'Spirituality' can look really different, depending on where you're coming from. My friend Felicia Murrell recently observed:

"Moving into contemplative/mystical/'enlightened' spaces, I find myself in this wrestle with people who promote nothingness or no-thing as the ultimate

"...point of transcendence.

It confuses the heck out of me, given all the beautiful diversity we can so see and identify with subject to subject amongst the trees, the flowers, the birds, etc."

"But when it comes to diversity and uniqueness of personhood, I’m supposed to want to leave my God-given Blackness and meld into the nothingness of 'pure light.' "

"I’m not sure if I’m more bothered by the fact that these ideals are mainly taught by pale people who don’t have far to go to get to the nothingness of 'pure light' or that fact that 'pure light' is considered more worthy to ascribe to than, say, the darkness of the cosmos."

"Perhaps both/and, but that’s my internal daily, sometimes hourly, wrestle. We all seem to be struggling with the different ways in which dominance masquerades as righteousness."

I have to agree.

'Nondualism' has enjoyed a privileged place as THE spiritual paradigm of choice for at least 15 years now, as Westerners glean from Vedanta's supposed transcendence of form and collapse into 'pure' formlessness as the ultimate goal of enlightened perception.

"I think nondual perspectives contain valid insights, but I'm increasingly convinced that most popular appropriations of them are forms of spiritual bypassing to avoid the frictions and discomforts of a world of multiplicity."

The question I want to ask the avid nondualist is:

Do you think this world of form, manifestation, and 'many-ness' is a mistake? An anomaly? Something to be endured until it can be jettisoned so we can (as Felicia so aptly put it) meld into the nothingness of 'pure light'?

I can appreciate the idea that we're all made manifest from 'the One,' and thus retain an underlying unity, or interconnectedness.

And that perhaps our destiny is some re-affirmation of this original coherence.

But it's telling to me that most surviving indigenous cosmologies are not spare, minimalist, 'nondual' affairs, but sprawling, maximalist lifeways, populated by all manner of visible and invisible creatures, manifestations of divinity, and parts of ourselves.

(Artist: Unknown)

Ditto for Black and Latinx Liberation paradigms, and Womanist wisdom. The invitation I'm hearing from these voices is what I'm hearing from Felicia:

Can we release our (ahem) white-knuckled grip on The One?

Can we slow down to appreciate the robust, complex beauty of The Many in all her particular, gorgeous forms?

I'm listening.

#ContemplativeChristianity #Spirituality #Contemplative #SpiritualBypassing #BlackTheology #LiberationTheology #WomanistTheology #NonDual #NonDualism