Mental Development: 21st Century Spirituality Part 2

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Some will have read the first part of this blog post already - scroll down to the *** for the new additions.....:O)

The momentous transition to 21st century spirituality has to do with consciousness. More specifically it has to do with three aspects of consciousness: cognitive development, psychological process, and spiritual practice.

Cognitive development has to do with how we think. The case I will make is that it is crucial that we teach ourselves and others to use our minds in a way that clarifies rather than distorts our perceptions of the reality we inhabit. There are three important areas of cognitive development that I will touch on: logic or rationality, critical thinking, and symbolic or metaphorical thinking.

Psychological process has to do with how our conscious sense of self (or ego) interacts with and learns from our unconscious mind and its dreams, emotions, over-reactions, projections, defensive beliefs and psychosomatic symptoms. The three important aspects of psychological process that I will touch on are:  the shadow, triggers, and defenses.

Spiritual Practice has to do with being in an awareness process that allows us to keep developing and deepening. The aspects of spiritual practice I will explore are embodiment, compassion, and presence.



Cognitive Development: Logic or Rationality

Seeing the world and ourselves through rational eyes does not imply being unspiritual, it implies basic sanity. Any spirituality that does not begin from a rational position of basic sanity will only dress itself up in contemporary clothing in order to perpetuate the religious madness of the past.

Basic sane rationality dictates that:

a) Jesus was not really (meaning “in  reality”) born of a virgin.
b) The stars do not really determine what kind of a day you are having.
c) Indian guru Sai Baba cannot really “manifest ash” from the palm of his hand.
d) The Jews are not really God's chosen people.
d) Islamic suicide bombers will not really proceed directly to a paradise where 70 virgins await their heroic attentions.

Notice how you might embrace or reject certain of these ideas and not others. While some may seem more malignant than others on this short list, they all have in common their unproven, irrational basis. As such tthey are all in the same category, though the consequences of believing them may vary - the foundational basis for that consequence is the same - they all lack a rational relationship to reality.

Thus, the above beliefs should not be called “spiritual”, they are merely irrational.
Irrational in the same way that my believing that next wednesday at precisely
4p.m. chocolate raindrops will fall from the sky, or that if I pray to
Indian prosperity goddess Lakshmi I might win the lottery.

We are way too far down the rabbit-hole of the inquisitions, holy wars,
witch hunts, jihads, guru abuses and cult suicides to ignore the
profoundly disastrous consequences of following irrational beliefs to
their logical conclusions. All of this in the name of spirituality.

I remember well the testimony of a follower of Gurumayi Chidvilasananda.
She said ” When I was a child magic was on top and reality was on the
bottom. Then I grew up and reality was on the top. Now that I have
Gurumayi in my life, magic is on the top again…”

That basically sums up the spiritual position of the New Age - we want a
return to the magic of childhood, and anything that challenges that is
anti-spiritual. We want to “believe” again and so deep is this desire to
believe that we are willing to fund millionaire gurus who claim divine
identity and in some cases, magical powers. We are willing to support
astrologers, psychics and trance-channels who help us to cobble together
a worldview that eschews psychological, social, political, and
historical knowledge in favor of metaphysical explanations for
everything from the war in Iraq to yesterdays parking ticket.

When we go along with unprovable metaphysical assertions about the hidden meaning of events in the real world, we not only give misplaced respect to the metaphysicians claims at higher truth, we also completely fail to use our own rational intelligence to explore the slightly less comforting but infintely more valid layers of meaning available to us.

The first principle of 21st Century Spirituality is this: the rational and the spiritual go hand-in-hand.

***********It is only from the foundation of solid rationality that spirituality can avoid the serious problems of what developmental psychologists call pre-rational consciousness. Children before the age of seven are pre-rational. From seven to eleven we are in the early rational (concrete operations) phase that then transitions into a more sophisticated rational phase (formal operations) which inlcudes abstraction. Many of us never completely move beyond some combination of pre-rational and early rational cognition, and in fact much of what passes for spirituality champions a regression to thinking about reality like a six or seven year old. The radical suggestion I am making is that adult spirituality should incorporate cognitive awareness from at least the age of eleven and older.

