I think many people will have to spend less time constructing this section, because we don’t know the ultimate nature of reality, although reality is likely more crazy than we are imagining. No one can say that one particular spiritual belief or another is definitely wrong… so just write what you want.
I appear to be conscious. I am embodied as a human being with five senses that look out into the world and I have an awareness of what is “out there”. Technically, this is false, clearly. I intellectually understand that my senses receive impressions, like light photons fall on my retina and disturbances in air vibrate a hammer in my ear. There are nerves on my skin that can recognise pressure, temperature changes etc. and all of these signals are converted to electricity, which shoots along my nervous system into a big ball of neurons in my skull (which is actually a giant sheet folded into an irregular ball shape) and this organ somehow takes all the electrical signal and recreates a mental representation of a world that is “out there” beyond my skull.
Of course, the world might not actually be “out there”, I might be a brain in a vat being fed a simulation. The answer to this is that I cannot know that, and if I could it wouldn’t actually change my experience of being conscious, the agency that I do and do not have over various things and how I can be happy and unhappy.
I can objectively perceive things in the world but can’t directly change them, but I have an inner-world, where I can create anything I want, but when I choose not to, it kind of creates itself as daydreams, memories, worries etc. I want to be happy and not sad. Everything changes in the outer-world and I have limited control. Therefore, to orientate happiness as a reaction to things I perceive with my senses CANNOT WORK; it’s impossible as nothing stays the same.
In the inner-world, it all keeps changing and can be good or bad, unless I choose to reign what is created there, which I am able to do at any time. Therefore, ultimately, I can only be truly happy by orientating the way I am feeling by choosing the contents of my mind and largely disregarding what my senses perceive, as ultimately they are the same, i.e. the world “out there” is recreated by my brain “in here”. IT’S ALL IMAGINARY.
I haven’t always physically existed, and I won’t always; I will die. I don’t remember dying before so I don’t know what will happen, but I know that I won’t have a body, so I won’t have senses. When that happens I won’t be able to interact with the physical world the way I (possibly) do now, but I have perceptions in the mental-world and dream-world and they don’t depend on my physical senses. Therefore, when I die, I will be existing wholly there rather than both there and here in the physical world which is now the case. Therefore, if I’ve learned to discipline the way my inner-world is created in this life while still alive, it should stand me in good stead when I only live there in the future.
In the world I have perceived people and found teachings that tell me that there is an ultimate state beyond suffering to attain. It’s like the ultimate self-improvement that actually results in the extinguishing of a sense of self. So the perception of being separate from what it perceived, thus no suffering as I’ll only exist as change itself. That makes sense, on the basis that the world is so complex and evolution seems to move forward towards intelligence with the possibility of awakening.
Because this isn’t something that can be reasoned, it can only be ‘realised’, i.e. if it was a set of logical steps to understand, someone would have written it down and I would have read them by now. Therefore, it’s more like a ‘realisation’, an understanding that just arises when the conditions in the mind are right. I think this might be the case as ideas just ‘pop’ into my mind when I will them. When I lose something I try and create thoughts to remember where I put it but when I cannot I just stop and wait, and quite some time later it just ‘pops’ into my head. Therefore, if I cannot reason this ultimate state, it must be based on waiting with a peaceful mind, which is what people who have obtained it recommend, i.e. meditation, or meditating aka choosing the contents of the mind — which is actually the same formula to create happiness. Therefore I will essentially dedicate my life and time to disciplining my mind.
Argument:
I exist.
I can perceive inside and outside.
I have limited control over outside.
I have control over my inner-world, but only if I choose it.
Happiness can only occur by controlling my inner-world.
If there is any ultimate answer, it can only be found by the above method.
Thus the rest of my life needs to be dedicated to mental discipline.
—
So that’s my bag concerning spirituality. You’re could be completely different, and I won’t really give advice because it’s a very personal thing. There’s only one guidance really, and that is to think back to the birth of Western culture, which was the philosophers of ancient Greece. They lived in a world where everything was explained by myths, the stories (made up) of the exploits of various Gods and Goddesses, and the philosophers decided to disregard this and base their ideas on their own experience, not what other people have told them.