YOUTUBE culture, it is in the medium of flexvideo, the contemporeality is discovered. (
here) When you use a search engine to define a concept, and the answer is a video, you begin to understand we are watching, as well as reading definition (of the mystery).
What you may not understand about pictures, still pictures, is that we take pictures of what we know, both inside us and from what we've seen. Harold Bloom wrote a book on poets, that the poet cannot write without a precursor, another poet whom the poet emulates both in content and verse. The same for the average person, they photograph what they love, family and nature, or they photograph in ways they've been taught, or emulate from mass media. If you are educated, that is, have a body of design knowledge, art history, and a sensuous appreciation for what comes before you (historically), and then take a picture, you are either emulating acceptable imagery, or recognizing a need within you to mark that image as New Territory. That image is beauty within, and some photographers recognize that as evidence of a spiritual reflection. What else could it be for anybody using the camera as a tool of perception? You are recognizing, by taking yourself. The world is an illusion, for we are only conduits of energy, but spirituality is evident.
Why else take pictures? As an inquiry to the vast world, we take pictures of what we don't know. The act can be a bridge to understanding relations, sizes and shapes and color, but more over, what it is, is us. We seek what we want, and dispose or avoid what we don't want. Few answers are rarely found other than us, that which is ours to recognize.