We have this romanticized notion that children are somehow more spiritual than adults and that it is logic, rationality, the complexity of adult cognition that limits us from being spiritual. In fact, it is logic, rationality and the complexity of adult cognition that allow us to beginn to become spiritual. True, these qualities limit us from feeling as unburdened, invincible and in touch with magic as young children sometimes feel - but that is actually a good thing! Genuine spirituality has to do with the struggle to come into wise and mature relationship with responsibility, evil, power, suffering, money, desire, love, morality, pleasure etc. Children are not more spiritual than adults, they are more immature.

Children in the pre-rational stages of development - birth to around seven years old, have very basic (though fast developing) cognition. They do not yet fully understand cause and effect. Children will therefore come up with or believe in magical explanations for things that adults (should) understand as a little more mundane.

Example: the child wakes up Xmas morning to find gifts under the tree! Where did they come from? Well, clearly Santa Claus brought them,  and what's more he came down the chimney and flew on a magic sleigh drawn by airborne reindeer!

Now of course when a child gets to be nine or ten years old and still believes in Santa Claus, we start to wonder if there is some kind of problem. (By twelve or thirteen the really bright child might even begin to think metaphorically about Santa - or Jesus and angels or demons for that matter...)Their cognitive development should be getting to the place where they understand that the more straightforward rational explanation of their parents putting the gifts under the tree is more obviously correct.

For too long it has been taboo to point out to religious and spiritual believers that their “faith” is pre-rational. This taboo is often dressed up in the multi-cultural relativistic clothing of tolerance, but there is something really fishy about this. If someone told you that they had once seen giant drops of chocolate falling from the sky and believed that, by their spiritual calculus, it was about to happen again sometime soon, you would probably ask them for proof and hold their unreasonable sounding assertions in a highly suspect light. In fact, you might even tell them (if they didnt seem too dangerous) that this sounded like a crazy idea and they must be mistaken.

But take a similarly outlandish claim about the arrival of the messiah or the existence of angels or spirit guides or belief in astrology and, for some unexplainable reason it is taboo to point out, and sometimes even to acknowledge to ourselves, that these are unreasonable, unproven assertions that do more to distort our perception of reality than clarify it.

Unfortunately we now live in an era when we see all too clearly the results of unreasonable pre-rational beliefs carried to their logical conclusion in the endlesly replaying images of the exploding and collapsing twin towers of the WTC. Of course 911 represents the most extreme expression of militant religious fundamentalism - but it is important to recognize that without the religious ideology of the Abrahamic religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, jihad, crusades, witch hunts and holy war would not be possible. Let us not forget that it is reality-distorting pre-rational religious belief that allowed those 19 men to convince themselves that they were martyrs in a righteous holy war who would be rewarded in the afterlife for their great acts and the glory thereby brought upon Allah. It also allowed  the executors of the Spanish Inquisition to perform acts of great inhumanity again and again in the name of God, and in a related way, there are those in the current U.S. administration who would invoke some divine directive to do the same in the name of homeland security.

It gets even worse when one is exposed to New Age interpretations of 911 along the lines of karma, synchronicity, past lives and "co-created reality". I can hardly wait for the so-called quantum physics interpretation! The problem is that fromm the classic New Age perspective, nothing can actually just be bad. Even 911 has to be interpreted in a way that proves a priori pollyana beliefs about the nature of the universe and the hidden magical hand that contrives to educate us spiritually through some combination of deus ex machina intervention and thought-generated intentional manifestation.

Neither conventional religion nor contemporary New Age spirituality know what to do with the reality of immense meaningless and unjust suffering. Though 911 has much meaning in terms of geopolitical history and as a springboard for a critique of pre-rational literalist religion, the death and destruction of that day can only be seen rationally in terms of the kind tragedy and horror that crushes humanity - and with it, meaning.

