"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It will have to transcend a personal god and avoid dogma and theology. Encompassing both the natural and the spiritual, it will have to be based on a sense of intelligence arising from the spirit of all things, natural and spiritual, considered as a meaningful unity." - Albert Einstein
Man has become a spiritually neutered animal, a subtracted being disconnected from the whole - in:
mind
body
soul
What has been cut from him is Nature itself, more specifically, and consequently, his own spiritual nature: his connection with his inner animal - awe and creature - astonishment that has the potential to transcend itself and achieve the numinous, the kind of overwhelming interconnected feeling that can be felt balls to bones, ovaries to marrow, and has the potential to make god-animals/animal-gods of us all.
Alas, the loss of Soul has become untenable. We have forgotten how to speak a language older than words, because we rely far too much on outdated traditions reeking of parochial values grown unhealthy and uncouth.
Hegel's "silent weaving of the spirit" has unraveled into discordant knots of anxiety and neurosis. It is time to counteract dysfunctional religiosity and its dogmatic ideals and antiquated values with an updated spirituality that heals the dissociative split between Cosmos and Psyche, between Nature and the human soul.
Our overly-religious culture can be reborn, but in order to be reborn into a spiritual one it must first learn how to die. It must die a beautiful death, with the mighty seeds of spirituality planted into its rotting corpse.
It sent shockwaves of change in patterns of thought, at least for those who actually think, but it was met with a religious cognitive dissonance that absorbed it and continued on.
We simply weren't ready for God to be dead. We weren't ready for the end of religion itself. But now, with burgeoning spiritual practices and modes of enlightenment rising all over the planet, each able to see past the Big Con of religion.
Now we are ready.
We're ready to ride the wave of the Great Mystery.
We're ready to hold the pain of being mortal creatures living out short lives within an unfathomably ancient cosmos.
We're ready to open up, to release our death anxiety, and to surrender to something greater.
So can we still call it "God?" Sure, why not?
But now we'll finally be able to stare into the vast awe-inspiring cosmos and state, with self-evident and interdependent truth, the following words once spoken by Meister Eckhart,
"The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me."
Dogmatic Religiosity
"There is no polite way to suggest to someone that they have devoted their life to a folly." - Daniel Dennett
image.png
2.25 MB
View full-sizeDownload Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 – April 19, 2024) was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.
What is the hidden function of dogmatic religion? It is the presentation of the inexplicable by the impossible in order to steal the minds of the unthinking.
The fly in the ointment of religious devotion, isn't just the devotion part. The Achilles heel of religious devotion is that it is blasphemous to question the tenets of the faith. Indeed, it can even be considered "evil" to question one's faith or to challenge the Gods, one has devoted himself to.
This leads to woeful ignorance and willful myopia. This makes the devotees all too easy to manipulate and control, whether it's to the extreme extent of slavery or the covert extent of debt-slavery, people become easily convinced and overly fearful of authority.
How else does one explain how Christianity and Islam, two religions originally based on loving tolerance, are now tyrannically intolerant?
Alas, they began as spiritual practice but dissolved into dogmatic religiosity.
As Carl Jung intuited,
"The religions of the world suffer from increasing anemia, because the helpful numina have fled from the woods, rivers, mountains, and animals, and the God-men have disappeared underground into the unconscious."
Joyce in Zurich c. 1918
890 KB
View full-sizeDownload James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.
So, all is not lost if you've found yourself spiritually bamboozled. Which most of us have.
We are all born with the faculty of wonder; it is the duty of the individual not to lose it, or to be distracted by the 'monkey-holiness' (Campbell) of the slothful who lean on spoon-fed, hand-me-down religions.
But it is not easy.
Religious indoctrination, like cultural conditioning, is difficult to overcome. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological hang-up that even the most intelligent of us can easily get hung-up on.
"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."
Hodgell at Worldcon 2006 (aka L. A. con IV)
1.04 MB
View full-sizeDownload Patricia "Pat" Christine Hodgell (born March 16, 1951) is an American fantasy writer and former academic. Hodgell taught in the English Department at University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh but retired in 2006 to pursue a full-time writing career. She has won several awards for her works.
Religion is tempting because we think it fulfills a purpose.
And it means well, but inevitably falls short due to its own shortsightedness. It provides a crutch for the spiritually perplexed, for lost spirits and broken souls. But religion is to a broken soul as a crutch is to a broken leg; whereas spirituality is to healing a soul as science is to mending a broken leg.
