Concerning Spirituality and Blindness

Digg.com can sometimes frighten me. Well, not really digg.com itself, more like the angry atheists userbase. Occasionally I’ll visit the site for my daily dose of mostly useless news, and not infrequently I find a headline proclaiming in some way or another that religion is evil. The titles, the articles, and semi-anonymous comments that follow, flow through the my retinas, into my brain, and come to a crashing halt in an area just below my breastbone and above my intestines, where the hurtful words cause an ill-feeling stirring sensation. This has been happening for a long time, not just caused by anti-spiritual rhetoric, but only recently did I realize what was happening to me.

Credulous at best your desire to believe in
Angels in the hearts of men
-”Vicarious,” by Tool.

These blind and hate-filled articles weren’t necessarily causing me physical pain; instead they were harming my soul. The area in which I get that nasty uneasy stirring sensation is the exact location of the anahata – the heart chakra, associated with devotion, love, compassion, healing, and most important in my case – empathy. Now, I’ve never been very partial to the idea of charkas, but I think this is an unavoidable sign of its reality and manifestation in myself at least.

It’s always the comments that bother me the most. An article is the opinion of one man, but the comments that follow express the general feelings of many people; in the case of digg.com this is hundreds, often thousands of people. The fact that they all vehemently support this belief that religion is silly, evil, and should be abolished displays a hypocrisy on a scale so grand it’s no wonder why none of them see it themselves. Or it may be as simple as the fact that they’re so busy placing the fault on others that they fail to see it within themselves as well.

Of course, no one can argue with historical facts. Indeed there have been many horrible wars, feuds and violence in the name of religion. This is not deniable, but what of the horrors that industrialism, and materialism wreak upon our earth? These are the supposed products of a strictly skeptical, materialist use of logic, but – pardon my speech – it is not in my opinion logical to shit where you eat. This is exactly what were are doing to ourselves and the planet as corporate globalization continues to bring about the destruction of rain forests, spewing of chemicals into the sea, and the pumping of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. We are choking on our own filth, and we will soon drown if we do not realize that we are not separate, but included in the play of life, staged on this planet, our only home in this vast abysm of space and time.

This is not to say that all atheists support the destruction of the earth, of course not. I’m positive Richard Dawkins himself is probably quite environmentally conscious. You don’t need to be spiritual to have a desire to preserve the Earth. But just as it is impossible to doubt the wars religion has caused, it is also impossible to doubt the destruction to Earth, caused by our cold mechanic materialist worldview. In our society we are forced to consume and spew waste, and quite frankly I find it disgusting.

The giant hypocrisy I mentioned earlier alludes to the comments of digg.com entries such as this one, where users always end up fighting. They argue over what really is or is not atheism, why religion is stupid and why religion isn’t stupid. Every now and then someone will point out the gross generalizations being made, and speak the truth, but they’re usually ignored. Instead those who make blatantly ignorant statements like “The ONE thing all religions do is provide people with something to do after they die … The primary purpose of religion is to divert people from this unpleasant truth,” recieve much of the praise.

The argument that religion was created solely because people cannot cope with dying is a very weak one. In Buddhism, what happens beyond death isn’t stressed as very important at all. And the cycle of reincarnation only applies to those who fail to live a morally good life. There is a popular story about the Buddha, when he was asked if he believed in God, and he replied, “when did I say I believed in God?” Then when it was asked of him, if he did not believe in God, he replied, “when did I say I do not believe in God?” In other words, Siddhartha was telling the questioner not to worry about it – whether God does or doesn’t exist doesn’t help you live peacefully in the present.

Religion, spirituality, superstition – or whatever you like to call it – isn’t the root of all evil, people are. The fact that people will sit around and bicker over this on digg.com shows their complete blindness to this fact, and it is this blindness that causes all of our social discourse today. It is caused by blindness on both sides, everyone is blind! People allow their religious beliefs to blind them, to prevent them from clearly seeing others or situations for what they are – instead seeing what they want to see. On the other side, these people who vehemently protest religion become blind as well, because they automatically see anything spiritual as incorrect, instead of truly seeing to the root of the problem – they too see only what they want to see and not what really is.

My belief in other realms doesn’t make me a silly and ignorant person who lives in a world of fear and submission. Why is it completely rational and sane to postulate the existence of wormholes, parallel dimensions, and quarks, but laughably silly to believe in a daemonic realm of inspiration and creativity? Or a collective consciousness of human beings?

If one were to see a priest or a monk and say to one’s self “what a silly man, he believes in invisible things” – this is blindness. You do not see a person; you see your mind’s stereotype of him, you judge before learning any facts. So many of us live in darkness whether we know it or not; we view the world through the lens of stereotypes and generalizations; we are blind and invisible people. One, not wanting to truly see the other, causes one to loose his true and unobstructed vision, and subsequently causes the other to become invisible, or more accurately, a shadow – a figure is present, but with no defining characteristics, only the vague generalization of a shadow. Figuratively speaking of course, for those who take their world far too literally.

The problem is within ourselves, not religion or spirituality. So stop pointing your finger, and look at yourself and your society with an innocent mind. Our problem is our refusal to get along with others, our refusal to see who we really are, to recognize and accept our differences, to communicate and creatively solve our conflicts, or to see our living world for the infinitely beautiful place it truly is.