I have gone on at length in this blog about Spirituality and connectedness. I even wrote an 18-part series of posts in this blog starting June 2021 (Spirituality, service and Connectedness). I mentioned the Roseto effect briefly in an earlier Espe post (Pathways to a Better Future – Espe part 10: Health and Global Healing – part 2 {February 2023}) and have talked about it for years at conferences. But in general, I have found that nothing but skepticism, and worse, indifference, about the benefits of connectedness as if it were something inconsequential. Your whole physiological and psychological health are majorly influenced by this non-physical aspect of living! And it doesn’t matter how bad your lifestyle is. A reason I tout spirituality is for this very reason, and it really has little to do with religion per se, despite what religious leaders actually say. I’m not mocking religion and apologize if you are a religious person. But much of religion is about control and dogmatic orthodoxy.
There are a lot of religious people who put up with all the crapola doled out by the religious hierarchies, often because they believe that being pious and not rocking the boat will get them a reward in the afterlife. I believe we can have heaven here in this life now if we make a decision to do so, along with having happiness and joy – why wait for the afterlife? Let’s make heaven on Earth now! But as you have noticed, I do tout spirituality. Even atheists ought to be spiritual.
For starters, spirituality is about relationships (not religion) – relationships with everything, literally. It’s about having a positive emotional connection, not just to each other, but to life, and as importantly to ourselves. Being truly spiritual opens us up to adaptive resilience – physical, mental, and emotional. We live in a time when catastrophe narratives dominate our lives with fear and doom. Much of what we do with social media is flawed computer algorithms that are supposed to give us more of what we want, but actually create more separation and anxiety than connection. The result of this is subtle but results in more stressful living. We now know that stress is a major contributor to many health problems, especially ones of the heart.
While there are all manner of drugs to treat all kinds of illness, living a ‘connected’ life is still poo-pooed as just a placebo-like effect. But that is the kicker, placebo’s work too well and have always been a problem for drug companies insistent on convincing us that a pill is the only solution to disease. There is revealing data from a seven-study looking done in the late 1950s looking at people in a small East Pennsylvanian town called Roseto.
Starting in 1892, residents of Roseto, Valfortore, Italy, emigrated to a hilly region of Eastern Pennsylvania to find hard work in the quarries of the region. By 1912, they had established their ethnically separate small town of Roseto, PA. Far from the healthy diet of Italy, but where they had smoked and drank, they now had a bad diet, along with smoking and drinking – all perfect risk factors for health and cardiac problems. But, when a local doctor compared the health of Roseto residents with all the similar surrounding towns, there was a marked difference. The Rosetans were healthier, by far! – the Roseto effect.
After looking at all the obvious factors associated with diet and general lifestyle, the researchers were baffled. Only one factor remained that connected the healthy population that had come from Italy to the one that lived in the U.S. “While living in the town to conduct the study however, the researchers observed several major differences as to how the Rosetans related to others in their community. They noticed a remarkably close-knit social pattern that was cohesive and mutually supportive with strong family and community ties, where the elderly in particular were not marginalized, but revered. Put simply, the Rosetans lived in brotherhood with one another” Unimed Living. In a nutshell, people are nourished by other people when they live more harmoniously with each other.
In a time when people want a pill for every ill, the simple but effective choice to live differently with each other is still a difficult choice. That choice is to stop living in fear, hate, indifference, avarice, and greed. It’s only our conditioning that makes us live this way. It is not the normal human condition. The materialistic-consumer lifestyle has made us highly insular and self-centered. I am always surprised at how even suggesting that we live differently is such a fearful thing for so many people. We find saying hateful things so much easier that saying “I Love You.” I talked about this in one of my first blog posts (Spirituality {February 2018).
Why are ’feel-good’ movies (however campy they might be) so popular? Because we want to feel good! OK, that’s seems a bit too simple, but that is my point. We have a society that seems designed to make us feel bad about ourselves and the world in general – we are constantly told how dangerous it is out there (wherever out there is) and that humans are wrecking the world. To change our worldview and start to make a better world (no matter how you perceive that idea) where we live in harmony, compassion, collaboration, and Love seems unreachable but just needs a change of mind – literally. I am not preaching a loss of anything, except a world gone haywire that doesn’t work for most of us.
“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as ours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now” Daniel Quinn.
The most singular force that controls us all the time is the need for food. Millennia ago, a hierarchy recognized this and used it to enslave humanity into a competitive world where scarcity rules, also convincing us they were the only ones able to manage it all. Our modern civilization and its worldview is a hierarchy of control using food as a weapon, and not the social way Humans Evolved! We don’t have to invent a new way to live. We just need to look deeply within ourselves for what we know is a better way to live – to remember that time before we became ‘civilized’ when we lived in relative harmony with the world and each other. It wasn’t perfect, or we wouldn’t have been convinced to try ‘civilization’ – not a good trade I think.
“Very typically, when people question me about the future, they ask if I really believe people will be willing to give up the wonderful things we have for the mere privilege of avoiding extinction. When I speak… of another story to be in [Worldview], they seem to imagine I’m touting a sort of miserable half-life of voluntary poverty, donning sackcloth and rags to do penance for our environmental sins. They’re sure that living in a sustainable way must be about giving up things. It doesn’t occur to them that living in an UN-sustainable way is also about giving up things, very precious things like security, hope, light-heartedness, and freedom from anxiety, fear, and guilt” Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization.
All this merely heralds an end to a ‘way of living’ not an end to life. I do believe that we have evolved over these past millennia and are now ready to merge the best of what civilization did create with the best of the pre-civilization ways of living in the world, for a Nova Renascentia (see A new Beginning Parts 2, 3 and 4 {January 2021}!
TBC……………………
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