The Sensational vs the Spiritual

We are all bound by some degree to our senses; they are how we have been conditioned to see the world. Our sight, sound, taste and touch are the litmus that we use to test that which surrounds us. Yet to claim that these senses are the objective truth about the world around us is a very difficult claim to justify. While our senses seem to work similarly from person to person, each of us carries within them our own interpretation of reality. We see this when we observe how different humans distinguish different shades of a color, or when people are asked to identify the source of a sense of smell. These interpretations are a powerful reminder of the limited lenses that we engage the world through, and how these senses can often times be misleading.

One adverse effect of these conditioned senses is that they can often imitate and create illusions, distorting themselves to align with our imaginary interpretive. We see this when white folks are asked to describe their encounters with Black folks, when cisgender people are asked about transgender folks and when straight people are asked about queer folks. We could claim that the evidence brought forth by racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia are created by delusions (believing a truth that is contrary to evidence) but to do that dismisses the power of our imaginations, and the ability for our senses to adopt these interpretations into sensations that we then interpret as fact.

Spiritual counseling provides us with the tools to interrogate these interpretations and begin to separate the sensational from the spiritual in our everyday lives. The spiritual is that voice that lies underneath our senses but is often drowned out by the sensations which encase it. Learning to listen for that spiritual voice often requires us to let go and unlearn how we have come to see the world, simply because so much of our interpersonal ideas about other people come from a mix of our imagination and social conditioning. Spiritual counseling in this manner is best done through memoir and reflection, teasing out our encounters with the other and being asked to reflect on our feelings about the other. Often in this exercise, we come to easily be able to identify the teachings that fueled our imagination about the other and begin to unlearn these ideologies.

The spiritual is a voice that will always guide us towards becoming better selves, towards the pursuit of justice, self-love and love for all of creation. With this voice we can build our skills of discernment, which helps us to determine where this call to justice will best be enacted. The spiritual also grounds us by reminding us that how we interact with the world is interpretive, inviting us to continually gain self-awareness about the ways in which our interpretations of our reality have been influenced by harmful ideologies. It hints that there is a reality outside of what we can perceive through our senses, if we learn to first tune out the noise.