New Spirituality: Need for Depth

These Are Anxious Times

Holy War, Global Warming, Toxins, FDA, Prescription Drugs, 911... these are heady times!

People in spiritual crisis and disenchanted with contemporary religions are making a mad dash for any exotic moral authority and spiritual path advertised to them. New Age businesses excel at marketing products to the spiritually bereft. Pseudo-Eastern philosophies, shamanism, and similar belief systems are a lucrative commodity in the spiritual marketplace.

To ease our anxiety, in anxious time, we infuse new value into the past (actual or mythical)

"to see if we left anything useful behind in our rush to some undefined goal of progress," says Paul Devereux. We all want to create a new moral authority that will work in this time.

Some years ago, Mark Johnson, a Feng Shui practitioner and author, noted that we think nothing of "borrowing" concepts like Feng Shui from other cultures and filtering the knowledge through our limited understanding.

One cannot separate the spiritual problems of people from their religion.
The New Age movement is infamous for mixing half-baked ideologies and philosophies and marketing overpriced, hodge-podge products to customers who don't know whether a product is authentic or of lasting value.

Paul Devereux talks about this phenomenon in Secrets of Ancient and Sacred Places: The World's Mysterious Heritage:

"Both the research and religious aspects of this renewed interest in the past have their good and bad sides. Some lines of research are genuinely uncovering new approaches to the past, and fresh facts and perceptions are emerging. Other developments are, however, somewhat fantastical and worthy of the mainstream accusation of "lunatic fringe."

Because the area is outside the protection of the academic pale, it is open to the predatory attention of journalistic hacks, egocentric would-be gurus and well-intentioned but poorly informed enthusiasts, often from a "New Age" background, who rush into print with their pet ideas of the past, of ancient mysteries, before they have done their homework. It makes for a babel of competing claims and ideas, and what is essentially a fictional view of ancient wisdom is created.

Astrology, numerology … a variety of martial arts techniques, various brands of shamanism, and modern versions of witchcraft fill the empty hours of the affluent fringe groups who reject Christianity but want to have some hold on religious experiences.

Concepts are "Americanized" to make them palatable and marketable — oversimplification is a particularly popular technique. It is astonishing how New Age marketers find nothing wrong about appropriating someone else's culture and homogenizing it for the tastes and dilettantism of American consumers.

---- In other words - this need to be done accurately and correctly.


Scientific Support for Spirituality

Let's begin with the origin of the universe. Most educated people are at least somewhat familiar with the Big Bang theory, namely that the universe emerged with incredible heat and light energy some 12 to 15 billion years ago and has been expanding and solidifying ever since into galaxies, stars and planets under the operation of fixed natural laws built into the process. This 20th century scientific theory replaced, at least for some people, the spiritual belief of an Almighty God somehow creating everything that is.

Did that mean spirituality was dead? Some tried to argue that it was, but the claim of faith is not so easily dislodged from the human mind. In fact, it was the existence of the human mind itself that gave the scientific explanation of reality the most trouble. While scientific laws and mathematical formulae can explain the formation of a material universe, they cannot account for the existence of immaterial mind or consciousness. The "popular" scientific view is that consciousness emerges from the brain, but there is no scientific way to explain how it is possible for the immaterial to emerge from the material.

On the other hand, science has demonstrated precisely the opposite. It has to do with the physics of a vacuum. Quantum mechanics has shown that virtual particles and antiparticles spontaneously emerge from a vacuum and become "real" if energy is added. This gives rise to scientific speculation that the origin of the universe was a quantum fluctuation within a vacuum, which initiated not only the "stuff" of our world, but also space-time itself.

What I am leading up to is an argument that by the end of the 20th century scientific research rather than dislodging the notion of spirituality has in fact strengthened it. Again we turn to quantum mechanics, which has shown that a particle exists both in its particle form and also as a wave. The quantum wave is smeared throughout the whole of space, and it only collapses as a particle into our physical space-time when a conscious observer makes a measurement.

Was it such a super-ordinate Consciousness (called God) that collapsed the wave function in a primordial vacuum and created the universe? This gives us an explanation in scientific terms that confirms the essence of the intuition from spiritual traditions of an omnipotent, omniscient Consciousness (or Spirit) behind what we know as reality.

The argument for a spiritual dimension to being becomes stronger when we consider what 2500 years of mental research by Buddhists (and others), as contrasted with 300 years of empirical research by scientists, has revealed about consciousness. The collective result is that at its deepest level consciousness is a state of luminous emptiness. In Buddhist terminology this absolute ground of consciousness is called the Great Perfection. In other words, there is a ground state of primordial awareness from which everything we call reality came and into which everything dissolves. This gives us the foundation for a 21st century spirituality in which human faith is anchored in a revelation of eternal wholeness and oneness from which we as human beings along with the material universe come for a period of physical existence and to which we return.

Implications of the New Spirituality

Let us now explore further the implications of this spirituality for how we might live together on the planet. A fundamental spiritual principle emerges from the above understanding of the origin and continuing unfoldment of the universe and the living portion of it that we know as the biosphere of planet Earth. This is the principle of oneness, not only within the human realm, but also of humanity with all life on Earth. This is a point that cannot be overstated, for it stands in marked contrast to the history of human spiritual experience over tens of thousands of generations.

Wherever human tribes or communities grew up on the continents and islands of our world, they embraced some form of spiritual belief. This strongly suggests that the propensity for spiritual thought, like the facility for language, is built into the human genetic makeup. However, because humanity evolved in isolated and separate enclaves, divided along ethnic lines, this innate spirituality expressed itself in personal deities, who were usually seen as the protector and sustainer of the ethnic group.

Because of another innate propensity in our species, namely to perceive others outside the ethnic or tribal grouping as enemies, the natural inclination was to bond fiercely under the protection of the tribal god or gods, and to wage war against the enemy in his/her name. Even when we come to relatively recent times from an evolutionary perspective, namely the last 3000 years, when great spiritual traditions emerged and spread across large geographical areas encompassing many nations, the same propensity for separation persisted. Indeed, the 20th century experienced two world wars and other international clashes when nations expressing the same faith tradition fought against each other in the most brutal ways ever conceived.

At the beginning of the 21st century the world now finds itself teetering on the brink of what some would call holy war or a clash of civilizations divided along spiritual lines. Of course, international politics and policies of economic globalization make everything much more complicated than that, but the fundamental human predisposition for conflict and separation remains firmly established. That is why a spirituality of oneness would be such an extraordinary leap forward in human thinking.