The Importance of Spirituality
The morning that I began this article I sat listening to music and as often happens while doing so, my mind wandered. Music is a beautiful catalyst for imaginative and sometimes deeper thoughts.
My thoughts, floating on the waves of this music, turned to humanism and philosophy. To the way that we behave, and why do we do so? What makes us human? Why does a race that seems to want peace so badily instead so frequently turn on ourselves and destroy each other? Why do we value “things”, rather than peace and prosperity when such things are within our abilities to achieve?
We see television shows, games, and movies depicting advanced societies with air born transportation, yet we find ourselves in reality where we are stuck largely on the ground. Our air craft suit us well enough, I suppose, for long distance travel, but our cities remain strangled with streets laden with gas guzzling cars. If we focused on advancing civlization as much as we focus on bombs to destroy it then we would surly surpass these fictional depictions. Yet greed and the desire to control prevent us from moving forward. We, as a race, are stagnant.
“Why is all of this so?,” I wondered.
is a manipulation of spirituality.
Religion is used as a tool of
subjugation and war. It knows no
ends to its evils, from seperating
people into “them and us” to
justifying torture and death. So
when I speak of “spirituality” do
not confuse it with “religion”.
Then I saw us as a race that once held importantly to spirituality. A race that was “above” the animals of the world in both our mannerisms and our technology. I saw us as a race that was truly human, holding sacred things sacreds and the world around us as significant, alive, and imperative to the balance of life. Metaphorically speaking, we worked on the earth as a gardener would work in his garden; keeping things healthy, trimmed where needed, and helping the entire system run as smoothly as possible without interfering too greatly.
The “spirit” has meaning. There are things we know to be important without fully understanding why. In the spirit, we feel that we are supposed to do some things and not do others. We hold the land and its people dear and know that they’re supposed to be treated special; better than how the animals would treat the world or other animals. We tend to them evenly, fixing what’s broken or injured and trying to heal the land where and when we can. Modern examples would be wild life sanctuaries, national parks, and our efforts to save endangered species.
In this music induced state of wandering philosopical thought I then saw us humans begin to value physical things more and more, and spirituality less and less. As our logical understanding grew we built and discovered more and more “things”, but instead of seeking a balance we focused on those “things” more so than on spirituality. In time, human society became so distracted by our “things” that we left the spirit behind and began to forget what was important.
What was once special was no longer so. “Why should we value such ideals”, the humans would ask, “when we have things? Real, solid things?” In an effort to gather more things and to make more things humans began destroying the land and each other. Yet it is spirituality that makes us human. It’s what makes the human something more than an animal that seeks only food, stuff, and mates. As humans began to forget the spirit we started to become more animal than human.
Today, what is important? Money, success, and a lot of toys. Yet what is the world like? Species have been killed off, the temperature of our entire world is raising, forests have and continue to vanish, and we slaughter ourselves over mere differences in our ways of thinking. Who cares about all of this? Most would say that it’s not their problem because they’re not the ones who will have to deal with the consequences. That, or they fail to understand how the extinction of a species is important. Who cares, so long as they have their things?
We read endlessly about a struggle between light and darkness. How it’s a spiritual battle, and that the spirit is supposed to be so important. No where is it actually explained why this is apparently so, however. You have stories where “the gods” will either be angry or will punish people if they disregard the spiritual, but that’s just human fear. Why, really, would spirituality be important?
If we still held special things to be special - the land, animals, a balance in life, and realizing that we need guidance from something more than us - then the world would not be in the terrible state that it is in. We seem to think that we have to spend as much time possible getting our things, but where has that behavior lead us? A green world that’s not so green, blue skies that aren’t so blue, white capped mountains that are no longer capped in white.
A future for our children that’s not much of a future.
You frequently hear or read that all religions are a piece of the whole. That there are many different paths that are all part of the same thing. This seems to be true in a way.
In all of the time that has gone by with us focusing on the material rather than the spirit, is it no wonder that humans would have only an inkling of what we once understood in our hearts? We have these feelings that seem to be at odds with the physical world around us. They don’t seem to fit with our skyscrapers and our computers, so we try very hard to find a way to make sense of those feelings. So we find religions, and we pray.
Yet aren’t all religions said to share common tenets? That being true, what is the rest of the religion compsed of? Belief and teachings that were specific to the nation in which they formed, with ideals being taught that were proper under the political climate of the time. In this way, religions seem to be fragments of the truth. Like pieces of a broken mirror they share the ability to reflect, but only in part.
If you take all of those pieces and put them back together…. all of those religions and push them together into a single ideal… then what you have is the whole mirror. That universal truth that we all still have lingering inside of us, unclouded by the political and locational beliefs of any one culture.
It becomes so much simpler, and truth is always simple.
Spirituality is what makes us human. Is it so surprising then that we behave like mindless animals when we focus so strongly on the material? A balance needs to be struck. People need to return to realizing that the world and life around us are sacred, or else we will continue to be animals.
Such were the idealistic thoughts that came to me through the music, at least.
~Steph
Topics: Spirituality |
June 1st, 2006 at Jun 01, 06 | 5:02 pm
[…] Hemingway Not all themes have been edited. Please use Hemingway or 3K2 for best results. « The Importance of Spirituality […]
July 24th, 2006 at Jul 24, 06 | 10:22 pm
[…] If you’ve read my post, “The Importance of Spirituality“, then you may be surprised that I say that science is how we’ll get there. Fact is, the future will need a healthy dose of science right along side whatever spiritual ways of life we humans choose to take. […]