Dear Haran,

Thank you for your letter. I hope that it doesn't strike you as condescending when I write that I liked your letter very much, and that it doesn't make you angry when I write that I agree with everything you tell me. I have been wrestling in a more or less formal way with what you and I now call spirituality since I was 16 years old. 72 years ago; that's a long time, and since I write little essays about what I think and feel, I've used up a lot of paper, much of which has been saved in cardboard boxes, waiting to be reread, rethought, and perhaps even scanned into the computer.

Here's the sonnet again:

              Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
   This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
   To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
                                
You write:

The Sonnet is and is not about spirituality to me. It is not in the sense that as active life fades it reveals its secrets to us, rather like the tide revealing gems on the shore as it ebbs, particularly for the final time.  So in this sense our appreciation for things can become intense as its value is increased through the shortage of supply (economics 101), in this case the amount of.time perceived to be remaining to us.

I reply:

We can skip economics 101, because this sonnet, as I read it, is an awakening to the circumstance that the leaves have fallen, that the light has faded, and that the fire has died down, leaving nothing but love, nothing but agape, which I think we agree is the life to which the spirit awakens.  

You write:

An insight into the process here is quite straightforward: that when you look at the world apart from 'you' you know that it is different from yourself.  If u then close your eyes and apply that same logic as you observe your body sensations. Then your thoughts. If you can watch your thoughts then we know certainly they are not 'you'.

I quibble:

You said: "If you can watch your thoughts then we know certainly they are not 'you'." I say: "We" has no business in this meditation which concerns not the group, but only the individual.  When I "watch (my) thoughts" then I know certainly that I am thinking. "Watching my thoughts" is thinking. The "thoughts" may not be me, but so long as I am "watching my thoughts", though perhaps I can be made to disappear as an object, I cannot be made to disappear as a subject. A thought is not a thing. A thought is not an object. Thinking is a process of the spiritual life, just as breathing is a process of the physical life. The contrasts between spirituality and actuality, between subjectivity and objectivity, are linguistic problems which are neither your fault nor mine but reflections of the limitation of language.

You and I aren't the only ones who can't figure this out.  Søren Kierkegaard wrote:

"The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self." (The Sickness Unto Death)

I see two related problems in your exposition of spirituality, neither of which you have addressed. a) the incapacity of language to describe spirituality, and b) the impossibility of publicizing to a congregation, spirituality which is in essence an individual, inward, subjective experience. 

What you call "spirituality", I call subjectivity. I have thought and written a great deal about subjectivity and its opposite, objectivity, mostly in German.  I doubt they would be of interest to you, but translating my ideas into English, would be a good exercise for me.

Jochen