Soul Celebrations and Spiritual Snacks

Book excerpt: This guidebook on secular spirituality will appeal to both religious and nonreligious people. Basing its premises in values—and everyone has values—it offers broad avenues and private paths to achieve sustained, empowering, exalted, and expanding “Soul Celebration” experiences singular for every individual because each person’s value system is exclusively theirs alone. It also offers shorter, simpler “Spiritual Snacks” to provide instantly available, delectable bits of spiritual nourishment for spur-of-the-moment joyful experiences of being uniquely alive in today’s impersonal world. Our essential value center defines our distinctive personhood. This interior core can be activated by external stimuli into experiences of sustained secular spiritual bliss that celebrate our one-and-only inimitable personhood. How? By connecting to and uniting—becoming “One”—with three “other” here-on-earth entities that can stimulate our value center both emotionally and physically: nature, art, and romantically beloved humans. These three alone can open gateways that lead to the highest renewal of the essence—the soul—of Selfhood in a secular manner. By learning to approach the wonders of the physical universe selectively, we can experience a “merging” with chosen aspects of nature and come away with a glorious sense of having participated in eternity. A museum stroll, a novel, and music may turn into exhilarating experiences because art at its best expresses ideas that make manifest—in external, material form—the artists’ values. If they match our own, we may feel elevated to the point of experiencing the art aesthetically and spiritually. Romantic love with its sexual component is the ultimate secular spiritual experience because the most desirable and cherished human being is a living embodiment of our supreme values making this mind-body union the most sacred of all. Plus, happily, along with the three primaries, families and friends are rewarding subcategories for sharing marvelous spiritual-like experiences.