Religion puts you in comfortable shackles; spirituality sets you free into painful self-realization.
Religion has faith in blindfolds and tells you what to see; spirituality removes the blindfold and teaches you how to see. But what you see can often be terrifying. Religion wants to keep you small, meek, fearful and adaptable to authority.
Spirituality wakes you up to how big your smallness really is, which can give you the kind of power that gets power over power itself.
Indeed, religion keeps you small and indifferent to the universe; spirituality helps you understand that you are the cosmos and the cosmos is you.
But it's not easy. Love and fear are at constant loggerheads inside us, and sometimes inversely so. The religious man looking to possibly break away from his religion to become a spiritual man will be "afraid" to leave the religion he "loves."
After all, he has almost all of the cognitive biases and logical fallacies inherent within the human condition working against him.
It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward."
Wilde in 1882
23.2 MB
View full-sizeDownload Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
But on the other side of the coin there's reason screaming at us.
"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science" and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?"
Instead they say,
"No, no, no!
My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."
The evolution of man itself advances depending upon how often he can exchange outdated, parochial methods of achieving enlightenment with new, more holistic methods.
Leaving dogmatic religion behind and evolving toward an adaptable spirituality is precisely such a sacred exchange. But it comes down to a critical choice, and one only the individual can make for herself.
Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love."
Hicks at the Laff Stop in 1991
943 KB
View full-sizeDownload William Melvin Hicks (December 16, 1961 – February 26, 1994) was an American stand-up comedian and satirist. His material — encompassing a wide range of social issues including religion, politics, and philosophy — was controversial and often steeped in dark comedy.
Adaptable Spirituality
"Mystery is a place where religion and science meet.
Dogma is a place where they part. Awe-based psychology is a place where they can evolve and reunite." - Kirk Schneider, PhD
"Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told.
Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right."
Mencken in 1928
1.38 MB
View full-sizeDownload Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes Trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also gained him attention. The term Menckenian has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, including his combative rhetorical and prose style.
As such, the spiritual person is not averse to becoming amoral if need be.
"One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion."
In 1965, on one of the sets of 2001: A Space Odyssey
1.47 MB
View full-sizeDownload Sir Arthur Charles Clarke CBE FRAS (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008) was an English science fiction writer, science writer, futurist,[3] inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host.
But the spiritually robust individual, adaptive and self-overcoming, hijacks morality right back from the steely jaws of religion and brings it back into alignment with a healthy/unhealthy mythology, despite parochial notions of good and evil.
What remains then is a moral plasticity that is adaptive to the numinous experience of interdependence.
It teaches spiritual humility, human compassion, and eco-centric and egalitarian, as opposed to egocentric and sexist, values. This moral flexibility all at once subsumes all religions under a giant umbrella of spirituality.
The spiritually self-actualized individual is thus free to pick and choose the healthy and good from all religions, while discarding what is unhealthy and immoral.
But such spiritual acuity also shines a spotlight on the fallibility of the human condition itself, and upon how easy it is for people to get things wrong. As such, it takes both religious and spiritual proclamations with a grain of salt.
"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly, teaches me to suspect that my own is also."
Mark Twain in 1907
910 KB
View full-sizeDownload Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." Twain's novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." He also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and cowrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner. Ernest Hemingway claimed that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
Whether we call it spirituality or not, any basket that we are tempted to put all our eggs into must be held suspect and handled with circumspection.
In the end, the adaptive spiritual individual overcomes even her own death anxiety, becoming a mediator of natural terror through her own robust soul-craft. She becomes a facilitator for those trying to bridge the gap between suffering mortal and flourishing mystic.
A spiritual person becomes then in art, literature, and religion the extinguisher of death anxiety and the sacred overpass toward a new way to triumph over it.
She subsumes the sacred. She frees the human animal to become individuated in ego and self-actualized in soul, despite the petty fears of afterlife pedaled by those still locked within a dogmatic and religious construct.
As Adolfo Quezada said, speaking of lost spirituality:
"God of the Wild, you are different from what I expected. I cannot predict you.
You are too free to be captured for the sake of my understanding.
I can't find you in the sentimentalism of religion.
You are everywhere I least expect to find you. You are not the force that saves me from the pain of living; you are the force that brings me life even in the midst of pain."
