Many of us find ourselves mystified by the topic of spiritual strength. Most would like to feel more spiritually empowered, but we don’t really know what spiritual strength is, how to find it, how to develop it, or how to use it in our daily life. How many times have you heard someone say, “We are such spiritually pessimistic, and negative people…”

Think about it. Do you believe that we really live in the material world? Yet often here in America, and most other countries, we call ourselves “American, or English, or English-Midwestern, orucks…I love that term, it really doesn’t mean anything. It’s a identity. So many other cultures have terms that describe something that our culture doesn’t even have. Someone asked me once what the word was for me: spiritual strength. I just winced and said, “Nothing like this.”

Someone told me once that spirituality was something that had to do with being in a state of karma. I said, “Karma’s a total contradiction. If you believe in karma, and I do, then it is a contradiction to believe that spiritual strength exists in your life or in your world.”

Spiritual strength has to do with your state of consciousness. It has to do with your relationship to that pool of consciousness that observes the action and the body under the pulls of physical nature.

From a meditative state, you begin to experience the awareness that exists beyond, rather than within the limitations of the body, mind, and physical senses. When you are in the meditation state, you feel the connection between body, mind, and spirit. You come to know that you are not just limited to the body and the mind. You begin to experience spiritual strength.

If you are spiritual, as many of us are, you have realized that you are not just limited to all the stories that you’ve created in this lifetime. You began to feel that there is much more to you than cooperative behavior, manifesting motes of happiness, love, and personal wellbeing. You began to understand that the meditative state, truly spiritual, is just one of many states that you can simultaneously be still as you encounter the sensory world and go beyond sensory experience.

There is most certainly a deity that is all-knowing, all-consciousness, and all-wise. It is similar to the God that is spoken of in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and others. God is both a watching and loving God, just as it is also a watchful God, or one that keeps an eye on our personal behavior, but with limitations, that respond to our bark orencies.

Humans have many names for this supreme life force that is all knowing and all-conscious, but no name for this divine state of consciousness, that aware of the whole. We may call it a Higher Power, a Higher Self, a knowing of the Creator before this life, or even a knowing of the Creator while we live in this life. No name, no term even, is necessary. It is the experience, the knowing, and the experience that is so joyful and freely wonderful to can only ever be described as the state of Oneness.

I am not just speaking of religious experience here, although it is the moments between live and death that will forever point to this truth. I am referring to the experience of being this expression of that mysterious oneness in life that is fully expression of the infinite space that is before us and still is in the beyond.

The great news is that the time of us as human beings, the purpose of us as physical bodies, and the reason why we are not united in consciousness and in spirit (to use the language of Eastern traditions) is not gone. It is still here. The quantum circumstances of this time have opened the doorway for us as the human family to become aware of this higher state of being, of God, of part oneness.

There is nothing wrong with any of the ways to experience spiritual growth that I have described. There is only one factor that has hindered, and frequently still does the expression of spiritual experience in this current lifetime and not to to mention all those who have gone on before us. I call this factor the human psychological roadblock. We have unconsciously created the psychological roadblock to human being and not just physical symptoms, but spiritual symptoms as well.

Words of caution: When you begin to open into the experience of spiritual growth, what you are experiencing is a truly living experience. It is not a feeling, it is not a visceral experience, but a spiritual experience. You may get joyful as you go beyond your limiting beliefs, go beyond rational thought and turn to experience of the non-physical realm.