September 30, 2012
In my 30 years of researching the patterns of those who call themselves spiritual versus religious, this is what I have discovered.
Spirituality is a new name for an old theme - finding the god within and healing one's soul.
It is not easy to break from traditional religion, but religious beliefs don't work in today's world and are too controlling.
Religion is too structured for many people who seek totally freedom in end times.
Everyone has their own way of saying they 'talk to god' ... or a creational source of light who listens.
Were gods really ancient aliens ... so it would seem ... including Jesus himself. It was all just a myth.
Religion and Myth are the same.
Religion traps souls in the grids of creation.
Healing and awareness brings people to a place where they believe in love and light (god), but not as a religious figure who will one day return to save them.
Spirituality helps people connect with higher consciousness - no matter how it is achieved - though sometimes taken to extreme with chemical abuse.
I find that people who believe in false gods are just as lost and dysfunctional as those who put too much faith in spirituality, for in truth they are the same and merely tools to help people heal and connect with the collective unconsciousness for greater understanding.
Most of what is taught during a spiritual session, often sounds a lot like religious sermons to me and unrealistic.
Never worship anything or anyone. The best way to go is anything that is positive in frequency - laughter, creativity, making a difference - all of which are popular themes in the consciousness grids today.
Many ask, "I am a good person, so why doesn't god help me?" There is no god. You are programmed illusion in a consciousness hologram about to wake up and remember the nature of our biogenetic experiment.
At the end of the day ... of this blog ... people understand that life as we know it is changing or evolving along with consciousness. The human experiment is ending, imploding everything in its wake.
'I'm spiritual but not religious' is a cop-out
The increasingly common refrain that "I'm spiritual, but not religious," represents some of the most retrogressive aspects of contemporary society. The spiritual but not religious "movement" - an inappropriate term as that would suggest some collective, organizational aspect - highlights the implosion of belief that has struck at the heart of Western society.
Spiritual but not religious people are especially prevalent in the younger population in the United States, although a recent study has argued that it is not so much that people have stopped believing in God, but rather have drifted from formal institutions.
It seems that just being a part of a religious institution is nowadays associated negatively, with everything from the Religious Right to child abuse, back to the Crusades and of course with terrorism today.
Those in the spiritual-but-not-religious camp are peddling the notion that by being independent - by choosing an "individual relationship" to some concept of "higher power", energy, oneness or something-or-other - they are in a deeper, more profound relationship than one that is coerced via a large institution like a church.
That attitude fits with the message we are receiving more and more that "feeling" something somehow is more pure and perhaps, more "trueÓ than having to fit in with the doctrine, practices, rules and observations of a formal institution that are handed down to us.
The trouble is that "spiritual but not religious" offers no positive exposition or understanding or explanation of a body of belief or set of principles of any kind. What is it, this "spiritual" identity as such? What is practiced? What is believed?
The accusation is often leveled that such questions betray a rigidity of outlook, all a tad doctrinaire and rather old-fashioned. P> But when the contemporary fashion is for an abundance of relativist "truths" and what appears to be in the ascendancy is how one "feels" and even governments aim to have a "happiness agenda," desperate to fill a gap at the heart of civic society, then being old-fashioned may not be such a terrible accusation.
It is within the context of today's anti-big, anti-discipline, anti-challenging climate - in combination with a therapeutic turn in which everything can be resolved through addressing my inner existential being - that the spiritual but not religious outlook has flourished.
The boom in megachurches merely reflect this sidelining of serious religious study for networking, drop-in centers and positive feelings.
Those that identify themselves, in our multi-cultural, hyphenated-American world often go for a smorgasbord of pick-and-mix choices.
A bit of Yoga here, a Zen idea there, a quote from Taoism and a Kabbalah class, a bit of Sufism and maybe some Feng Shui but not generally a reading and appreciation of The Bhagavad Gita, the Karma Sutra or the Qur'an, let alone The Old or New Testament.
So what, one may ask?
Christianity has been interwoven and seminal in Western history and culture. As Harold Bloom pointed out in his book on the King James Bible, everything from the visual arts, to Bach and our canon of literature generally would not be possible without this enormously important work.
Indeed, it was through the desire to know and read the Bible that reading became a reality for the masses - an entirely radical moment that had enormous consequences for humanity.
Moreover, the spiritual but not religious reflect the "me" generation of self-obsessed, truth-is-whatever-you-feel-it-to-be thinking, where big, historic, demanding institutions that have expectations about behavior, attitudes and observance and rules are jettisoned yet nothing positive is put in replacement.
The idea of sin has always been accompanied by the sense of what one could do to improve oneself and impact the world.
Yet the spiritual-but-not-religious outlook sees the human as one that simply wants to experience "nice things" and "feel better." There is little of transformation here and nothing that points to any kind of project that can inspire or transform us.
At the heart of the spiritual but not religious attitude is an unwillingness to take a real position. Influenced by the contribution of modern science, there is a reluctance to advocate a literalist translation of the world.
But these people will not abandon their affiliation to the sense that there is "something out there," so they do not go along with a rationalist and materialistic explanation of the world, in which humans are responsible to themselves and one another for their actions - and for the future.
Theirs is a world of fence-sitting, not-knowingess, but not-trying-ness either. Take a stand, I say. Which one is it? A belief in God and Scripture or a commitment to the Enlightenment ideal of human-based knowledge, reason and action? Being spiritual but not religious avoids having to think too hard about having to decide.