The Spiraling Motion of Daily Life

In a remarkable book on the teachings of Ibn al-'Arabi there is this wonderful statement about the spiraling motion of daily life that we all experience. This teaching comes in a particular focus on discernment and how it is that we discern and come to see the signs of divine Guidance within the everyday, mundane details of living. Morris says that we are often blinded by the vast array of unconscious, unexamined, socially reinforced assumptions about what is or is not "spiritual."

For the act and the expression of spiritual discernment involves a constant interplay of seeking, then of receptivity and contemplation ("listening"), reflection, appropriate action, and then further observation and reflection on the consequences of that action and the challenges of the next destined situation of testing and learning--and so on, in a never-ending, yet never identical repeated ascending spiral. And this process is not something mysterious and esoteric, but something that we necessarily constantly practice, from infancy onward--most obviously and subtly, perhaps, in our intimate daily interactions with all other souls around us.
--James Winston Morris, The Reflective Heart, 180-181.