Greed, Pride, Prejudice, Fear, Hatred, Hopelessness: Spiritual Ills and How to Cure Them

Greed, pride, prejudice, fear, hatred, hopelessness.

These are all spiritual illnesses. They happen when we forget that we are spiritual beings, when we ignore the Divine, and let our egos overpower our souls.

You may have noticed these illnesses are rampant in the world today. That's because there are no political, financial, or scientific solutions to spiritual illnesses, and our religious institutions are obsolete failures. The only solution is for more people to build a strong and healthy relationship to the Divine -- not to be more "religious" but to be more spiritually healthy.

Spiritual illnesses can afflict an individual, a family, a community. When enough people have them they can sicken an entire country.

Spiritual illnesses drive us crazy, make us do insane things. Greed makes us steal, pride makes us lie, prejudice divides us from others and makes us fear them.
But a spiritually healthy person is giving and caring, because nothing in the world is worth more than a healthy soul.
A spiritually healthy person is confident enough to be humble, and humble enough to speak the truth.
A spiritually healthy person knows that we are each a manifestation of the singular Divine Spirit. We are all spiritual blobs pinched off the same big colorful ball of spiritual play-doh.

Spiritual illnesses lead us to hurt ourselves and those around us. Fear is a stabbing pain in our hearts and minds that keeps us from loving, trusting, living. Hatred is that same fear turned outward, our attempt to offload our pain onto those we fear, those we are unable to trust or love.
A spiritually healthy person is not afraid of anything. Not terrorists or criminals, not illness or death. Not the Devil, and (despite religious exhortations) not God.
A spiritually healthy person cannot hate, because how can you hate someone who is a part of you? How can one hate anybody or anything when we are all connected, all one in the Spirit?

And the worst of all spiritual illnesses is hopelessness. Our past has taught us hatred and fear, our future looks like more of the same. In the here and now we feel unknown and unloved. We are so disconnected from life that death seems like the only open door, the only path to reality. The suicide rate in America has gone up over 30% since 1999, and is now the second leading cause of death for those aged 10 to 34. Think about that -- our young people, some not even teens yet, are choosing death over an ego-driven, spiritually ill existence.

A spiritually healthy person is always present, here and now, addressing life's surprises and accidents with calm and ease. They are not tortured by the past, or intimidated by the future. They follow their spiritual path fearlessly, relentlessly, even when the road ahead is not clear. They know they are connected to all creatures and all of creation through the Divine Ground of Being. And they know that by staying spiritually healthy themselves, they are leading their friends, family, community and all of creation toward a future with more hope and less spiritual illness.

In coming weeks I plan to post more about spiritual illness:
Why it happens.
Why science cannot prevent it.
How and why religions are making it worse.
How to overcome it.

Plus!: Transcendental Meditation 50 years later -- a path to God that became a multi-million dollar industry.

Mysteries of the Spiritual and the Physical

The Divine is very confusing, if you make the mistake of thinking about it. It is a doing as much as a being, a guide as well as a path. It is everywhere we are, and everything we are, but if we could go somewhere that was nowhere and nothing, it would be there too.

I've been reading "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson, which is mostly about all the wacky people who made great scientific discoveries, or scary things that might happen to us, like massive asteroids hitting the earth or Yellowstone Park blowing a huge hole in it. It's very entertaining.

One of the parts I found most interesting is the discussion of sub-atomic particles. Quarks, bosons, etc. And how, when physicists were able to learn more about the atom, they realized that none of its parts behaved the way we expect things to behave. They are still trying to find new particles that fit their calculations, or new calculations to fit the particles they know of. Also, the Large Hadron Collider is about to be switched back on after a massive 2 year upgrade. Having found the Higg's boson, they are now going to look for Susy -- supersymmetrical particles that will either confirm physicist's Standard Model of how the universe works, or send them back to the drawing board to come up with a new theory.

Reading the details of these quests to figure out how gravity works, what dark matter is made of, why the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, etc, makes it much less scary to think about how it can be that the Spirit creates us all, connects us all, nurtures and guides all of creation. Life has mysteries on many levels. Except of course on TV, where even the mysteries are predictable.

UPDATE:

As of 2017-08-05 (Unix style time), the LHC has been running at nearly full energy, and no Susy's or wimps have shown up.

It's Time for a Spiritual Revolution

I'm tired of waiting; New Year's Day 2014 is as good a time as any.

The changes we see in the world today are intellectual, moral, physical in their ideal and intention; the spiritual revolution waits for its hour and throws up meanwhile its waves here and there.
  -- Sri Aurobindo

So here are some ideas to get the party started:
1) Meditate/pray/read/commune regularly: spiritual practice is just that -- a practice.
2) Learn from all sources: Buddha, Lao Tzu, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, etc. Thinking that you can get all the spiritual wisdom you need from one prophet or tradition is like thinking all the science we need was invented by Sir Isaac Newton, or that Julia Childs was the only person who ever wrote "real" cookbooks. There are spiritual truths all over the place.
3) Learn from recent sources, too: Auro is right, there have been multiple waves -- the Theosophists, Pentecostals, New Thought, Science of Mind, Manley P. Hall, Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Ken Wilber -- some of the most important spiritual ideas for our time have been revealed in our time.
4) Let's get together: and not like a Coke commercial. Let's arrange meetings between these different groups, see what we have in common, figure out why we disagree about some things.

Until it comes the sense of the others [i.e. the intellectual, moral, physical changes] cannot be understood and till then all interpretations of present happenings and forecast of man's future are vain things. For its [the Spiritual Revolution's] nature, power, event are that which will determine the next cycle of our humanity. --- Sri Aurobindo [with some help from me. I find the good Sri a bit pedantic at times. And his grammar is a bit weird.]

Auro wrote this some time in the 1930s. 80 YEARS AGO. I know the Divine has more time and patience than we do, but  WE NEED THE REVOLUTION ASAP. Our brothers and sisters who are gripped by fear, anxiety and despair (and those who are too mired in greed, pride, or prejudice to realize that the should be in despair) need to know that there is a way out, a way to live that is full of love and light, a peace that passeth understanding, a joy that is in and of and connected to all things and all eternity.

It is the lesson of life that in this world everything fails a man -- only the Divine does not fail him. 
-- Sri Aurobindo

Watch for my book on spiritmode.com, and weekly blog posts here.