Quick Summary of Outlooks in Religion and Spirituality

English: Sadhu offering charas to Shiva, India. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Too many people in modern industrialized societies have such a limited view of what religion is that their approach to thinking about, reacting to, and discussing religion can become counterproductive. Below is a rough sketch of a brief summary of some important distinctions to show what I mean. I use popularized terms and concepts such as "right-brain consciousness" for the sake of balancing clarity and expediency (more on my thoughts on that particular notion can be found here):

Right-Brain consciousness = holism, poetic sense, and creative response.

Left-Brain consciousness = reductionism, literalism, and logical analysis.

Spirituality = emphasis on Right-Brain experience and a focus on the depth of the present moment or on an expereince beyond time, broad and inclusive sense of connection and identification, sublime emotional states, non-judgmental, open to possibilities.

Anti-spirituality = emphasis on Left-Brain experience and a focus on the past or future or the immediate moment in terms of needs and desires, narrow and exclusive sense of connection and identification, reactionary emotional states, judgmental, fearful of differences.

Mystical/Contemplative Religion = embraces spirituality and shares impressions in artistic and poetic forms, seeks balance.

Fundamentalist Religion = anti-spiritual tendencies, attempts to interpret mystical and contemplative expressions through Left-Brain analysis, seeks domination.

Mainstream Religion/Liberal Religion = attempts to reconcile tendencies and history of a sacred traditions including their more mystical and fundamentalist aspects, tend to lean more towards spirituality.

Mainstream/Conservative Religion = attempts to reconcile tendencies and history of a sacred traditions including their more mystical and fundamentalist aspects, tend to lean more towards anti-spirituality.

(One could also go on to map things such as spirituality and anti-spirituality onto to different forms on non-theism as well.)

This brief and over-simplified taxonomy has implications for how people use concepts and terms such as religion and spirituality but also those such as faith, sacred, and the like. It is worth exploring or at least having a good grasp of because if the spiritual impulse in inherently human, it is surely a good thing to guide its expression toward healthier and more beneficial forms. 

The value of the profound in the absurd

Poetry (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Originally written February 26th, 2010

Have you ever wondered why so many supposedly deep insights have an element of wackiness to them?

Any good religious or spiritual insight (and to some degree any truly profound paradigm shift in science as well) has to contain the absurd.

Ponder that.

It has to defy the logical, analytical style of comprehension, to point to that which beyond such forms of understanding. It creates the necessary space for a new way of seeing the world beyond the safe boundaries that other parts of the mind wish to create and reinforce.

Anything outside of a closed system will appear odd or absurd or even impossible from within that system. It is not captured or explained by the current set of rules and expectations in place, and so when encountering or considering such novel phenomena using available "left-brain" conceptualizations and terminology to try to grasp or contain them can create a confusing and contradictory riddle instead of a stunning new insight.

Pioneers in expanding our view of the nature of existence, of its substance and value, initially seem to be speaking and thinking incoherently because there is no common experience of their vision and no vehicle to readily make this new vision available to others.

This is where the artist comes in to play.

To see with sacred perception

Something with which I have trouble. I read this last year in a Barnes & Noble and just recently found it again...

Some years ago, I heard the story of a high school history teacher who knew this same secret. On one particularly fidgety and distracted afternoon she told her class to stop all their academic work. She let her students rest while she wrote on the blackboard a list of the names of everyone in the class. Then she asked them to copy the list. She instructed them to use the rest of the period to write beside each name one thing they liked or admired about that student. At the end of class she collected the papers.

Weeks later, on another difficult day just before winter break, the teacher again stopped the class. She handed each student a sheet with his or her name on top. On it she had pasted all twenty-six good things the other students had written about that person. They smiled and gasped in pleasure that their classmates had notices so many beautiful qualities about them.

Three years later this teacher received a call from the mother of one of her former students. Robert had been a cut-up, but also one of her favorites. His mother sadly passed on the terrible news that Robert had been killed in the Gulf War. The teacher attended the funeral, where many of Robert’s former friends and high school classmates spoke. Just as the service was ending, Robert’s mother approached her. She took out a worn piece of paper, obviously folded and refolded many times, and said, “This was one of the few things in Robert’s pocket when the military retrieved his body.” It was the paper on which the teacher had so carefully pasted the twenty-six things his classmates had admired.

Seeing this, Robert’s teacher’s eyes filled with tears. As she dried her wet cheeks, another former student standing nearby opened her purse, pulled out her own carefully folded page, and confessed that she always kept it with her. A third ex-student said that his page was framed and hanging in his kitchen; another told how the page had become part of her wedding vows. The perception of goodness invited by this teacher had transformed the hearts of her students in ways she might only have dreamed about.

We can each remember a moment when someone saw this goodness in us and blessed us. On retreat, a middle-aged woman remembers the one person, a nun, who was kind to her when, as a frightened and lonely teenager, she gave birth out of wedlock. She has carried her name all these years. A young man I worked with in juvenile hall remembers the old gardener next door who loved and valued him. The gardener’s respect stuck with him through all his troubles. This possibility is voiced by the Nobel Laureate Nelson Mandela: “It never hurts to think too highly of a person; often they become ennobled and act better because of it.”

To see with sacred perception does not mean we ignore the need for development and change in an individual. Sacred perception is one half of a paradox. Zen master Shunryu Suzuki remarked to a disciple, “You are perfect just the way you are. And… there is still room for improvement!” Buddhist psychology offers meditations, cognitive strategies, ethical trainings, which form a powerful set of practices that foster inner transformation. But it starts with a most radical vision, one that transforms everyone it touches: a recognition of the innate nobility and the freedom of heart that are available wherever we are.