On the flipside, the feeling that nearly all of us have a great deal of the time is that the world is full of wrongs to be righted, problems to be sorted out, things to be done. There is appalling suffering in the world: wars, natural disasters, starvation, ecological catastrophe, human brutality, not to mention the tyranny of the To Do list. The response that 'it was meant to be' seems callous and insensitive.

These two attitudes are in different worlds. In the first world there is no sense in which anything could, let alone should, be otherwise; in the second world just about everything should be otherwise, and life is a constant battle against chaos. Yet both ways of looking ring true.

There are, indeed, traditional divisions between the two worlds. The first world is called 'spiritual'; the second is seen as opposed to the first and is referred to as 'the flesh', 'the material world', 'the temporal world', or simply 'the world' - usually with the background idea that it's a bad thing that we need to wake up or escape from. The seeker wants to get more of those perfect moments, and eventually to live in that sublime state all the time.

We need to minimise the old connotations. One of the least contentious of the terms for the second world - the world where things can and usually should be otherwise - is 'temporal'. Calling the non-spiritual world 'material', or worse, 'the flesh' - has come to carry all sorts of very smelly red herrings, many of which will be pointed out as we go along. Temporal simply means 'of time' - as distinct from eternity. This is fine, and so we can stick with it.

The temporal world includes everything we experience through our senses and everything we do with that experience. The physical sciences compress the experience into generalities, which enable communication, tools and techniques; psychology and philosophy make models of how and why we feel about it all, and the arts experiment and play with those models, making use of the aforementioned tools and techniques. Life goes on in all its variety, and we enjoy or deplore the details.

By contrast, the spiritual world is eternal. Eternity is not a very long period of time; if eternity means anything at all, it is outside time. We probably won't go too far wrong if we think of time as a line, the present being a point on the line, and eternity being a view of the whole line all at once. In the temporal world we can't step outside time; eternity somehow includes time but is not confined by it.

A logical glimmer

The spiritual world has no shortage of synonyms. We find it referred to as Almighty God, the Creator, Spirit, Ultimate Reality, All-that-is, the All, Love, the Source, Home, the Way the Truth and the Life, The Dao, The Absolute, I Am, Not this, not that, Being, The Centre, and so on, including such devices as a random pattern of dots which can't be pronounced because that would give it a name.

At first glance it's not obvious that Love, for instance, is a synonym for the Absolute, and it's difficult to find out whether the oft-repeated comment that 'God is Love' is intended to be a definition of God or a remark about Love. There is, however, one logical handhold on the sheer face of this Ultimate Reality, and despite all the well-founded warnings we are going to grab it.

Very simply, the handhold is this: in Reality what is, is and what isn't, can't be. In Reality there is a particular number of hairs on your head, and there is a particular spacetime configuration of sparrows falling. It is all-powerful because it's the Way things are, end of discussion. To see, or be, the Absolute is to be omnipotent and omniscient by default.

This says everything and nothing. It says everything because there's nothing that it doesn't cover, and nothing because it's a tautology - true, but only trivially true. Nevertheless, one can be lucky in one's choice of tautology. This one manages to seem meaty without being misleading - there's a vague shadow of profundity about it but no hint of a suggestion that we need to believe something preposterous to move forward.

Recurring themes in spiritual advancement

Given our predicament, books on the spiritual path are ipso facto opaque to us at this stage. Nevertheless, there are recurring themes in the attempts of those-who-know to explain it to us. I've separated out three of these themes, just to make the discussion manageable. This is not an exhaustive analysis (which would in any case hardly be appropriate), but a set of impressions of what we are told lies above and beyond the temporal world.

The three themes are: detachment, emptiness and Oneness.

Detachment is a favourite word of the mystics, and is indicated in such sayings as: give up all you have and follow Me; renounce the world; lose your life to save it; the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak; hate your father and mother; if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!; let go of what you are clinging to; and don't identify with your body, mind or emotions.

Here is the image of a caravan of camels marching confidently through the eye of a needle. Here are all the seven deadly sins. The haunting refrain is that we must give up everything that we are attached to; the idea of sacrifice looms large here, since it's generally assumed that if we're attached to something we don't want to let go of it. The hellfire merchants therefore concentrate their efforts into telling us that if we enjoy something, it's bad for our spiritual well-being.

There is a deep confusion here, to which we shall return. In the meantime we'll take it as read that detachment - in the sense of letting go of the things that are most precious to us - seems to be generally agreed to be a prerequisite for our punchline.

The second theme is emptiness. This is embodied in: the forgiveness of sins, humility, judge not, Thy Will be done, it was meant to be, walk the extra mile, go with the flow.

A kind of invulnerability comes from emptiness. There's no calculation, no 'what's in it for me?' One image used by the mystics is a cup with a hole in the bottom: always accepting, always empty, always the same. Stories and personal experience abound with the theme that you only get it right when you stop thinking about it. Hence, perhaps, the New Age haunting refrain that the intellect is bad for our spiritual well-being.

Perhaps we could say that detachment is like shedding external baggage and emptiness is like shedding internal baggage. As we shed the baggage we become more free. It seems simple, but of course it isn't that easy. The way things go, the more baggage you shed the more you seem to find you are still carrying. The emptier you are, the more room there is for more junk; the more you detach from one thing, the more likely you are to get attached to something else. So it's no good just taking on a new lifestyle with new values, however noble the new discipline might seem. This is why we find the repeated comment to the effect that we can't find salvation (or enlightenment) by our own efforts.

