I often say that religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell and that spirituality is for those who have already been there.I associate religion with an organized, dogmatic approach to theology and to human behavior. Spirituality is more an individual recogniton of the presence of divinity and how you live from that recognition.
People go to war over religion every day, even within the same denomination. I can't imagine anyone going to war over spirituality, because it is essentially free of dogma; it is more of a feeling of your connection to Spirit and to the worls around you. Religion can drive spirituality out of a person, replacing the feeling of connection with a groupthink concept of separation. Spirituality never leads you to feel shame, or that you are a miserable sinner, or unworthy in some way; it will lead you to feel small in the awesome nature of the presence of divinity, but never out of fear of an angry God.
Because of all of this, I think that spirituality, rather than religion, is the necessary force for change that can lead to the healing of our planet - actually the healing of humanity, for the planet is just fine except for what we are doing to it out of a mixture of greed, ignorance, fear, and arrogance.
Where religion drives us to a need to be "right," and makes others "wrong," spirituality allows for acceptance of other points of view, if not agreement with them. Where religion is often strident and rigid, spirituality is flexible (without the loss of integrity) and open. Many (most?) religious people are also spiritual - the problem, is that many are not.
Our religions, or at least the most fundamentalist branches of them, are creating so much intolerance, hatred, and violence today, that we are truly in a global crisis. Just when we need new and innovative thinking to step into a greater level of human behavior, we have a pulling back into old ways of thinking that are ultimately destructive. There is no need to give examples, for they are everywhere.
The good news is that there are thousands of spiritual people, whatever their religious affiliation or lack of one, who are generating leading-edge thinking and creative endeavors in every area of human activity. Many of these people have stepped away from mainstream politics and its divisiveness to work in collabrative networks of creative, pioneering souls. Much of this work is being done in faith communities that are more spiritual than religious, and much of it is completely separate from any organized faith tradition.
The work of these people barely penetrates the mainstream media. This is so because it takes the media awhile to generate an interest in what truly represents leading-edge creativity, and because there is a bias in the media to present only that which is reliably controversial to draw a predictable audience. So we see and hear much about Ann Coulter's latest contribution to American harmony and next to nothing about creatives like Barbara Marx Hubbard, Ray Kurzweil and others.
In my faith tradition, we stress the need to use the qualities of intelligence and love in all thought and in all actions. This spiritual approach leads to the discovery of the best of yourself - not that you are guilty of "original sin," but that you are connected to a Divine Itelligence and Love which is infinite and the Source of all Love. When you can truly come to see yourself as both worthy and an extension of an Infinite Spirit, it becomes impossible to do anything to harm another. If our major religions could produce that sense of a divine self in each of us, the earth would truly be healed. If they cannot, we must try something else.
Love and Light,
RevLockard
1 comment:
Brother, Jim:
While "religion" can readily be seen to have served as a springboard for personalities willing to exploit human nature and incite passionate divisions, it is also a rich, multi-layered creation of the One Mind in expression that has encouraged great expansion in the human experience and mass mind consciousness (e.g., world service, charity, material education, and artistic magnificence.)
Organization around dogma and the establishment of conventions for human behavior are common strategies for human beings who perceive themselves to be identified with their sets of effects/conditions. Even the most pure spiritual practitioner filters experience through the indoctrination of a historical period, cultural millieu, social class, and the collective stew of mass mind indoctrination. Our own beloved faith tradition is no stranger to this behavior at the level of organizational protocol, control of expression, leadership model, and struggle to achieve paradigm changes (and this is in a tradition whose founder repeatedly admonishes that ours is a practice that is continually expanding -- "open at the top").
If, additionally, we are willing to examine other human expressions of "groupthink" according to the criteria you have used to define your association with religion, then so many other human concerns fall into the mold: capitalism, which is a dogmatic approach to human energy interactions that demonizes other systems of practice and belief,for example. Or nationalism, a dogmatic approach to human interactions grounded solely in a purely conditional set of geographic concepts.
People, in bodies, are prone to seeking control over their conditions at the level of those conditions in one realm or another. In fact, this tendency is each human being's richest call to personal empowerment, expansion and spiritual realization. When we are ready to explore this concept as a bigger "idea" on the scale of one and all, rather than in relationship to a continuing "us and them" discussion, then we will be truly evolutionary beings.
We have much bigger fish to fry in the realm of New Thought than we may have yet considered to be our brief. How courageous are we willing to be? How great in depth, integrity, and breadth of our application of our teaching and of Principle? These are the questions that may free us in new ways to participate in the spiraling trajectory of a scientific metaphysical practice that achieves humankind's embodiment of God's recognition of itself and the all Good; the categoris of inquiry that are most likely (in my current conjecture) to radically expand our capacities for recognizing that embodiment as it occurs in each present moment.
I do know one thing for absolutely sure, however, and that is that ALL paths deliver all people to the ultimate realization of the One Life of All. God is all we are ever working with, considering, discussing, and seeking -- no matter what form the conversation takes.
Religion, spiritual traditions, conflicts, nations, are all transitory structures and effects -- nothing more or less than temporary collections of ideas, fully subject to the infinite power of the Divine Mind and its eternal expansion of itself for, through, and as, all Life. I know that this expansion delivers all of creation, ultimately, to an infinite array of perfected points of conscious clarity and Self-recognition.
What we do in the meantime, is hasten the realization, or dally in the fields of duality. It's really up to us.
You are the life of God as brilliance, compassion, and exquisite articulation, Brother Jim.
Thank you for inviting the contents of my heart and mind through your blog.
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