On Becoming Spiritually Fearless
Our conventional way of thinking about the world remains profoundly dualistic. The physical and the rational in a supposedly eternal and inexorable battle against the unseen and the spiritual. In fact, the barriers between these two dimensions -- built by the narrow rationalism of the Enlightenment -- are now being dismantled by modern science and a growing chorus of personal experiences. What we're seeing -- if we are willing to look -- is that we are not alone in an indifferent universe. As Goethe put it, "This life, gentlemen, is much too short for our souls." If this life were sufficient for our souls, we would not go through it consumed with fear.
Reintegrating the spiritual and the everyday is the key to fearlessness. But ending this division is not easy when we've stopped even acknowledging that we live caught between these two worlds. When we're consumed with climbing the career ladder or just making a living, the spiritual seems unreal and far away. So we keep it conveniently penciled in one day a week, we seek it out only in moments of crisis, or we deny it altogether while trying to convince ourselves that we can overcome all fears and obstacles on our own.
Which is not to say we're not religious. Seventy percent of Americans belong to a religious organization and 40 percent of adults attend services once a week. "The downside to all this," writes Jeffrey Kluger in his 2004 Time article "Is God in Our Genes?" "is that often religious groups gather not into congregations but into camps -- and sometimes they're armed camps. . . .Why then do we so often let the sweetness of religion curdle into combat? The simple answer might be that just because we're given a gift, we don't necessarily always use it wisely."
Here's the bottom line: If you believe in a God who only judges and punishes, or if you believe that there is nothing but an accidental, indifferent universe, it's going to be incredibly hard to move from fear to fearlessness because, after all, the essential characteristic of fearlessness is trust. It's the trust that there is meaning in our lives, even when our limited minds are unable to see it, the trust that's captured in one of my favorite verses in the Bible: "Not a sparrow falls but that God is behind it."
The alternative is a pessimism and an impatience that despair of life and seek hope either in the end of the world or in worldly panaceas.
This excerpt was originally published in On Becoming Fearless by Arianna Huffington.
Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff
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What many atheists don't understand, or accept, about believers is that we are not really "believers" at all. We have a relationship with God (loaded word, admittedly) that is as real as any other relationship in our lives. We don't go around trying to work out what to believe or not to believe. We may wonder, as I do, all the things that atheists wonder about why God would allow horrible things to happen, or why life is so demonstrably unfair. But I wonder things about my wife, my daughter, my pet, the people in Washington, etc. too. I am not going to disavow my relationship with any of these beings just because much of what they say or do doesn't make sense to me. When Carl Jung was asked if he believed in God, he countered that "belief" was a wholly inadequate term for his experience. "I know there's a God!", he said. As do I.
For those who do not, I assume that you experience a similar relationship to what I am referring to within your own thought processes, the "conversations" you have with yourself when you think about things. If that is all you need to grow and evolve, then that's great.
Arianna,
You are very brave and should be commended for your thoughts on Spirituality.
I believe that the next great leap in human social evolution will be liberating Spirituality from the monopoly of religions. This liberation will unleash the greatest opportunity for humans to finally began to answer the foundational question "What does it mean to be a human being?"
How about trusting in yourself? Why do people feel the need to externalize and put their trust in something outside themselves? To me, that only breeds more fear, because you're putting your trust into something you have no control over. People say they want to believe in something much greater than themselves, but the human mind can be a pretty great thing. Use it!
Arianna, I couldn't agree more. It should be obvious to all that we've been living that alternative you refer to for at least the last 50-55 years. In fact we have made it our "world view" by our mutually tacit agreement. People are beginning to wake up to the fact now though, that they can actually make that agreement, that "world view", what can be most spiritually benificial and therefore, life affirming to all. In this way fear as a manipulative tool becomes ineffectual.
The issue of consciousness and meaning has a direct bearing on this outcome and has been addressed by several of your regular bloggers on a fairly regular basis and for this I am most thankful to huffpost for the opportunity to interchange views and information.
Thank you again Arianna.
