And I don’t just mean organized religion, or theistic religions, or traditional religion. The spiritual urge many of us experience is not about the supernatural, or magic, or even going with some cosmic flow. It is, I suspect, a by-product of our culture and upbringing, our various inate intelligences and our pattern-seeking brain. We are better for spiritual practice – but not because it puts us into contact with god or our inner divinity. Rather, it is a way of opening up ourselves to connections and relationships that we might otherwise ignore.
Creating space in our lives for compassion, for awe and beauty, for discipline and self-sacrifice – these are time-tested pathways to a deeper and more effective life. Better in what sense? More effective in what way? A simple answer? Living in such a way as to maximize the happiness of all – giving everyone the opportunity for a successful and meaningful life.
We’ve embraced a natural model for how things work based on scientific principles, yet we build our spiritual life on outmoded speculation and assumptions about the world that we know to be false. Instead, let’s take what we are learning about the foundations of ethics, of community, of morality – and use this growing understanding to make a new map of human spirituality.
Just like ancient maps were often very wrong – and yet did identify historical towns and landmarks with some accuracy, these new maps will continue to identify touchstones like compassion, meditation, self-discipline (to name a few), but these can now be placed in the context of the natural world and our modern discoveries about the nature of our brain, our communities, and the vast universe we inhabit.
The result is a life that honors virtue, discipline and sacrifice – but in the service of a more just and compassionate life for ourselves, our family, our neighbors, the people of the world and the earth itself.
