The One and the Many

The One and the Many

by Kurt Barstow

Spirituality is nothing like I ever thought it would be when I was younger... well, even three years ago. Having taken a class in Zen Buddhism in college and for much of my professional life working on Western devotional material from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, I had a notion that Enlightenment was something that happened in distant lands and sanctity was something that was relegated to the past. I thought we lived in a thoroughly modern or post-modern world that essentially had nothing to do with such charming relics of days gone by or foreign esoterica and the fact that I was concentrated more on work than what was actually going on in the world spiritually served to reinforce that idea.

I had no idea, for example, that there was a synthesis of the world's wisdom traditions that had been going on and would be popularized on the Internet and in movies. I didn't make the connection between the state of the planet and the imperatives of contemporary spirituality. I didn't realize that so many current day saints and awakened people were in our midst and available to the public. And I had no idea that the basic technologies of awakening and the information to provoke a shift in consciousness were being made available to and were interested in by so many. ..

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KURT BARSTOW is freelance writer. Kurt’s involvement with art, culture, and spirituality span over two decades and include two books and fourteen years as a manuscripts curator at the Getty. His new direction is in health and spirituality, in both massage therapy and soul-centered psychology. He has an Integral Life Practice that includes yoga and meditation.