The last post was long – and it leads me to ask the question that is the title of this post!
How much evidence is there to state, with confidence, that spirituality is important to humanity?
On the surface – probably not a lot! If the proverbial Martian came down what would she think? If she picked up the popular newspapers and read random bits of social media, or surveyed peoples’ entertainment choices, or, indeed, spent some time in a war torn country, the flames of war fanned by people whose beliefs are based on teachings by intensely spiritual leaders hundreds of years ago, what would she think of spirituality?
We mentioned war a number of times in the website – and this surely is the acid test for spirituality – if it is important why do we have war?
If she was transported back to the time when I was young and saw reluctant teenagers dragging themselves to Mass every Sunday and kneeling at the back of the church she would probably have thought that attending to this spirituality thing was an awful chore.
Because of the prevalence of the Not-A-Bit evidence that I see around me every day, (and because I always like to challenge myself a bit) I am open to the argument that spirituality may be merely an interest of people who, because they are intelligent in an academic/philosophical way, think that they know best.
They put themselves in an advantageous position by playing on ordinary peoples’ insecurities and fears – using their well-thought out arguments and superior educational achievement to convince people who couldn’t give a damn anyway that just because they think that spirituality is a good thing to aspire to, everyone else should think the same.
There is a giant academic/education and religious industry built around the desirability of being spiritual and they are not going to let that go.
Or perhaps some people have more insight than others, or are more reflective.
Such people see an opportunity for themselves and exploit this. Because they appear to have insight they are elevated to a higher status as they claim to have some connection with the source or sources of mysteries in life. Some of this has worked out really well for humanity – but humans being human – it was also abused.
In many cases the vulnerabilities of the insightful and reflective people were exploited by people who rose in status, property and wealth, to the extent that they were unable to resist the pressure and drifted into organised religion which then became, in turn, a tool of the powerful rather than a source of inspiration or good.
Two points are worth noting here:
1. There is a lot of suffering in the world and spiritual people throughout history have convinced everyone else that there is something out there (a better place, like heaven – where there is no suffering) and that the spiritual ones have some kind of route to it. If we have no interest in spirituality but pretend to follow this path, adhering to the rules as laid down by those who have an interest in spirituality, we will, somehow, get to the place of no suffering when we die. This suited people in power, so they supported it, because it enabled them to keep other people powerless, obedient and docile.
2. Thinking themselves to be more intelligent and aware, the purveyors or gatekeepers of spirituality bore the pants off the majority of us who just want to get as much money as possible doing the least work and blow it on anything we want regardless of whether or not it ultimately leads to the destruction of our species. That is, a significant proportion of us are intimidated into pretending to be interested in matters of a spiritual nature to impress the intelligentsia who pack academia and the Pillars in general.
And, if everyone was in touch with their spirituality what would the spiritual ones do to promote it? Would the world be a happier place?
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After all that (what some would call cynicism) it is interesting that heaven (and going there after death) is now somewhat outdated – in the Western World anyway.
Nowadays the edge, or advantage, (that those who promote the primacy or benefits of spirituality have) seems to come from our wish to be, overall, good people, or (more pertinently) perceived to be good people, so that we can have a little bit of heaven while we are alive and, if it exists, all of it after we die.
After all, if we think about it, when people meet each other first, a lot of Of-Course-It-Is type behaviour dominates. It is only when people get to know each other that the Not-A-Bit shows itself………..
But most notably, the two descriptions of human behaviour in the different perspectives post point to the paradox of our relationship with our spirituality.
On the one hand it is something that we desire, or aspire to – on the other hand it appears to be of such little value to us that we ignore it.
However, if we think deeply about it – which, by the way, is what the spiritual types advise us to do – it is clear that spirituality is important. But if we don’t think deeply about it – perhaps it isn’t!
But maybe, at the end of the day, the fact that the vast majority of us want to be perceived to be what most people understand to be good people is enough proof that spirituality is indeed important to humanity!