911 serves no higher purpose or truth. Events like 911 cannot be candy-coated by any metaphysical meaning. 911 stands as an extraordinary wake-up call out of the slumber of the denial and fantasy that have taken over the true estate of spirituality.

The reason evens like 911 are so wrong is precisely because they devastate the fragile reality of civilized meaning. The interpretation of meaning is after all a rational process. It falls to the higher or more sophisticated cognitive realm of formal operations - where we learn the art of abstraction and interpretation of metaphor and symbol. The vast majority of metaphysical interpretations of reality regress into pre-rational rather than higher rational or even trans-rational cognition.

How do we know this? Because the metaphysical (be it religious or New Age) interpretation is usually choc-full of unlikely magic, self-important narcissisim, and elaborate fantasy about the nature of god and reality. Take any metaphysical interpretatiion of life's difficulties and horrors and substitute the major events with something like little billy's dog dying and the child-like cognition will be quite clear in the surrounding explanations.

Think for example about the kinds of metaphysical back-flips people have to perform to try and explain the "higher meaning" behind who did and didnt die in the 911 attacks - the person who was late for work, the father who had a baby on the way, the woman who was having an affair, the boss who was misusing his power, the noble person who helped an old lady across the street that morning, etc.. Rationally, we understand that the impact of those two exploding planes, the political agenda and the religious madness behind it was what killed the people in that attack. Rationally, we understand that it was not a punishment to any particular individual from some divine source. Rationally, we understand that it was mere chance that certain people who might have died didn't on that day. Rationally, we know that it would have been better if the whole thing had never happened. There is no higher plan or purpose to such a moment of horror and tragedy, be it God's will, or for Allah's glory, or as some kind of past-life blowback - the spiritual message of 911 merely echos the words of the Buddha. There is suffering. Often that suffering is meaningless. 21st Century Spirituality should help us to face this reality and deal with it on it's own terms. Of course, I think 21st Century Spirituality should also help us to look at the political and psychological underpinnings of such events - but this is something we cannot do until we dismantle the childish attempt to metaphysical-ize and candy-coat tragedy.

This is definitely not a rant against children. Children think exactly as they should. Children should even be suppported in protecting themselves from the aspects of real life that are too overwhelming for them to handle. My point is that as adults we should, in the natural order of things, continue to develop into embracing reality with adult cognition. My point is that spirituality, this most essential of human endeavours, should properly concern itself with the large and difficult questions that mature adults struggle with and honor rather than dismiss and diminish those questions.

Of course all spirituality is not pre-rational. I am saying, though, that all spirituality and religion that makes magical claims about reality is inherently pre-rational and based in a deep need to deny the basic, sane, rational interpretation of reaity that thinking men and women have everywhere embraced in the 250 or so years since The Enlightenment.

The New Age spiritual movement believes that the Rational Enlightenment  was the problem, it seperated us from our innocently pure spirituality - just as the personal development of an adult rational ego is supposedly an obstacle to spirituality. Not so.

What they fail to recognize is that it is only once we start to develop a rational ego (between the ages of 7 and 11) that we can start to lay the groundwork for that most spiritual of qualities - compassion. It is only with the rational stage of what developmental psychological giant Piaget calls concrete operational thinking that we start to be able to imagine ourselves experiencing from another's point of view. At this stage - the voluminous research shows, we begin to be able to cognitively put ourselves in another's shoes and imagine how reality looks and feels to them!

Concrete Operations is thus named because we learn at this stage to apply logical rules to the operations of cause and effect. This happens at the same time as we are learning how to take another's perspective, and to eschew magical interpretations of reality that were filling in the gaps of our cognitive pereceptions, in favor of clear and simple cause and effect.

It is from the foundation of clear and simple cause and effect that the sophisticated cognition required to decipher symbolic and metaphorical spiritual meaning develops in  a way that embraces rather than refutes basic, sane rationality.

Shadow and Light: 21st Century Spirituality Part 3 a) here!

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