S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 6 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 2 0 1 EDITORIAL Editorial Frightening, and yet always accompanying the history of humankind – such are existential cri - ses! Crises of this kind remind us of our universal human experiences of incompleteness, dissatisfaction, and anxiety by making us aware of our conditioning – our unquestionable dependance on causes of physical, biological, social, cultural and psychological nature. They are these crisis situations that challenge our ways of life, thinking and experiencing, and at the same time, offer a chance for their change. The way we experience reality is related to the way we understand ourselves. Our self-image functions as a matrix that inevitably shapes our experience – creates our reality on our own image. Thus, the reality, as we perceive it, is always constructed, and the agent behind the constructive processes of man-made reality is to be found in our identity constructed on the basis of variety of conditioning factors that affect us. The opening article of the 2020 Fall edition of the Spirituality Studies journal directly addresses the question of our identity and puts it at the very center of every authentic spirituality by doing so on an example of the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, a prominent contemporary representative Cordially Martin Dojčár of the Indian tradition of Advaita Vedānta. In it, G. M. Timčák not only provides a description of the identity constructing mechanism amplified by our hypnotic fascination with metamorphosis of objects, both sensual and mental, but also construes comprehensive didactics of its deconstruction. It cannot be done by thinking, nor ritual practices, as Janneke van der Leest points out on an example of Friedrich Schleiermacher and the European Romantic movement. Spirituality is something more personal as Monika Zaviš and Pavel Procház - ka show by studying spirituality of Muslim spouses fighting infertility, and Miloš Lichner by looking for patristic inspirations for the theological study of spirituality. Priority of experience is put forward by Srikanth N. Jois and his team in their study of correlations between the personality types and prānic energy perceptions. A search for the core of authentic spirituality requires not so much doing as being . This is the message that resonates strongly in the concluding article of the current edition of Spirituality Studies authored by Daniel Simpson. Let us find an invi - tation in this message to turn our predominant attention from doing to being in the challenging times of the present global crisis.
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