I am non-religious, neither for nor against. For me personally, it is irrelevant. I want to be able to summon god to fix my problems about as much as I want to have my mom go negotiate for me at work. I refuse to be fear-driven. I've made my choices on how I want to live. Send me back 2000 years as a first-hand witness to the ressurection or the hoax, either way it doen't matter. I'm content with my choices and wouldn't change a thing.
In regards to the references about fear, I feel that I am much more fearful (and obviously much less talented) than Ms. Huffington. Whatever the reasons, be they biological, spiritual, scientific or artistic, we are each different, and each face our own demons and blessings. To get through this life doing as little damage as possible, and to help when help is useful, and to maybe smile along the way, I am thinking that that is not such a bad thing.
Arianna is always at her best when she writes about spiritual things.
However, while the intuition of our immortality fills us with courage when facing the dualities of fortune and life, more fearless still are those who have achieved the "reintergration" of Time and Eternity in the political and social realm; who see the movement of Heaven and its Directing Ideal in the turbulant course of events.
As life is too short for the deathless soul history is too short for the life of humanity which rises triumphant from this world of tears and it's necessary wars and tragedies.
"Time is a moving image of Eternity," said Plato. But what he didn't say, because he didn't know, is that Eternity is continully shaping this world into a godlike image of itself. And this is what we call human history the story of our species which ever survives and presses onward toward the redeeming goal of law and liberty.
Hi Seamunky,
For a Godless Secular Humanist you have many qualities that are most often only found in a Child of God seeking the Father within. I see hope.
A Child of God can also believe in science & reason, tolerance, eliminating discrimination, protecting human rights.
But some are merely subscribing to the Pharasees and socialized Dogmas of today's Churches not the religion of Jesus.
Knowing that the Father Loves All then shouldn't the Child also try to Love All?
The very traits you speak of prove you are much more than simply an evolved animal. The animal believes in the survival of the fittest. The Spiritually enlightened Child of God loves everyone equally and would always believe in every one of those traits.
Why our Pharasee's of today cannot see the virtue to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity, is beyond reason. They will soon become aware of what they have been doing.
Seamunky, how could you be so accurate in what the Father wants, which is so much further than many who do believe, and not realize this drive came from somewhere greater than evolution could bring?
Our 'Christian' President is in name only and many have fallen for his words but we have all been told that by their fruits will they be known. Rotten fruit means?
If man actually decided to seek out that which is already here he would soon begin to understand his True Destiny.
We are All connected and we should treat each other for the fact of it! But how many will continue to sit in their churches, synagogues or houses of worship, happy to profess their beliefs before others like the suit they wear, while remaining in fear of life lived being our Father's Child?
Learning Love is Loving God, Loving Truth is Learning God.
thorpe55.t
I go for the collective consciousness theory of spirituality myself. According to neural network theory, we are all one mind, one soul. I then add the collective Pattern of the natural world to that collective consciousness. When we die, we live on in the memories and minds of the people still living and our imprint on the natural world. God, the “one God” is the Ideal collective Soul. It is our greatest aspirations as a people in this universe. God is what we Will the collective Soul to be. So we are all a part of God.
That's my 2 cents.
Everyone should see ZEITGEIST. The first half is a really new way of looking at the origins of religions. Everyone on earth should see it. The second half is a very reasonable 9/11 conspiracy theory, which may upset some people. I don't think a 9/11 conspiracy beyond BushCo ignoring Clinton's warnings about Bin Laden is necessary, but they bring up the best evidence I've seen. The whole movie is very entertaining and well done. You can go to their web site after to see the supporting documentation.
During the many years that I was an agnostic (tending toward atheism and searching for intellectual certainty), I discovered again and again that one thing that most self-proclaimed Christians and atheists have in common is that neither of them live their daily lives based on what they claim to believe in. Most "Christians" don't act in a particularly loving, charitable or forgiving way, and most atheists don't act in a particularly rational manner of fact-based decision-making.