Nevertheless, an end to the search is promised. Detachment and emptiness, once attained, will (so the promise goes) take us to the blissful state of Oneness. Here we find comments like: ask and you shall receive, thou art that, the Kingdom is within you, grace comes unbidden, we are all the same, faith will make you whole, and God is Love. Near as I can figure it, the idea is to develop a kind of trust that the next thing to do will be given you, or equivalently, is already within you. This is the promised outcome, and no amount of effort will attain it because it is already in place. Our punchline is to be found here. The outcome is, we are assured, a kind of joy that is quite different in quality from anything we can achieve in the temporal world. We are stripped of the outer shell (the ego, perhaps) that hurt us so much, but somehow we remain ourselves. This is a mystery, but not a problem. Even the busy little brain doesn't need to understand how that works. It would be great to get close enough to see it working at all.

Recurring themes in personal development

The world of lifeskills workshops, assertiveness training and the myriad new systems of counselling and psychotherapy also has its haunting refrains. They are along the lines of: learn to say no, go for what you want, don't be a victim, be aware of danger, believe in yourself, follow your heart, unlock your creative potential, find your own unique identity and take pride in it, take control of your life, don't let the bastards grind you down.

All this advice seems to be completely contrary to the themes of spiritual teaching. Where in spirituality the ego is dissolved, in the temporal world developing a decent ego is essential to the process. In spirituality pride is deadly; here pride is a prerequisite. Being nice to everyone only ends in mediocrity and failure. Standing up for yourself and carving out an identity and a place in the world for yourself is the way to find happiness.

By contrast with the spiritual detachment from what we most value, in personal development we are urged to discover what really matters in our life, and to go for it without feeling guilty or threatened. We must follow the heart, not the head. Effectively, we need to get in touch with our deepest feelings, and discover what we most value, if we are to find ourselves and discover love. This requires exposure and involvement, the seeming opposite of detachment, and the theme might be called awareness.

The theme in personal development that stands opposite the spiritual 'emptiness' could be called choice. (Originally I used the word 'control' here, but there are connotations about 'control freaks' that I want to avoid.) Take charge of your life, don't be so anxious to please others that you lose sight of your own goals; think positively - it's the way you think that makes your world and you get what you give out. Resist what you don't like, don't sit on the fence: if you decide something is intolerable, do something about it. Your life is your own, and does not belong to anyone else.

The whole tenor of the personal growth movement is pointing to liberation from the shackles of the past, the old habits and the painful memories, and to a vision of mind and body integrated into an autonomous, creative whole that rejoices in its separateness and independence. Across the divide from the spiritual Oneness, the goal of awareness and control is individuality.

Unpacking the Predicament

Spiritual and personal development, then, are clearly and neatly opposed to each other in just about every way. Writings on 'basic Christianity' make this point very forcefully, usually by contrasting the committed Christian with the miserable sinner he (usually he) was before he found God. The prevailing theme is that we are bogged down in our own little worlds, with no thought for other people, just a selfish drive to look after Number One. One comment that abounds is the idea that we are resistant to the idea that there is something greater than our little selves, and we will do anything to defend this miserable ego's existence.

This 'propaganda' picture of the worldly-wise is way off-beam. It brashly assumes that a person who tries to live without God doesn't have a conscience. If pressed, it might mumble something about conscience being God working in the person anyway, since all the good that we do comes from God. It might then resort to telling you that this is a mystery. It incorporates the insight that the temporal and spiritual worlds seem to have opposite goals, and elementary logic tells it that one of them must be an illusion.

At this point the busy little brain sticks its first oar in.

There is a confusion between the two worlds; this is becoming obvious. Just as psychology doesn't talk to physics, except for occasionally swapping the odd metaphor, we should not expect spiritual insights to address the temporal world. Later on we can look at relationships between different ways of looking, but for the moment we should take it as a datum that a remark from the sublime bliss of eternity will not mean the same thing, if it means anything at all, in our temporal lives. The point is amply illustrated in the graffiti that reads: 'the meek shall inherit the earth - if that's all right with the rest of us?' If humility meant 'be a doormat', then doormats would be radiantly happy. They're not. Simplicity is great; stupidity is not recommended.

So far, so good. From now on we don't try to transfer insights from spirituality to the temporal world, or vice versa. Maybe later, when we know what we're doing, we can ask about how they might relate to each other. But for now, we keep them separate.

Being separate, there is nothing that they have in common. They use similar terminology and similar-looking concepts (love, freedom, the Self), but we must now remember that even where they use the same word in a similar context, they are not talking about the same thing. This means that there is no way that the two worlds can either agree with or contradict each other. There is no point of contact, no dimension in common, at all.

This immediately removes the need to take sides. All we have done is to distinguish between two ways of thinking. Since the two worlds have no dimension in common, we can't see the here and now in both ways at once, but we can switch from one to the other and back again. Most, if not all, of the nonsense in spiritual talk comes from confusion between temporal and spiritual insights. They are separate, but equally valid.

The distinction between right and wrong has not yet entered the discussion. Since the most prevalent confusion seems to be over values, the next step is to look at where right and wrong, good and evil, can possibly fit into the scheme of things.