UR Part of It

Spiritual development, in my experience, has been associated both with organized groups and independent of involvment with organized groups. Religious and spiritual groups all have some sort of social hierarchy based on the experiences, activities, and purpose of the group and often attainment of specific spiritual experiential objectives are, in addition to being personal experiences, markers of social status within the group. The framework of seeing spiritual devleopment as being associated with social hierarchy, authority, or status has been an obstruction to my own spiritual growth. After realizing that my own spiritual development was inevitably appropriate to me and not a marker of status in any way my spiritual development began to change into a more personal and flexable process that fit my needs.

I have come to the conclusion that the capacity for spiritual experience is part of our natural capacity for expansion of the scope of our personal consciousness and that that capacity is shared across reality in various ways. When I had my first significant spiritual experience I had no knowledge of, and was making no attempts to have a spiritual experience. It was only later in life when reading descriptions of spiritual experience that I found that what I found as truth early in life was acknowledged in spiritual systems and traditions as a goal of spiritual pratctice. So the cultural aspects of spiritual experience must take a back seat to the biological roots of thaos experiences in my mind. My experience contradicts the ownership that many spiritual systems take of spiriritual states of being, as they are a product of the spiritual systems themselves. In fact I think the assertion of ownership by systems and groups is exclusively a product of the need for social hirearchy and status/rank competition.

There is a paradox in this observation. Spiritual experience its self tends to take an individual out of submission to social hierarchy because one state of being seems to transcend another. In my experience when I stand most profoundly in the deepest place of conscious life that I know I do not feel bound by any social hierarchy and my relative position in the various social hierarchy's I naturally am part of. This makes me a natural leader because of unintentional social signaling, as if not being bound puts someone in a position of superior rank/status.