Member-only story
Sceptical spirituality
Spiritual exploration: what’s supposed to happen?
Doing your spiritual homework #4
An obvious difficulty with everyday rationality and logic — meaning ‘thinking things through’ carefully and systematically — is that it doesn’t seem to be able to deliver quick and easy final answers when it comes to spirituality, so people throughout history — that’s all of us — have concluded that it’s worthless. If you sit down and quietly think things through about spirituality, you will most likely come up with nothing. Even if you do it many times, over an extended period. There just doesn’t seem to be anything there.
Worse still, everyone else is supposedly grooving on New Age mindfulness, living in the now, perpetuating perpetual positivity, connecting to the Divine, and all the rest of it. A bit of yoga, a bit of meditation, some exotic calming music, profound one-liners from a spiritual guru: that’s where the action is. And the best thing about New Age spirituality — it’s all so easy!
And yet.
The enigma of spirituality has not yet been solved because, in essence, it’s the most difficult predicament anyone can face, and nobody has yet managed to come up with a convincing answer. So here we are — as experiencing beings — but how did this happen? And…