Amerika

Modern people tend to see religion or spirituality or whatever you wish to call it as a replacement for wisdom. They do not trust wisdom because in their view it leads to a materialistic or nihilistic view of life in which we are just creatures like any others struggling to adapt to our environment and our survival is the only meaning we can have.

There is a point to that, but the curse of being human is to see a point but miss the bigger story, since this is most of what we do in order to avoid the big issues that scare us. We avoid them and instead retreat into little clusters of “safe” notions; this is the basis of both Crowdism and political correctness.

If we want to look at the big picture — no, let us call it the whole picture or at least as close as we can get — it makes sense to see our world as consistent and logical, since it is far more functional than we are. This means that the same is true of religion and wisdom.

At that point, the two are continuous. Science, philosophy, and religion are all methods of understanding our world; they look at different domains, but it is the same world, so the rules are the same in each. In this logical world, spirituality makes as much sense as gravity or rainfall.

Perhaps we cannot predict it, much like the weather. This seems consistent with very complex things in which a butterfly flapping its wings may correlate to a storm a thousand miles away. However, we know roughly how it works, and often can describe it exactly.

Humanity came out of the Age of Naturalism into the Age of Idols and now the Age of Symbolism. But what happens when the symbols become obsolete? We will not give them up, but they go back to being lowercase words and we use them descriptively in metaphors instead of as goals in themselves.

Any divine that exists in this world is like the sun, the rain, and the infinite reaches of outer space. It makes sense; our wisdom will lead us to it. Any other approach leads us away from the spirituality of this world and into human wishful thinking which defeats us every time.

Tags: monism, religion, spirituality