Showing posts with label Religion of tomorrow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Religion of tomorrow. Show all posts

Saturday, June 4, 2022

I’m spiritual but not religious.


—only 11 percent of northern Europe, for example, is “churched.” That is, only one out of ten people have anything to do with institutional religion; nine out of ten find it unbelievable and useless.

Wilber, Ken. The Religion of Tomorrow (p. 6). Shambhala. Kindle Edition. 


There is a phrase for this that has become quite common: “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Polls show that some 20 percent of Americans identify overall with that phrase. And some polls have shown that, in the younger generation—those between eighteen and twenty-nine—this percentage explodes to an astonishing 75 percent!2 In other words, three out of four young individuals have a deep spiritual yearning that no existing religion is addressing.


Wilber, Ken. The Religion of Tomorrow (p. 6). Shambhala. Kindle Edition. 


There is a huge social transformation underway which goes largely unmentioned and that is the diminishment of religion as a major social institution in much of the Western world. This loss of the organizing and socializing function of religion in Western society has huge consequences for a shared meta narrative and shared umbrella for value consensus. What is to take its place and fill this vacuum? What we have seen is the rise of authoritarianism propelled by various ideologies and conspiracy theories.


If people are indeed “spiritual” even if not “religious” what form and practice will this spirituality take? How is spiritual intelligence to be recognized, acknowledged, and nurtured? What are the ways to think about this? Wilber and the integral philosophers call this “waking up” and “growing up.” Waking up is the development to higher levels of consciousness and growing up is the development of higher levels of world views. Waking up is done by the development of one’s interior spiritual life and growing up is done by achieving higher levels of cultural maturity.


What is your interior spiritual life like? From what worldview are you coming from?


Continue with us on our journey of study of the spiritual awakening of the world.


Friday, June 3, 2022

Are you searching for Enlightenment?


But what if that which we have since learned in the past thousand years, even the past fifty years, would actually affect how, for example, a person would directly experience Enlightenment or Awakening? What if we have discovered aspects of human awareness that most definitely determine how humans interpret any and all experiences that they have, and what if these interpretive frameworks, which will determine the different ways we directly experience Enlightenment, not only exist, but actually grow and develop through over a half-dozen well-documented stages during a human’s overall life—and that they continue to develop during a human’s adult years? Awakening or Enlightenment is traditionally taken as being the unity of the individual self with ultimate Reality—what the Sufis call “the Supreme Identity”—resulting in a Wholeness or Nonduality, which, including all of reality, conveys a sense of utter Freedom and total Fullness to the individual. But what if these interpretive frameworks actually govern how individuals see and experience “Wholeness,” and thus directly determine how an individual experiences Enlightenment itself? That would change the nature of the Paths of the Great Liberation profoundly, with, in effect, a different “Liberation” being experienced at each of these different stages of growth and development. But the evidence is already in: those framework stages definitely exist—they have been found in over forty cultures (in every culture checked so far, in fact)—and they definitely alter how one experiences Enlightenment, or any other experience, for that matter. The very ground has shifted under the Great Traditions, and they don’t even know it.


Wilber, Ken. The Religion of Tomorrow (p. 5). Shambhala. Kindle Edition. 


People, increasingly, say these days when asked that they are not religious but spiritual. What do they mean? Are they trying to express some relationship with a Higher Power whatever they conceive that Higher Power to be? And is this relationship going anywhere?


It is the function of the church to nurture and enhance spiritual development but in our post postmodern age they are failing at the job and people no longer find churches and their religions helpful in nurturing their spiritual intelligence. So where do the people turn for this assistance? They often flounder and stagnate. And yet the maps are there. We have the knowledge about spiritual development but it is rarely taught even if it is recognized and acknowledged.


Ken Wilber lays this information out in his book, The Religion of Tomorrow. We will be reading it and studying it. Join us.


Print Friendly and PDF