PL  |  NL  |  FR  |  ES  |  PT  |  IT  |  DE  |  DK  |  NO  |  SE  |  FI  |  GR  |  JP  |  CN  |  KR  |  RU  |  AE

  Report this article

More information

Kuan Yin: Achieving The Most Divine Life Imaginable

JCM FACTOR

Be good and will be happy

Happiness and positive thinking

LOVE IS TRUSTING AND UNDERSTANDING

Hell or Heaven: Firsthand Authors Describe Your Fate

Happiness Is Important For A Good Memory

The Benefits of Sorrow

Marriage: Positive Relationship Signs

A SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS ~ IF IS SUCH A THING A POSSIBILITY...

The Happy Marriage Recipe

Marriage: Reduce Anger in A Relationship

Prejudice of Wealth

Marriage: Secrets of Positive Marriage Conflict

Marriage: Become Friends with Your Partner

Our downward-spiraling civilization clearly seems to be on the verge of a momentous shift in values, thinking, and consciousness. On the one hand our scientific materialism, our excessive rationalism, and the capitalist economic system, and on the other hand our traditional religious belief systems and the established churches have all let us down in such obvious and grievous ways that a sizable percentage of people nowadays are sincerely looking for something different and more spiritually healthy.

It seems to be a spiritually revolutionary time for outgrowing ignorant ideologies, and growing into a more enlightened way of understanding our lives. Everything indicates that ours is a time of inner awakening, with great outer and historical repercussions.

In that case, the growing number of people who today are devoting themselves to the inner quest are not just doing something private and self-involved. They're actually taking part in a worldwide historical trend that's going to transform life on Earth! An epic global movement that's eventually going to usher in a more spiritually aware era in humanity's ongoing story of self-actualization.

Are you a part of this brave new societal swing toward spirituality? Do you wish deeply wish to be? It starts with making the personal choice to make spirituality a more central part of your daily life. It's as simple as that. At least to start with. So why not make the daring choice for a more spiritual lifestyle right here and now! Become a part of world history in the making, and join the inner liberation nation, today!

When we're children and young adults our brains really are like sponges, soaking up the beliefs of our society. Including many beliefs that perpetuate spiritual ignorance. Including the belief that Ultimate Reality is a "Big Guy" high-up in the sky, whom we can never even wildly hope to touch.

But in our innermost mind we know that Ultimate Reality is not a fatherly old white guy with a flowing white beard hanging out in some heavenly never-never land. Deep down we know that the fundamental truth of the universe resides right here in our own nature. That it's blessedly within the visual field of our mind's eye.

So then act on and follow this sublime intuition, begin nurturing your majestic ability to experience the inner reality of yourself and your world. Indeed, our human ability to perceive reality and think the truth is much greater than we give ourselves credit for. We all have the wonderful potential to be comrades in enlightenment with the likes of Jesus and Buddha!

Don't spend any more of your precious life in spiritual ignorance. You do have a choice. You can begin pushing the envelope of your spiritual awareness. And if you push it far enough you'll eventually discover that you don't have to settle for mere faith. That genuine enlightenment is in fact possible after all.

And the share of enlightenment that you attain will make a significant contribution to man's overall growth and collective consciousness of ultimate truth. You will become one of the true heroes of human and spiritual self-realization!

But be prepared to be an unsung hero. Whenever enlightened spirituality becomes a real threat to the political-economic status quo, the big shots of the status quo strike back. In "First World" societies the mass media is used to mock, malign, and marginalize spirituality. People who opt for an alternate inwardly-oriented and spiritual lifestyle are pigeonholed and dismissed as "New Agers". And of course in "Third World" countries the military is used to physically eliminate the threat presented by progressive people of faith. The "ruling class" of the "global community" is only tolerant of our spirituality when it isn't too much of an annoyance to them.

Be this as it may, inner spirituality is an idea whose time has come. And just in the nick of time for modern man. For we human beings have gradually gotten ourselves into quite a sorry state.

Beginning way back around the time of the Renaissance we began to move in the dangerous direction of compartmentalizing the spiritual part of our lives. First we compartmentalized our spirituality, and then we shoved it off to the side, and then as a society we made spirituality downright irrelevant to how we live our lives.

And of course at the same time that we we're banishing spirituality to the sidelines of our culture and our lives, at the same time that religion was becoming an only-on-Sunday-if-at-all activity, our civilization was also actively engaged in putting the economic aspect of life front and center. Our decline into materialism and consumerism was getting underway.