As for me, I ended up becoming that most chimerical of creatures in our polarized culture of right vs. left and religious vs. non-religious: a liberal Christian (based on life experience first and reasoning a distant second). I am not a fundamentalist, and I believe that genuine faith is only possible where there is honest doubt and an open mind. I also believe that science is the best method that human beings have ever come up with to determine objective truths about physical reality. But I don't think that science can create an absolutely complete model of all reality. Those who claim to base their rejection of all religious and metaphysical experience on science are guilty of intellectual dishonesty: science can't prove that there are no classes of phenomena that are unverifiable by science's own methodological constraints -- that's a meta-scientific issue.
The fact is that there are, past and present, many examples of brillant, informed, honest, courageous and decent human beings who are religious, and of many who are non-religious. It is arrogant, close-minded and absurd to dismiss such people's worldviews simply so that one can maintain the illusion that one's own conclusions can't possibly be wrong.
Most of the non-religious people I know are less afraid of death than the religious ones, who agonize over whether or not they are going to hell (few believers are free of "sin" in their own eyes). To me, the universe is indifferent and certainly not fair; we each have to find our own meaning to our lives. I simply cannot believe in virgin births and bodily (or even non-bodily) resurrections; if God had wanted me to believe all of that s/he should have ordered the circumstances of my life much differently.
THE WORD "SPIRITUAL" HAS BECOME A CLICHE...
Especially as a substitute for what used to be called "religious
Other than these terminological quibbles, I am in total agreement with her basic perspective on things. But speaking of terminology, we also really don't know what to call that "other dimension," the one in which our souls exist and move from life to life, forgetting each one as we go....
I've read this beautiful passage by Ms. Huffington and also several of the Thanksgiving
pieces by the bloggers on this post. Every last one of them touched my heart. Like or not, we are a "spiritual" people; the same country that engendered the Christian Right also produced Henry David Thoreau and all of his devoted disciples. And speaking of Thoreau, if you don't believe that there was a
Creator"-- look around. Look with fresh eyes. And yes, you can simultaneously believe in both God and evolution.
One of the many things I am thankful for is that theHuffington Post exists and a nobody such as I am can post her opinions. Thank the God of your choice that for all of its faults we still have a gorgeous country that allows us to have Freedom of Expression (as of today, November 24.)
Speaking for myself I am far from fearless; to borrow a phrase from the great Mose Allison "but I'm gettin' there."
I'm a secular humanist who isn't frightened by death (after birth, it's the most natural thing on earth) or by the Sturm und Drang of the human experience (it has been tumultuous since the beginning of time, and will always be so).
Because I'm not inclined to fear variables I cannot control, I don't need the comforting scrim of spirituality to face the world fearlessly. I am content to do the good I can, and to enjoy this life for what it is.
-- Christian Gulliksen
Unfortunately, I don't have time to read all comments but will hope to get to them later on the weekend.
Important topic, and I'm glad to see it raised. The mind and body are inextricably interconnected, and those who practice meditation or mindfulness do appear to have a more calm, thoughtful, grounded, open approach to thinking through possibilities, challenges, or solutions. (They also have lower blood pressure.)
Whether mindful reflection occurs in a church pew, or whether it occurs in someone's living roomk, or an a noonday stroll doesn't really matter so much. But the importance of 'daily quiet time' is increasingly valuable in such a busy, noisy, conflict-ridden world.
We've solved many technical problems; the next challenges are social and personal. Those require time, persistence, humility, and patience.
It's easy to be afraid, and there are many forces that want us to be fearful -- we give up our power when we're afraid, and let others make decisions. But that's like walking around half-dead; life is too precious to squander being afraid all the time.
The most vibrant, innovative, courageous people that I know are all fearless: some are farmers, one fixes car engines, one teaches second grade, and another is a surgeon. But they all have a ' fearless trust' in forces that they can't control, and don't necessarily understand. They influence those around them in wonderful ways, and because they are fearless, they have the courage to be honest, forthright, and humble.
Thanks again for this thoughtful post.
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