It's difficult navigating a spiritual conversation with individuals who, by the very nature of their belief, are forced in to a worldview where they are right, everyone who even slightly disagrees is wrong, and that THEY have ultimate claim on absolute truth.
As a child I was raised in the Christian faith. I went to church every Sunday, celebrated the holidays, read the scripture, and sang the hymns but none of it ever really CONNECTED with me on any sort of deeper spiritual level.
When I was a teenager I finally admitted to my parents that the faith was just never something that blossomed in me.
Since then I have studied many different world religions and developed my own belief system. I have found beliefs and teachings from across the globe that resonated and stuck with me in ways the pastor at the pulpit of my youth could never inspire.
As many of us with religious upbringings do, I of course had my more angst-fueled years of rebellion against the teachings of my youth. But as time went on I came to peace with my past and what I had been taught.
It would take a year and a day to fully map out the inner spiritual landscape of my personal belief system but the heart of it is this:
We exist in ways that are fundamentally unknowable to our level of understanding. We are too limited by our physical incarnation's perception of reality to say for certain what, if anything lies beneath.
What IS for certain is that, for as long as humans have walked this earth, we have sought connection through any number of methods. Connection with something beyond ourselves. Connection with something that we, on some fundamental instinctual level, can almost feel as if we should be able to reach out and touch.
What that may be or what that may mean I can't say.
But what I do know is that in a vast and infinite universe, we are limited, not just by our minds, but by the barrier of language. We exist spiritually (or mentally if you prefer) in a limitless realm of thought and concept. Of dreams and imagination. We express this through art. Through music and poetry and writing. And in that never ending quest to express ourselves to each other we have yet to find any single method of expression that fully translates, in full uncorrected fidelity, any thought or concept that we can dream.
It is through that lens that I view truth. I seek to understand with the acknowledgement that I cannot. What I cannot understand I can accept. If not as a truth as I understand it, then as another perspective of truth.
That is why I believe all genuinely held spiritual beliefs to be the same. While the language and expression of those beliefs differs it is the connection to something beyond ourselves that all spiritual believers share.
The only problem, the only conflict that arises is when the expression of that connections meets another through two human beings who are unable or unwilling to view each other from a different perspective. When someone is dedicated to the perspective of their perception of reality through their physical incarnation there is simply no way for them to see the truth that we are just actors on a stage.
So while navigating conversations with those who believe they have sole claim on ultimate truth you can never budge them. Not even to explain you are standing on the same side of the invisible line they created.
"Well we can agree to disagree, you're allowed to be wrong." They say.
What they fail to understand is that we CAN agree to disagree. But the other person is ALSO allowed to be RIGHT.