Time to talk a little about spirituality and its place in a sustainable world. Let me be clear at the outset in this post, spirituality is NOT the same as religiosity. While spirituality has been generally associated with religions, it is erroneous to connect them directly. I have met many religious people who are not spiritual in any way – quite the opposite. Likewise, I have met many atheists and agnostics who have been quite spiritual in how they live. Religions are based on the teaching of a great many mystical masters over the millennia. The teaching themselves talk about spirituality, but unfortunately those teaching have been corrupted as a form of mass control. I know some devout religious followers who are quite spiritual and are true to the real teaching of the mystics. I also know many fundamentalist religious people who verge on being downright evil and claim their holy books justify their insane antisocial actions. Having made that disclaimer, I would like to describe what I have uncovered about spirituality as a path for how we live together in a future sustainable world. I have spent the past 35 years following a personal spiritual path, learning and developing a knowledge of many of the great mystics of history. In the past 15 years, I have sought to understand as a scientific academic the connection between science and the supposedly more esoteric non-science we call spirituality. When cultural anthropologists and sociologists ask people what they want from life, the amazing answer that connects nearly everyone is the same. A life of peace, harmony, connectedness through love of family and extended family and friends. Indeed, in an earlier couple of posts, I gave the seven things we all people generally seek to have in their lives once we can get past the control of the hierarchy: Physical Comfort, Good interpersonal relations, Interesting cultural activities, Good health, Good nutrition, Satisfying jobs, and Purpose. When we really sit and ponder what we really want, it rarely has to do with money – we know at a deeper level that money is merely a means to an end of what we perceive we want. The hierarchy has done a great job of convincing us of that. Move money out of the picture and we get a vision that nearly all people share! If only we could find a way to get to that vision! So how do we get there? This will take more than one post, so let’s begin a journey down another part of the rabbit hole.
In my first textbook, I explain how non-verbal communications – Kinesics, Proxemics, Semiotics, paralanguage, and psycholinguistics – are all important aspects of communication that we unconsciously use on a daily basis besides the actual spoken words. Good actors are masters of consciously using these non-verbal forms of language to convince you they are playing a specific kind of character. One of my class exercises that I used to demonstrate this was for all the students to pair up after I had covered the basics. I asked them to use all the non-verbals they could to convince their partner (each one taking their turn) that they hated them as the words, “I hate you” were spoken. Curiously my observation was that they were able to accomplish this without much difficult, although afterwards they laughed about it to show that they weren’t serious. I was always fascinated with the apparent ease in which they could express ‘fake’ hatred. Then, I would repeat the exercise, only this time saying the words, “I love you.” This time, for most of them, it was uncomfortably difficult, with several feeling embarrassment and even shame. During the debriefing, the students would comment that saying I hate you was easier because they believed that the other person would not take them seriously. I love you on the other hand was so culturally weighted with all manner of psycholinguistic meaning that could be misconstrued, they were concerned the other person might take it in the wrong context. We have imbued the word love in western culture as meaning something sexually related, even though we will tell family members that we love them quite readily. When the prophets tell us to love everyone, we know it isn’t about asking them to have sex or to marry them. A wealth of scientific knowledge now shows that we are hard-wired to be emphatic, compassionate, and to express unconditional love to each other – it’s a natural thing – we come into this world that way. Sadly, we all spend most of our lives through social conditioning, ‘learning’ to be suspicious and distrustful, and to even ‘hate’ others not exactly like us. Add to that the conditioning of human superiority over the natural world and you get a dystopic world we currently suffer. To be continued……………….
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