Idolatry of the Spiritual Experience

Idolatry of the Spiritual Experience One of the points of Religion is to help us stay in right relationship with our parent and superparent holons. You might count God, the Universe, the Cosmos, Gaia, Human Civilisation or some other set of parent holons as the important entities with which to be in right relationship. Whichever ones you call important, one of the strongest motivating experiences we can find for our elephants to achieve such a relationship is a powerful spiritual experience. Many people talk about powerful spiritual experiences as moments of sudden realization in which they saw a path to right relationship and dedicated themselves to follow it. It might be a moment where you suddenly knew what God wanted you to do. It might be a moment where you suddenly understood that you were a part of the universe and had a place in it. It might be a breath of air inhaled in grove of rich green trees that told you that the forests of the world were your external lungs. It might have been a sentence in a book which suddenly linked together concepts in the book to form a logical whole and allowed you to see how the ideas in the book could form a guide to your whole life. These moments generally give you a kind of chemical high. Perhaps it is endorphins released into the blood, perhaps it is contact with the infinite. Believe what you will but consider that it might be a human response to stimuli and that there is no guarantee that it is an appropriate response to the stimuli in question. I contend that spiritual experiences can also be moments of clarity in the midst of anger, despair or suffering in which goals like vengeance at all costs, destruction of evil at all costs, accumulation of resources as an end in itself can become life guiding principles. Murderers, terrorists, and capitalists may all be who they are because of life-changing spiritual experiences. Religions need to give guidance to their members in terms of recognizing spiritual experiences which lead to life-denying life-styles rather than life-affirming life-styles. To be in right relationship with your parent holons, you must be living a life-affirming life-style. We do not contribute to our highest holonic contexts if we are not creative forces. Destructive life-styles will always lead to diminishing parent holons. So the first lesson of spiritual experiences is to seek one until you find one that leads you toward a life-affirming life-style. But it is easy to fall into the trap of continually seeking more and more-powerful spiritual experiences. Such striving is really another form of self-gratification. It is Idolatry in that it strives for the trappings of Religion while distracting us from the point of Religion. It leads us toward a life of seeking experience but not acting on those experiences. Many people who say they are 'spiritual but not religious' often fall into this trap. They seek spiritual experiences and revel in them but refuse to commit to a path of action, to a community or to a higher power or holonic context. As such they continue to receive messages that tell them to act but the receipt of those messages is so much fun that instead of acting on them they just seek more messages. The difference between someone who seeks repeated instances of meditative bliss and those who regularly gorge themselves at a dessert buffet is their source of self-gratification not the type of activity they are performing. Wisdom advises that once you have had one deeply spiritual experience, if it has placed you on a path toward right relationship with your holonic context, do not start looking for more spiritual gratification. Instead, let the wisdom and insight you have gained guide you. Begin the work. Walk the path. It won't be easy to ignore your desire for a repeat of that chemical high. It will be hard to follow the path. Taking the hard path rather than the easy one will usually be part of the message of a life-affirming spiritual experience. Religion isn't easy, if it was it wouldn't be worth it. But that is why the formation of communities around religions is so useful. Communities support us through the hard stuff. People who call themselves 'spiritual but not religious' often avoid organized religion and in doing so they avoid joining a community. This leaves them without support in facing the hard stuff, the self-denial that our parent holons usually demand, the sticking to a path without guaranteed reward. How can they follow their chosen path without that support? It becomes so much easier to follow the path of seeking more spirituality, more self-gratifying chemical highs, more moments of sudden realization. One might believe that one is becoming more enlightened with every experience. One might believe that there will later come a time when an ultimate wisdom or enlightenment will be reached. Action is delayed. But our lives on this Earth are short and there is no guarantee of an afterlife or reincarnation. Rather than set your sights on ultimate perfect enlightenment, take what you have and act on it. Join a community that will support you in your effort. Support others in their effort. Then you will have entered into communion with others. You will have created an intermediate holon between yourself and the super-holon you seek to serve. This intermediate holon will be the community you have created and it will be more powerful than yourself. Its power will grow even as you age and your efforts fade. It will be your immortality. This is guaranteed. No requirement for supernatural intervention, afterlife or reincarnation. This is why I call myself 'religious but not spiritual'. I have no need for traditional spiritual supernatural concepts. In that sense, I am not spiritual. But I do need the community, the common striving toward a single life-affirming goal, the support in staying on my chosen path. I need organized religion and so I organize it. This is why SolSeed exists. Eric Saumur 2013-10-08