A short diversion from Flow to discuss something that we need to fully digest before I come back to how to get to a sustainable world.
Do you handle your life or does your life handle you? Do you use love as a weapon or allow Love to work through you? Caroline Myss
When we look at the modern world with all of its political and economic problems, we find that so many people seem to be going through what seems like a profound psychological crisis. Therein lies the first problem we have. It is not the outer world we live within that is the crisis but the inner world where depression, fear, hopelessness and despair reside – in short, our world is suffering a spiritual crisis. And as readers of this blog will know (e.g. earlier posts Spirituality 1-3), I do not relate spiritual with religious. Yes, some religious people are spiritual, but spiritual people do not have to be religious. I refer to Rational Spirituality – thoughtful deep thinking and heart centered connectivity. So how do you tell a psychological crisis from a spiritual one. While all the symptoms may be the same, a psychological crisis is just suffering, while a spiritual crisis has a sense of more meaning within it. Consider the quote above. I use the word love and then Love with a capital L. One of our crises is that of Love. Lower-case love is built on some Hollywood ideal and is more often than not I love you if you love me, and then don’t do anything that interferes with that dream or I will hate you. Any love that can swiftly move to hate is not love, it is attachment, expectation, and conditions. Now upper-case Love comes from the spirit and is unconditional with no judgments or expectations. Now re-read that quote again. How do YOU use love/Love in your life?
In my earlier spirituality blog post I described an activity I used in a class to show how we are all to ready to express hate but have socio-cultural problems expressing Love, especially for someone who we are not intimately involved with (and many men especially in the western world cannot say it even then without discomfort). In many blogs and ‘spiritual’ sites every day I read that we need to espouse Love, but it has almost become a cliché – a hollow expression to help us feel better about ourselves. I often hear (more often than I would like) people refer to the spiritual movement as the New Age movement. This has been a problem since the 1960s. The reason is that it infantilizes our spiritual journey into something trivial. What I mean by this is that it becomes the bumper sticker catch-phrase kind of spirituality where simple techniques such as meditation and positive thinking will yield our deepest desires in this physical plane of existence. This is not to say that it is a bad thing, but the true spiritual path is a commitment to your soul’s journey that is using the physical body as a tool to experience life to its fullest, and to learn and understand what those experiences mean to the soul’s evolutionary development. The deeper meaning of life’s lessons become lost in the rush to gain quick physical fulfillment in this lifetime.
There is this odd dichotomy that if you follow a spiritual path everything goes smoothly, and if everything is hard in life then you must be too materialistic. All too often I also meet people who claim to be spiritual but then I observe the person and it seems more about bragging rights to be recognized as ‘I am more spiritual, look at me’ – all very ego based. Now don’t get me wrong about my observation, I am seeing it from a non-judgmental perspective. It is a great first step to living a truly spiritual life but it implies some sort of competition about something to be obtained (spirituality). The New Age movement is certainly better than the ‘competitive and self-centered, what’s in it for me’ consumer movement, but if it is all about ego then it is still a shallow expression of love to impress people. As already emphasized, I see Love as a service to helping and building up others. I do not expect anyone to be a Mother Teresa and we don’t all need to be to transform this world. What we need is to Stop being competitive and Start being Collaborative. Without the need to be better than someone else we start to see people as more than barriers to our own success but as partners in all our success. “Build someone up. Put their insecurities to sleep. Remind them they are worthy. Tell them they’re magical. Be a light in a too often dim world.” Healthyplace.com
Life can be hard and difficult, even when it goes well. But “Life is not about fairness, but about how we respond in the midst of unfairness” (Caroline Myss). To be spiritual isto ‘inspire’ others (from Latin: spiritus – encourage, inspirit, hearten, embolden mean to fill with courage or strength of purpose). The dream I speak about in this blog is that of a sustainable world where equity and justice are the norm, but it will come when we start treating each other as fellow travelers on a difficult journey and not barriers in the way of self-centered personal success. Whatever your job, treat all people with the same respect and potential for greatness. People usually meet the expectations we have for them. Low expectations give low outcomes, while high expectations coupled with respect often give really creative and beautiful outcomes. True leaders are not the ones barking orders but the ones instilling a dream to be fulfilled. True leaders show Love in action. They may not even know your name but they express Love whenever they are around you. They expect you to just be the best version of yourself you can be. And if you can’t be that, they accept that is just who you are for that moment.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Projectmanager.com
To Be Continued……
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