Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

feeling" he experienced contemplating the underlying
order of the physical universe. The great geneticist
Barbara McClintock, whose research was both
ignored and disdained by her male colleagues for so
many years until it was finally recognized at age
eighty with a Nobel Prize, spoke of "a feeling for the
organism" in her efforts to unravel and understand
the intricacies of corn genetics. Perhaps ultimately,
spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and
interconnectedness directly, a seeing that
individuality and the totality are interwoven, that
nothing is separate or extraneous. If you see in this
way, then everything becomes spiritual in its deepest
sense. Doing science is spiritual. So is washing the
dishes. It is the inner experience which counts. And
you have to be there for it. All else is mere thinking.
At the same time, you have to be on the lookout for
tendencies toward self-deception, deluded thinking,
grandiosity, self-inflation, and impulses toward
exploitation and cruelty directed at other beings. A lot
of harm has come in all eras from people attached to
one view of spiritual "truth." And a lot more has come
from people who hide behind the cloak of spirituality
and are willing to harm others to feed their own
appetites.