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Writes Abbot Christopher Jamison, in Finding Sanctuary . . .
The movement to separate spirituality and religion has had a number of effects beyond simply creating the distinction. One of the most significant effects has been the emergence of a belief in western society that the institutional part of religion is optional - that real spirituality is a wholly private event and that this inward part is more or less the same across all religions and all people.
Many persons say they do not believe in organized religion - and it is fashionable to despise religion and disparage those in religion. However, all spirituality, or religion, is organized; all things in Nature are organized, each a system of interlocking parts. To say one does not believe in organized religion is nonsensical and belies the ignorance of religion of the one saying such. Such is as absurd as saying, "I believe in bodies, not organized bodies" or "I don't believe in disorganized trees."
If one were to design his or her spirituality, it would be organized. Yet, how can one do this, if religion is a communal system to be experienced by persons together, not isolated individuals cut-off from a like community, selves creating their way: an I cut off from a we? If one were religious and apart from others physically, she or he would be so only with a sense of intimate, spiritual communion with others. There is no such thing as a purely private, personalized wisdom path.
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The world religion that some would prefer to extract from being called a religion is Buddhism. The Buddhist author and teacher Charles Genoud, in Beyond Tranquility, writes of this:
When we rush to call Buddhism a science or a philosophy rather than a religion, we neglect important aspects of the tradition, and it becomes difficult to properly evaluate rituals and meditative experiences. Science, focusing on the naïve beliefs of religion, reduces it to a kind of proto-science and ignores its higher aspect: the inconceivable. It is easy to understand why, since science has no access to this inconceivable.
Science, despite glamorization of particle physics as a spiritual enterprise, cannot penetrate surfaces. Physics is a science of surfaces, as all science is. Subatomic phenomena are surface. Persons confuse surface and depth. A particle is no more spiritual than a toenail, simply more subtle. Likewise, the studies of the neurological effects of meditation are just that, effects. Mapping traces in the brain from religious or meditative experience is no different than observing tracks left by a truck on a muddy road or broken limbs on the ground after a storm.
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From my experience, I detect two sources of widespread discontent and even anger toward religions, though there are others. First, religion has hurt many persons. Yet, again, this is like saying, "She hurt me, so I despise all females." Regardless, the pain is real and needs to undergo healing. Second, the West is enamored with personal rights and self-independence. Words like obedience, humbleness, renunciation, and surrender have little place in an ego-entitled, self-inflated culture.
The West is big into the navel-gazing hype - I, me, mine, myself. When persons curse religion, can that be the self-infatuated ego worshipping itself before its own decrepit, crumbling throne, being the curser of wisdom not present to please it but transform it from its self-adoration into Love?
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