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.

We Can't Go On Like This

It’s been pointed out all over the place in 2017: this is the first time in worldwide human history that obesity is a bigger problem than starvation, more people die of old age than from infectious diseases, and people who commit suicide outnumber those killed in all the wars, terrorist acts and violent crimes combined.

The LA Times ran an interview with a filmmaker last Sunday, who said something about “these profoundly dark times…” and I had to wonder, as I often do when I often hear people say things like that, “WTF is she talking about?” Maybe it’s an ignorance of history thing. It mentioned that she was 38, which means she was born the same year I started college at Stony Brook. In those days unemployment was about double what it is now, inflation was like quadruple, violent crime rates were the highest for the last 60 or 70 years. I remember mentioning AIDS to a friend in Ohio, and she said, “that’s the disease that old Jewish people get, right?” In New York City, the Dakota was black, Trinity Church was black, all the subway cars were covered inside and out with graffiti (which at least was not all black). I assumed they were supposed to be like that. I have no idea what Times Square looked like because nobody went there unless they wanted to score drugs and/or get mugged.

But the thing that struck me most about my first year back in college was the way every conversation about the future was marked by the same caveat.

“In 15 or 20 years, if we’re all still around…”

“In the future, if we haven’t blown ourselves to bits…”

“The next generation or two, provided anyone survives the nuclear holocaust…”

And this was a couple of years before Jonathan Schell’s Pulitzer winning book “The Fate of The Earth”, a reasoned scholarly analysis of the likelihood and possible aftermath of nuclear war between the US and the USSR which deteriorated repeatedly into a rant that was essentially “OMG we are going to fucking obliterate humanity!”

Those were dark times. Too dark even to be profound.

Did I mention the garbage strike in NYC? Not only dark, but stinky were those times.

So what is wrong with these times? What’s wrong with living longer and healthier than ever? Is it somehow bad that worldwide poverty has been cut in half in the last 20 years? Is their something evil and scary about the fact that crime rates everywhere have trended downward for almost 40 years?

Okay, yes, we might could go to war with North Korea, which has a few nukes and coupla ICBMs, but hasn’t yet figured out how to combine the two. In the eighties the US and USSR could wipe out all civilization with a fraction of their waiting nukes; as Winnie Churchill said “the rest would just make the rubble bounce.”

And yes, too many people still don’t have the rights they should have and aren’t treated fairly as they should be. But would they want to go back to the way things were 40 years ago, or 100 years ago?

Yes, there have been 7,500 tragic, unnecessary American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last 16 years. Is that worse than roughly 60,000 deaths in the 10 years of the Vietnam war. Or 400,000 deaths in 4 years of WWII. 700,000 in the Civil War.

In short, the vast majority of everyone you’ll ever meet today is healthier, wealthier, safer and happier than they likely would have been in any other period in history. I refer you again to Steven Pinker’s book “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, the reading of which should be a universal prerequisite to getting an internet connection.

So why has the suicide rate in the United States surged to the highest levels in 30 years? Why are the best-selling prescription drugs all antidepressants? Why are so many people scared or angry or hopeless? Are these times really that dark?

Yes. Yes they are. Because while scientists and doctors and yes even politicians have made our material life better in the last couple of centuries, our spiritual world has been swirling down the toilet. Our religions are burnt-out husks of ancient spiritual guidance systems. Our so-called spiritual leaders hopelessly cling to these failed institutions, but they have no idea how to help us connect to the Divine. The people know this, and they are abandoning traditional religions in droves.

The fastest growing “religion” in the US is “spiritual but not religious”. NOT Atheists, agnostics, secularists, humanists. The vast majority of Americans still believe in a higher power, but they have no idea what it is or where it is or how to connect to it, or even what to call it.

The ills of our time are all spiritual ills. Greed, pride, prejudice, fear, hatred, hopelessness. These things don’t happen around spiritually healthy, truly Spirit-centered souls. These things are killing us. We can’t go on like this.

So what can we do? I’ll tell you. Check back on Labor Day 2017 for Part 2.

Outliers --- by Malcolm Gladwell

As a tween (decades before the term was invented) I used to take long walks around the neighborhood, a safe, quiet lower-middle-class suburb of Cincinnati. I would work out issues, carefully verbalize explanations, explain things to imaginary audiences. Was I a strange kid?

On one of these walks, when I was 12 years old, I had my first memorable encounter with the Divine. I was thinking about God, where he lived, what he did all the time, and it suddenly struck me --- quite literally struck me psychologically, emotionally, almost physically --- that God didn't just hide in the church waiting for us to show up on weekends. What kind of lame-ass deity would that be? God was everywhere, "He" was right there with me at that moment, beside me, within me, all around me. I may have had mild spiritual experiences before that, and just don't remember. But from that day on I never doubted the existence of the Divine, and I felt the presence of the Spirit many times.

I did not talk to many people about this, but later I was at a friend's house, the subject of religion came up, and I told him exactly how I felt. The subject was dropped pretty quickly, but he told me later that it was almost creepy, like he could feel another person, another presence in the room as we talked.

The dominant message of Outliers, as I understand it, is that talent, intelligence, and perseverance matter much less than we usually assume. Success and failure are heavily influenced --- sometimes wholly determined --- by where and how we are raised, by rare circumstances (more often a chain of circumstances), opportunities and lucky breaks. We, humanity, could produce many more success stories if we could figure out how to spread the opportunities around and teach people how to be successful.

I've come to understand that 12 was young to have a first true, sticky, non-dual experience. It seems that other people I read about, like Eben Alexander, Russel Razzaque, Eckhart Tolle are usually in their 30s or 40s when struck by spiritual lightening. I was raised in a Southern Baptist church. Almost literally. My family went to services Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, and usually a couple of committee meetings, choir practices, pot-luck dinners throughout the week. It's frightening now to catalogue all the things Southern Baptists get wrong. When it comes to our understanding of the Divine, our relationship to it, their own Bible, their own history, not to mention the wealth of teachings from other prophets, traditions, cultures that they vehemently ignore --- it's as if Southern Baptists are determined to stay as willfully ignorant as possible.

Yet, here's the thing: in our home it was understood that God was real. We prayed to him, asked for help and guidance. My father would pray before any big investment, we would pray for friends who were sick. There was never a hint that our prayers were just for our own mental health; I was raised to believe that praying to God can bring about real change in someone's life. They could have told me that the Divine was short and hairy, had furry feet and tusks, chewed tobacco and farted a lot. It didn't really matter, because at least I was emotionally open to the idea that it did exist and was accessible to me personally. And maybe because of that, I was able to reach through the fog of Protestant untruths and halftruths in order to truly connect with the Spirit. Maybe even bad spiritual training was better than no training at all.

I've always thought it brilliant that Krishnamurti refused to start a church. Instead he started schools. One in Ojai, California, one in England, a few in India. He didn't talk about teaching kids a certain path or dogma or way of thinking; he talked instead about teaching children to overcome their conditioning and thus end it. David Lynch advocates teaching meditation to school children.I often wonder how much better off we'd all be if our kids were gently introduced to the spiritual side of their own nature, before they grow up to be responsible adults whose ego has turned into an ogre that is that much harder to tame.

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.