I am sure that you are exhausted after the previous post and the one before it. As is said nowadays, you are spiritualitied out!
But I’ve started so I’ll finish – so let us, for the sake of argument, say that spirituality is important.
Let us assume that it is like breathing – it has high impact low noticability, and that without it we’d die. Let us assume that lack of spirituality would have long term detrimental effects on our physical health – though, admittedly, a bit slower than not breathing.
After all, it has survived tens of thousands of years of evolution in the consciousness of everyone worldwide and still is significant today – so, like compassion, it is obviously of some importance in our existence.
Then, why do humans generally, as evidenced by our consistent choices, appear to deem what most of us would understand to be spirituality to be of peripheral importance, or ignore it altogether?
To answer that question let us consider orienting our lives to do far more of, and think far more along the lines of the Of-Course-It-Is than we do now.
Would the wealth, power or control of someone else or some other people be diminished? If it would, perhaps there is a clue there as to why spirituality appears to be generally a peripheral phenomenon in our daily lives.
This is a bit of a long shot but I believe that there is a fair amount of evidence to show that if we are obsessive about power and control, we, deep down, fear spirituality – in particular the relationship aspect of it, and, in particular, our intimate relationship with self.
Our spirituality may be expressed through, and we may be very observant of religious strictures, but we are fearful of joy, abandonment, true intimacy and loving relationships. By extension we then fear spirituality getting out of control. (For example, the established churches corralled spirituality within a very tight boundary that excluded our sexuality).
Imagine what it would do to the power and control brigade if we all chose our own spiritual path. (The path less travelled – if you like – which, of course, if we all chose it would be the path most travelled)!
What would happen, for example, if controlling and powerful people in a country wanted to go to war to colonise a distant land and grab their resources and the vast majority of us thought the thoughts, or took seriously the experiences in Of-Course-It-Is.
I propose that we would not be very enthusiastic about engaging in the destructive and exploitative behaviour that the power and control elite wanted us to.
From their perspective it would be dangerous to have us ordinary people thinking too much about spirituality! Far better to control it through an established religion that is in cahoots with the powerful – as has been done, if not for millennia, certainly for many centuries. (For example, appointing a chaplain from a powerful and wealthy establishment religion to bless the troops – i.e. look after their spiritual needs – before they go to their doom).
And, on a much less dramatic note, if we stopped and thought about how our actions affected others – who would lose out? What would happen if we discovered that we were happier without consuming, consuming, consuming?
Getting back to corporate closed-ness, I believe that the corporate world always has done, and always will do everything in its power to dumb us down and dampen any tendency we have to be spiritual.
Down through millennia it has appointed (generally) compliant agents in vast religious empires to promote a banal, sanitised and highly controlled version of spirituality. This has the effect of codifying spirituality thereby making it a lot easier to control.
But, I hear you say, aren’t we the people who enable corporate closed-ness to be so predominant that it dwarfs every other kind of thinking in the world? Yes, indeed we are.
So by way of exploration of this puzzling behaviour on our part let us once again look at the days before corporate closed-ness, to the hunter gatherer culture, which I will do in the next post when I discuss immanence.