And as if this wasn't bad enough, the spirit of science and of searching for the deepest truth of things, the quest for ultimate knowledge, a quest which had always been at home in the bosom of religion, was also separated from spirituality, and taken over by people with the new materialistic mindset. Scientists and other intellectuals began to develop and dogmatically subscribe to an extremely materialistic ideology.

For a while this trend toward compartmentalizing the different parts of our lives, and downplaying spirituality while at the same time emphasizing economic and materialistic pursuits seemed to be working for us. It produced some benefits, for some people. It made a few people, and some European countries rich and powerful. And so rich and powerful people encouraged the trend toward spiritual emptiness and materialistic values.

But, of course, rampant materialism and capitalism never really produced a "worker's paradise". Those of us not at the top of the economic food chain actually began to experience worsened living conditions. Life in the factory cities of the 1800s was not pretty. And working men and women were considered lucky if they lived past forty! Society became one big sweatshop.

And over in the world of science the amoral materialism of 19th and 20th century science allowed educated men to invent weapons of mass death and destruction with no pangs of conscience. The rich nations now had the technology to dominate the rest of the world. And when they went to war with each other the body count would be astronomical.

And while all this was going on industrialization and the factories owned by the wealthy were starting the process of global warming. The environment was being spoiled, and the planet turned into a dangerous "greenhouse". All for the profits raked in by people who had no spiritual values whatsoever.

The people with social, economic, and political power in society had been raised in a totally materialistic mindset. The rich now had no real spiritual values counteracting and restraining their greed. And they even had a philosophy, invented by a Scottish thinker named Adam Smith. A philosophy that says that "greed is good". A philosophy dishonestly named by 19th century spin doctors "Free Enterprise". Thanks to the twisted philosophy of "Free Enterprise", aka capitalism, the rich no longer even had to be hypocrites, they could be openly and proudly greedy.

And what kind of a society did we get when spiritual values were thrown aside, and people's greed was set free in the name of freedom, we got a society in which the majority of men and women were free to live in extreme poverty. That's what we got back in the heyday of the "Industrial Revolution", and things haven't really improved all that much for the millions of working and poor people struggling to live in the "Information Age".

Sure, we have longer life-spans today, and wonderful items such as cell phones and DVD players. But we're also living in the declining days of an unsustainable economic system. We're also gloomily aware that global warming may wipe out our great grandchildren's generation. We live with a crime rate and a societal drug abuse problem that are symptoms of our civilization's lack of spirituality. And we live with the nagging feeling that something deeply important is missing from our modern materialistic value system. In fact it's become downright commonplace for people to speak of an "inner void".

Not to be a downer, or another prophet of gloom and doom, but we do seem to be poised on the brink of a complete economic, social, and cultural meltdown. So yes, our modern resurgence of spirituality is just in time, and just what the doctor ordered. Spirituality is the right remedy at the right time.

It's the right remedy because what fundamentally ails our sick Western society is precisely a deficiency of spirituality, and too big a buildup of materialism in our culture's arteries. Like a morbidly obese person who mistakenly thinks that he can live on hamburgers and other high cholesterol foods until the plaque builds up and he begins to experience chest pains, our civilization thought that it could live on a steady diet of materialism. Our culture began experiencing its chest pains long ago, and has already suffered a few coronaries. It's at the point now that it desperately needs a heart transplant ASAP.

What our civilization critically needs is a new spiritual heart. Cheap substitutes, such as the worship of work, the worship of wealth, the worship of health, the worship of sex, or the worship of your country will not cut it. If our societies are to survive they'll need to undergo a pretty radical transformation that involves rejecting all of these inferior forms of worship!

Whether our civilization stands or falls will depend not on our ability to treat symptoms, such as our high crime rate or failing economy. It will depend on our ability to recognize what's fundamentally wrong with our individual lives, and our collective life. If the spiritual revolution that's still trying to get off the ground can help enough people to recognize that spirituality needs to be integrated back into our lives and culture, then it will perform the supreme service of saving civilization for our children, and our children's children.

Your cultivation of your own spirituality is a part of this bigger historical picture, that's why I've spent this article delving into the historical context and potential consequences of our spirituality, or lack of it. So no, do not ever allow anyone to accuse you of being self-involved because you choose to concentrate on your inner growth. By concentrating on inner spiritual concerns and values you're probably doing a good deal more to save the world than most of your critics. Hang in there and stand up for your spirituality, and together we can create a more sustainable and livable society!

(If you'd like to read more articles like this one, visit our site, Realityhead.com)