Spirituality is a recognition that there is something other than the course of everyday events; but what is this ‘other’? Many scientists, especially distinguished physicists such as David Bohm, believe that everything in the universe affects everything else because they are all part of the unbroken whole, where everything is connected to everything else. It is what David Bohm termed the Implicate Order.
This, of course, is the central teaching of the East: that everything is one. As St Bernard of Clairvaux wrote:
You will learn more in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you more than you can acquire from the mouth of a teacher.
It is only when we begin to look and listen, not only outwardly but also inwardly, that we begin to experience everything as vital and living. We discern the great in the small, the extra-ordinary in the ordinary or, as Blake put it, we ‘see the world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour’.
Yes, indeed. What makes me think, more than anything else, about the Implicate Order, is nature and wildlife. Simply considering the frailty and resilience of tiny creatures, going about their business; or the sheer immensity and beauty of life. If I can ever believe in something other than every day events, it will be because of this. Not because of doctrines and creeds and mosques and synagogues, churches and clergy; or theology or any of those things!