Many years ago, I was reading a chapter in Bahram Elahi‘s The Foundations of Natural Spirituality when a paragraph leaped out and grabbed my attention.

“God is in everything, everywhere and with everyone. Whether in a dream or while we are awake, directly or indirectly, through the intermediary of His messengers or those who are loved by us, or through any other means—even a passerby in the street—He communicates with each one of us. But in order to hear Him and to understand Him, we must first learn how to decode His messages.” (The Foundations of Natural Spirituality, Bahram Elahi, page 18)

I realized in that moment that if I were to have my own intimate relationship with God, I needed to learn to decode His messages. It led to my making more and more determined efforts that I have related in my recently published book, Decoding The Spiritual Messages of Everyday Life.

Being a practically minded psychiatrist, I felt that the first step was to figure out what made a spiritual experience different from a seemingly similar psychological experience—not in theory but in my own experience. So, I began writing down my own experiences on which my beliefs rested in as objective a way as I could. I then tried to see what conclusions each of these experiences could justify. Yet, interesting as they were to me personally, as evidence they were frightfully inconclusive. I realized that although I had initially needed to use my experiences to inspire faith in the existence of a spiritual dimension and in one or another person’s belief as to what it meant, it was now essential for me to learn to combine the evidence of my own experience with the evidence of other people’s experience to see which of the conflicting interpretations seemed most justified by the evidence rather than our intuitive grasp of what was going on.

To get started, I sent a questionnaire to all my friends and asked them to forward it to their friends. I collected a few hundred experiences and then interviewed in greater depth about fifty people whose experiences touched me in one way or another. Each was so different that I had to come up with a method to integrate them with my own in such a way as to increase my understanding of the forces causing our experiences. To make a long story short, I discovered that if we slightly modify what we all naturally do in our material life to take into account what we believe to be the spiritual element in that given situation that we can learn from each others’ spiritual experiences in the same way that we can then learn from others’ encounters with physical reality.

Let me describe the process in a very oversimplified way. It’s by first identifying the most determining spiritual and material factors that are active in a given situation and the way in which those factors influenced our own and others’ thoughts, feelings and actions and by secondly adapting our conclusions about how these elements work together to the particulars of our own life. To give a purely material example, if you have a problem with your boss, you do better understanding how others have dealt with bosses and then adapting those general conclusions to the specifics of your situation. What you need to do is to then add what you consider to be your understanding of the spiritual elements that might be at work in the situation and then see how that influences the outcome. And just as the proof of our ability to learn from others in that situation would be how much better it helped us deal with the realities of our own situation, so in learning from the spiritual experiences of others it’s by seeing how much better it helps us take into account the spiritual forces at work in everyday life.

In every study, it’s important to limit the field of your inquiry. Just as I found that I could psychologically understand both myself and others better by examining our interpersonal relationships, work lives and everyday habits rather than our peak experiences, so I found that decoding the spiritual messages that came in those same everyday aspects of everyday life provided a common reference point that led to a better understanding of how spiritual forces worked.

The ability to decode messages in my own life led me to more strongly believe one of Ostad Elahi‘s most innovative teachings—that spirituality could be approached as a science rather than as a philosophy. In fact, it helped me focus more clearly on the task that exists before us today, for I saw that spirituality today is in the same shape that psychology was a hundred years ago when no one thought the mind could be understood scientifically. I could see how we could learn from way psychology advanced and modify it to take into account the unique elements of spiritual experience to arrive at an ever-increasing understanding of our common spiritual nature.

Fortunately for us, we don’t need to start at the beginning, for each spiritual and religious tradition has given us sets of principles by which to engage the spiritual dimension of everyday life. By using the principles common to most in a systematic way, we will gradually arrive at a better understanding of what the originator of the principles believed was important for us. As Ostad Elahi’s philosophy was not only built on the principles common to all religions but also encouraged me to be more objective and systematic, I used the basic principles that were selected in his book 100 Maxims of Guidance to pull all the disparate experiences together into the coherent whole. To foster my efforts, for example, I often thought of the maxim “On the path of truth, all religions are but one, race and color are irrelevant, and there is no difference between men and women” for it encouraged me to do my best to arrive at a clearer understanding of our spiritual nature. In particular situations of everyday life that mystified me, I thought of the maxim that expresses the principle of causal determinism that is at the heart of all science, “Chance and coincidence are only illusions; there is always a cause and a reason for everything.” If we can’t understand something today, we will understand it in the future. As I pushed forward, I began to understand that each of the messages were a part of a larger plan that I tried to capture in the subtitle of my book How Life Shows Us What We Need to Know.

The real key in learning to decode messages is our discovering common methods that can be applied by people from different religious and spiritual traditions. Only then is real progress possible. For just as it takes the effort of tens of thousands of researchers working together with a common method to gather the evidence that enables us to use the insights of geniuses in material science to improve our everyday lives, so the same is true in spiritual science. The better we can formulate a common method, the more each message that we decode will become a bit of data in our collective understanding of spiritual forces. We will all benefit, for if we are struggling to understand a given issue or situation in our everyday life, there are thousands of others around the world who have struggled with precisely that issue and resolved it in their own lives. By using the Internet and sites like decodeyourmessages.com that I have set up to facilitate the process, we can share what we have learned.

I admit, it’s hard to get started because the task seems so huge. Yet, I believe that if you start, you will soon see the benefits of it, as I did, and they will be sufficient to keep you going. That’s because sharing with others what you have learned is a way of expressing your gratitude to the Source of your messages—and it will improve your understanding of the guidance that your messages deliver in your own life. Each of us understands one little piece of the puzzle but by working together we can show the truth of one of Ostad Elahi’s most innovative discoveries—that we can integrate spirituality into our more complex and rational lives by approaching spirituality as a science.

 This work is offered under a Creative Commons licence