Contra "Spirituality": Part 4

From the perspective of Thumotics, creating a personal religion has little if anything to do with taking good care of our own spirit and that of others. If anything, given the current understanding of "spirituality", it distracts us from attending to our spirit and has us attend to our religious beliefs instead.

Creating a personal religion can also deceive us into believing that by having a personal religion we're taking good care of our spirit. We might not be. Taking good care of our personal religious beliefs is not the same as taking good care of our spirit.

Being spirited, alive, precedes having a personal religion. In order to have a personal religion we must first be alive. We must first be spirited. Without spirit we cannot create a personal religion. Spiritedness ontologically precedes our personal religion.

In order to create a healthy personal religion, we do well to first take good care of our body, mind, and spirit. Just as an apple tree needs to be healthy in order to produce healthy apples, so we need to be healthy in body, mind, and spirit to produce whatever we choose to produce, a personal religion or anything else.

This begs the question: How do we take good care of our own spirit and that of others? It also begs this question: Why?

Contra "Spirituality": Part One

It is a popular, and apparently unexamined, belief that the word "spirituality" need not refer to our own spirit or that of anyone else. It can serve as a convenient label for our own personal collection of religious beliefs. 

For many "spirituality" is like a shopping cart into which we can drop our own eclectic collection of beliefs picked from the aisles of the religions of the world. To put into our "spirituality" cart we can from the aisle of Christianity pick some of the sayings of Jesus we like, hands on healing, prayer, angels, love, forgiveness, and helping the weak, sick, and poor. 

From the aisles of Hinduism and Buddhism, we can pick karma, reincarnation, non-violence, yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, mantras, mindfulness, devaluing our ego and identifying with the divine Self, and living in the present moment. 

On the Native American aisle we can pick love of Mother Earth and all of nature. 

From the Theosophical aisle we can pick Ascended Masters and Guides as well as the unity of all religions. 

And from the Occult aisle, we can add some Angel cards for guidance. 

Since there are many individual shoppers and many different aisles from which to choose, there are many different combinations of beliefs. Many refer to their collection of beliefs as their spirituality.

The "spirituality" label is convenient because it allows us to avoid applying the dreaded "r" word to ourselves: religious. So many of us are allergic to religion. We're "spiritual but not religious." It sounds so righteous, so "holier than thou" when said by some.

From the perspective of Thumotics, when we use of the word "spirituality" as a label for a personal collection of religious beliefs it begs this question: What word do we use to refer to a collection of ideas and practices related to spirit? More about this in Part Two.  

Religious Belief a Thought Virus?

As far as we know, we human beings are the only animals on Earth that have religious beliefs.* Dogs are not religious. Cats are not religious. Neither are crows nor catfish.

Does having religious beliefs make us superior or inferior to other animals? I wonder...especially since we, like other animals, are not born religious. We humans are made religious by other humans- parents and others in positions of power over us.

Religious belief is not natural. At best it is artificial. It consists of stories we humans make up and tell to help us cope with the challenges of life. At worst it is a serious, life-denying thought virus spread by word of mouth and reinforced by guilt and fear- guilt about our natural instincts and fear of divine rejection and punishment. Guilt and fear, expressed in words of divine love, join in our hearts and give birth to a bad conscience, the symptom of a sick spirit.

If religious belief is a serious, life-denying thought virus, we do well to cleanse our hearts and minds and cure ourselves of it. When we are clear, we will be free. We will be free to live spirit-related lives in which we love and celebrate spirit as that which makes us and all the living alive.

* Those who are "spiritual but not religious" may replace "religious" with "spiritual."