Covered Realms:
(all links - except to "Gaia" and "Do Future yourself" - refer to German texts)
We have to do some problems. We need ploughed land, ground, homes, technical means and so on. Marx said something about this needs. On the other Hand we must transform our culture, our lifestyle. We have to change our living and working. While transforming society we have to transform ourselves and while transforming ourselves we change the society.
Spirituality is one possibility to change ourselves. What is spirituality? There are many definitions. If spirituality demands praying - I'm not spiritually. I want to refuse all forms of spirituality which are "too lazy to think". But I won't refuse people who are spiritually. Its a tightrope walk.
In this weeks it happens an interesting coincidence. We discuss the topic "Spirituality" in a group of friends in Jena and we discuss this topic in a mailing-discussion-group at the same time around the world.
I outline some opinions:
Steve and I are fearing that spirituality will work like a religion. It may "hold (only!) its doctrines and values as the true, right... ones" (Steve, 28.3., add. in ( ) A.S.). I feel that many "spiritual" people refuse non-spiritual people because they are not "really human". But it is often elitism to say that the other people are "not ready for it esoteric secret".
We have to define what spirituality is. We can understand each other in the definitions. I wrote my doubts in a mail and got interesting answers.
Here are some definitions of spirituality:
I like this. I don't pray. But I often think that hearing good music or snuggle up to the child can be a better meditation than forced praying without feeling... (I can't write about this, because this is "nondual"(see: T.Murphy about "Wholeness and Enlightenment"). )
As I was 14, I feeled "a sense of oneness with" the universe. But it was a flight from the real world. As I studied physics (relativistic quantum theory) I defended my feelings against bare formulas. I want to integrate Feeling (I want not say that I mean mystical experience although maybe some of them are such feelings) and Knowing - not lose the knowledge.
It was a hard work for my to develop myself (all my ancestors were farm hands - I studied physics and philosophy...) In my early years I was "lost in cosmos" - was not by myself, wasn't a "self"...(and therefore, Tom, this "sense of oneness" had to be developed. Today seeing Hale-Bopp I'm feeling much more than in my earlier astronomy-times. )
I won't lose my self. But my "self" is nothing without introducing it in a community - the world. While this my "self" becomes another of course. I needn't to prove my knowledge to my friends to give a lecture in the discussions about philosophy with my friends in Jena . I've learned to be silent (it was hard to me!) and to be a part of the group easily. Some groups develop around me without lectures - only due to human being...
All my ancestors couldn't study or learn. My grandmas worked and worked and worked... Their lives weren't "transcended", but dull. I'm very happy to have another possibilities. Therefore I insist on them. Yes I know - I've learned (!?) to limit the meaning of mere thinking. I allow and promote feelings... on the basis of another understanding as my grandmas had. In this sense I'm unlearning some school-thinking. Hegel distinguished between "Verstand" (understanding) and "Vernunft" (reason). "Vernunft" unites the differences made by "Verstand". Hegel only knew rational brain-"Vernunft". We accept and know more.
Ken Wilber has a good presentation: at first there is a "fusion" (mush without differences). But than we need the stage of differences to achieve the stage of "Integration". Integration is not the same with fusion! In this way I can accept wholeness.
I see with Hegel differences in the units and these differences are necessary for being and evolution. If there no differences, there would be no interaction (like we in our discussions). Uniform things needn't other things, they would drive without interactions in the mush . This is not the whole/wholeness, which I mean.
Compare:
"Spinoza was by descent a Jew; and it is upon the whole the Oriental way of seeing things, according to which the nature of the finite world seems frail and transient, that has found ist intellectual expression in his system. This Oriental view of the unity of substance certainly gives the basis for all real further development. Still it is not the final idea. It is marked by the absence of the principle of the Western world, the principle of individuality, which first appeared under a philosophic shape, contempoaneously with Spinoza, in the Monadology of Leibnitz." (Hegel, Encyclop. § 151 addition, Engl. cit. in: ../works/sl/slactual.htm).
We have to unite - analogous to Ken Wilber - the opposites: Wholeness and Individuality, not to "attempt to eradicate one of the opposites" (Excerpt from Wilber´s "No boundaries" by C. Doppler).
Please refer as well to (in English):
- This page is a part of "Annettes Philosophenstübchen" © 1997 - http://www.thur.de/philo/spirit.htm -