Spirituality is, as concerns the improvement of the fate of
others, the confusion between the "acts of dreaming" (compassion, good
intentions)
and the real changes, leading to the promotion of the former as a
substitute
for the latter.
Spirituality is the stupidity or intellectual
laziness raised into dogma. In other words, it is the inability or
refusal, denial, of any life and development of the mind worthy of
this name.
Spirituality drives man back to an animal-like
behaviour, by letting him lose his specifically human characters: it
encourages people to live in their dreams confused with reality, i.e.
to
unstructure their thoughts; to live on the basis of emotions rather
than reason, to scorn the contributions of science and technology, to
tackle problems from a purely individual angle of each one for his
own troubles rather than a organizational and collective angle, and
thus accept to be led by the flow of so-called natural events in
resignation as
livestock, rather than to change them ("changing your desires
rather than the world order", "changing your view of
things", "changing man's heart to change society"),
and to present this selfishly poetical individual approach as the
ultimate solution to any problem. This practice
leads to unfairly devalue those who, whatever one might say, would
concretely be victims of the world order and would dare to complain
about it, as well as those who would dare to recognize the structural
defects of society and try to resolve them, as if they were guilty of
inventing the very sufferings and injustices they dare reporting.
Or: possibly I can
admit that in average, spirituality would not actually be worsening
human animality, but only expressing it, with the main effect of
uniformizing it, reducing its standard deviation. (Sorry, it's a
little too hard for me to see the foolish ways in which humans
usually "think" as "normal"). Also, there are of course also fortunately
here and there among spiritualities, some chapters of good lessons
such as love of nature in Buddhism, or some individuals labeled of a
usually spiritual category that stand apart from all these through... but these are nowhere the main part of a spirituality.
Generally, spirituality
attracts the intellectually lazy people, or anyway those unable to
carry out thorough discussions, that may only feel comfortable in
their preformated ideas, their naivety and their intellectual
lethargy.
A main expression of spirituality is the lack of
any serious deep research for ways to truly serve the interests of
others, insofar as, to bear effective fruit, this research would
require the investment in a sort of extensive study that its
followers can not bear. But, as long as they still have an ounce of
thought, they might still feel uncomfortable at the idea of missing
this way their responsibilities. That is why they choose to dedicate
the little mental energy that they sometimes have, to persuade each
other that this mental lethargy, this irresponsible silliness that
they practice, namely this spirituality, is a knowledge beyond all
knowledge, a grace and commandment of God, the epitome of goodness,
love and morality. They also persuade each other that this very claim
is a very high spiritual truth, either that it is self-evident, or
that it was revealed by sacred texts, so it needs no more
justification. Thus, neither themselves nor this doctrine can not be
suspected nor liable for any misjudgment or misfortune that may
result from their adherence to it.
Indeed, spirituality is a
doctrine that leads its members to self-persuade that spirituality is
not a doctrine and that those who join it are the only ones in the
world to be free from any doctrine and to not be self-persuading.
Spiritual people self-persuade this way that they hold the
key to universal happiness; their belief in the universal
effectiveness of their methods of happiness is actually based on the
much greater effectiveness of the procedures by which they manage to
persuade themselves that those to whom their methods of happiness do not work, or
who had the intelligence to immediately see that it could not work,
bear the responsibility for not having enough persistently or
stupidly tried. Anyway, this is not the problem of the spiritual
people if their spiritual happiness methods do not work on others,
but it is the problem of those on whom it does not. And, spirituality
teaches that everyone is free and responsible for himself and the
failures of his own life.
Thus they are persuaded that all the
misfortunes of the world, insofar as they depend on the actions of
man, are mainly due to the fact that men are not spiritual enough.
This applies especially at the individual level: if someone is
suffering and dares to complain, it is necessarily his responsibility
because he is not spiritual enough. But also sometimes at the
collective level: if the world goes wrong, it is because the Masters
of the World are not spiritual enough, or because there are not
enough spiritual people in the population.
And anyway you should
not worry of misfortune since it is willed by God for our
edification. And by definition it is clear that who is spiritual is
necessarily happy, so that who is not happy is not spiritual.
Especially, don't bother to check whether this claim is true or
false, spirituality suffices to ensure it. Besides, the misfortune of
others is ultimately a good thing, since it lets you exercise your
own virtue in urging those unhappy to raise their own level of
spirituality. And if someone dares to question the relevance of these
lessons and not thank you flatly for these insults (accusing him of
having a lack of spirituality, although in my opinion it should
finally be seen rather as a compliment), this shows how non-spiritual
he is, and thus, how urgently he needs these lessons...
So I had initiated a conversation in some Very Spiritual online
forum in French (no more online now) to see if in front of the
exposition of subtle and paradoxical
real issues closely affecting the reality of human condition, Very
Spiritual people were able to express something else than the
absolute pride of their immeasurable silliness, their blind dogmatism
and their flat electroencephalogram. As I suspected, the result was
negative.
Among spiritualities more or less characterised as
above, are for example Christianity, Buddhism (I indeed read and
heard some excerpts from its teachings, and it sufficed to see that
this was actually borrowing ideological errors that I denounce),
generally religious movements (for example, I visited the Hare
Krishna ...); Marxism, socialism, World Social Forum and other
utopias (although their defects are somehow differently structured),
The spirit of Local Trade Systems and other "Time Money"
who reject the principle of a real interest rate without caring to
understand the reasons for its necessity, and post-modernism and
other currents of philosophy.
But there are plenty of
other spiritual people, even among those who do not follow any sacred
text, any philosophy or any organized or defined religious movement,
including among atheists. In fact, spiritual people are an
overwhelming majority in every sense of the expression.
To maintain their explanation of the woes of the world by the lack
of
spirituality there, spiritual people can always manage to deny their
dominance, through their divisions into many labels or trends by
which they have great fun excommunicating each other: each form of
spirituality rejects every other form of spirituality and explains
out its failures by accusing it of being a
mere theory, while itself would be the pure expression of the
naked reality. But in fact it's all the contrary: the failures of all
spiritualities come from the fact they are not even worthy of the
great qualification of being called a « theory ». Indeed, the
complexity of reality forms a big
unavoidable gap between the direct observation of facts on the one
hand, their meanings and explanation on the other hand. So, anyone
who claims that in general (systematically rather than just sometimes
in particular circumstances) facts speak by themselves, are only
playing ventriloquist with them, while a thorough theoretical
interpretation of facts is necessary to extract the core of their
meanings. So, remember this: the facts love betraying those who
love them.