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.

A Spirit-Centered Life is a Life Without Fear

"And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?" Jesus asked, right in the middle of the sermon on the mount.

There's an excellent article in The Atlantic: Surviving Anxiety by the magazine's editor Scott Stossel, in which he chronicles his life-long battle with anxieties, fears, and phobias. He boldly describes several embarassing incidents, as well as encounters or relationships with varied and numerous therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists and institutions. The list of medications he has tried or is currently taking, plus therapies he's attempted (or been subjected to) is absolutely mind-boggling.

The one thing he didn't mention trying was a truly spiritual path. Prayer and meditation are embedded in a long list of therapies, but I have to wonder if he ever made a serious attempt to connect with and seek guidance from the Divine. He talks briefly about his family's religious heritage; his father's parents were German Jews who came to the US before World War II, his mother a proud Mayflower descendant wasp, so he and his sister were raised Episcopal -- pretty much guaranteeing they would never come anywhere near a true metaphysical encounter with the Divine. 

I think this is a good time to bring up Ken Wilber's AQAL concept: he said he was having trouble tying together all his (end everyone else's) theories about life, love, society, religion, science, etc., until he drew a big cross, creating four quadrants. He put Interior(subjective) on the left, Exterior (objective) on the right, Individual at the top and Collective at the bottom. Every human endeavor you can think of fits somewhere on this simple grid. Individual/Collective is pretty self-explanatory. Exterior refers to anything that can be seen, touched or measured; Interior is something less tangible, whose nature and state can only be determined by asking about it.

So let's say you go for a physical. The nurse measures your height, weight, blood pressure; these are all Individual/Exterior/Upper Right qualities. Maybe you took the subway from your apartment building to the doctor's office in a skyscraper downtown; your home, mode of transport, and the office tower are all Collective/Exterior/Lower Right accomplishments. The doctor asks how you feel; he can't measure this directly, he has to ask. So your answer --- happy, depressed, anxious, or (crucially for this blog) spiritually ill --- falls in the Individual/Interior/Upper Left quadrant. He mentions that he really likes some new sitcom that's on TV tonight, it's a big hit. This is a lower left Collective/Interior item, which Wilber describes as "cultural" (so maybe a TV show was not a good example); point is, it's a collective endeavour because a bunch of people watch it, it's interior because they have to poll people to find out if it's popular. He asks if you like it. You say yes. This is an upper left Individual /Interior lie; you really think it's stupid, which is exactly why science hates dealing with anything on the left side of this chart. There are no instruments that can tell how happy or depressed someone is, it's really difficult to know when people are lying, thus it's pretty much impossible to predict whether a movie or show will be a hit.

My takeaway from Wilber's writings is always that science has dominated human thought and progress for the last couple of centuries. Psychologists have tried to create a science to deal with the upper left quadrant, with the result that "We've Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy & the World's Getting Worse" as the famous Jungian James Hillman titled his book back in 1992. And if the measure of scientific theory is in the results it can produce, Scott Stossel's experience is an undeniable condemnation of our efforts to understand the Individual/Interior part of lives.

Yet, the upper left quadrant -- Individual/Interior -- is precisely where our connection to the Divine happens. How can we lead a balanced, healthy life if we ignore the very thing that northwest-pointing arrow is actually pointing at?

From Mathew 6:

 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life[e]?

28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.