Spirituality is a wonderful product of human consciousness. What is fascinating about people who embrace this philosophy is how they go about living its stated purpose of ignoring material or physical concerns, but to attend to things of a metaphysical nature.
Spirituality in the world is quite old. In the East, the main purpose of of one’s life is to escape the Illusion, or Maya of the world and ascend back to Brahma, or the Godhead. The West it received its first flowering in the 3rd AD with Neoplatonism and various schools of Gnosticism. Neoplatonism was a religious philosophical movement that attempted to preserve the teachings of Plato. The Neoplatonists claimed that evil was merely the absence of the Light of the One, a single principle from which existence emanated from. This One was totally transcendent, and could not be seen by human senses. In turn, this One emanates a perfect copy of itself called the Nous, a motionless Divine Mind that produces all in existence.
Salvation for the Neoplatonists (salvation is always the point of religious philosophy) was for the soul to escape this physical world full of suffering and ignorance of this great Light and ascend “back” to the One. It was the lack of light which produced darkness and evil, the Neoplatonists claimed. “Evil” and suffering was only the ignorance of the Divine, Transcendent One. Generally for the Gnostics, the physical world itself was evil and came from a ‘lower power.’
The current New Age religious philosophy of denying the world, its problems and suffering in favor of concentrating on an ineffable experience of spirit descends from Neoplatonism. They share the Neoplatonist notion that the World isn’t “evil,” it is just ignorant of the Light.
They go even further, wrapping themselves around the Law of Attraction – claiming that even noticing evil in the world “manifests more evil.” I haven’t located the exact entry point of this ridiculous notion, but the 19th century Hindu mystic Ramakrishna seems to have been the first one to mention it. In any case, modern religious philosophy has been one of the most disastrous modes of thought ever to strike humanity. The claim that salvation can be had by ignoring (ignorance?) or escaping the self-evident physical world by mentally ascending through ecstatic ritualism or meditation in order to reach an invisible, blissful state of ”higher consciousness” or Peace of Mind,” is a hideous denial of responsibility to the world. Perhaps something could be said of enlightenment if one could sustain the state for longer than a moment
Those who say, “the Higher Realms cannot be expressed in words” are engaging in religious dishonesty and self-deception, because if an experience cannot be named, how is it ultimately given the term of “Higher?” The only thing they can say is that they are mimicking the words of religious philosophers who denied the hateful, physical world which they held in contempt. They could not understand that their views were anti-life and denial of responsibility.
All claims of the existence of an ineffable “divinity” must be met with an appeal to the disgusting nature of what the human being have done to each other and to this physical world. In other words, all claims of divinity must be rejected. There is nothing that humanity has envisioned, created or observed that approaches what is vainly described as “Divine” (or “Life,” for that matter). Metaphysicians and Spiritualists have spent 2500 years copping out with a ridiculous and vain scheme to try and save their asses from taking responsibility for the “evil” they claimed was someone else’s doing. Their words are becoming more difficult to hear and they are now running out of time.
