It sure is good to be back and talking Resilience with old and new friends. I’d like to think at you also about a related topic, namely, spirituality, and specifically how to reframe it in our time of the great unraveling. The purpose of this post is to seek out a few similar-minded people, similar to the regulars in Resilience discussions, who would converse with me as I try to sort out my own spirituality. More below:

First off, I realize that this is a lightning rod topic. I will explain some of my rules for participation at the end of this post and as we go along. All right, let’s get to it (before I change my mind :=) Here’s my take on the importance of spirituality and where I’m at with it.

Resilience is about working on things within our control: our person and our local community. The first item in personal resilience is a strong, sound mind and will. Of all the practical tools and best practices, a strong mind and will is foremost. In the spring, I posted several reflections on Stoicism. You can find them in the Resilience essay queue. I have found Stoicism to the best practical philosophy for building a strong mind and will and rely on it daily.

Here's the thing. I found and read Stoicism in depth because I needed stronger medicine than the weak tea of my Anglican faith to help me survive PTSD. And my experience was common: Christianity (and all theism) is dead religion walking: conscious folks everywhere are struggling to reformulate their spirituality in intelligible words for themselves. That is certainly my problem. Perhaps it is yours too.

None of us is Einstein. He had no difficulty at all. I once copied one of his sayings:

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms-this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.
(Phillip Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times, p.285)

I’m like: “What he said.” But I can’t use his words for my spirituality; I have to find my own, now that speaking Anglican doesn’t make any sense anymore. So here is where I think we are at.

The advent of Christianity as the dominant mode of thought in the Roman Empire and subsequently in Europe displaced the practical philosophies of antiquity, such as Stoicism or Epicurianism. Classical philosophies were practical life guides in a cosmopolitan, pluralistic world. Citizens hired the eminent philosophers of their liking to teach them how best to live. If a philosopher couldn’t help clients live better lives, he didn’t eat. Christianity abrogated that role, to the extent that all knowledge and wisdom was subjugated to Christian doctrine. Philosophy was retired to academia, where "the fights are so deadly because the stakes are so low."

From there, philosophy battled Christianity under all sorts of guises until the enlightenment gave it an assist, together with the other forces of modernity. Christianity was at last vanquished to its present state of ruin; a religion fit only for the developing world, until enough development will eventually consign it to the history books in those places where history is still taught.
Postmodern people will not mourn its loss, and that gap in the social fabric was quickly filled by the new religion birthed by the enlightenment.

So here we find ourselves at the early days of the 21st c., bereft of any life guidance save that of the present global state religion – capitalism. If you don’t know that capitalism is a religion, you should brush up on religion a bit. Capitalism has its god - the omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent market; it has its devil - socialism, ‘nuff said; its body of life wisdom - the manifold creeds of greed in individualistic consumerism; and its sacred calendar with great festivals of bacchanalian consumption like Superbowl Sunday and Black Friday.

This is all perfectly obvious, but if you’d like to learn more on the market as god, Harvey Cox is a good guide. He taught on religion at Harvard for 50 years. (He’s got a new book out on this topic.) If you’d like to read him on this, here’s a link to a 1999 article of his in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/30...
(Don’t get me wrong, eh. All religions have been one long losing battle against greed within themselves.)
Those of us, who cannot and will not be assimilated by the market, huddle in little corners like c99, trying to figure out WTF happened to our society and us.

How should we live now? Here in "the desolation they call peace?" as Tacitus described it in his Agricola. The market, our modern state religion, has atomized us and enslaved us just as, or perhaps even more effectively than, Christianity had done in its imperial Hellenic form. Capitalism has reduced to hollow slogans all of the “ties that bind" individuals, local communities, and society together.
Humans are "produced" by our education system, brainwashed families, and consumer culture - much as meat is "produced" in industrial agriculture - to be atomized, defenseless, powerless food for the privileged elites. What do you think they eat at Davos? With a bit of Chianti :=)

Capitalist society atomizes us deliberately, unrelentingly, and continuously. Think of the two-income economic trap. Read Elizabeth Warren's book (with her daughter) on that: The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke, 2003. As families, we have zero power over anything because both parents are running on their separate hamster wheels in the same cage made from plastic cards. The market insists that its producer-consumers (not “it’s citizens,” eh) live like that. It’s the prime directive of the god “Market.”

“Arbeit macht frei” and all that.

Lovie and I made a conscious, deliberate choice 25 years ago to live on one salary no matter what. For all the hardships, we'd both do it all over again. Our grown children tell us repeatedly that we made the right choice for them. What we lost in world we made up in life, family, love, and relationships. We had made a spiritual choice, informed by our counter-cultural values, which came from our religious convictions. Naturally, your mileage may differ.

Think of how capitalism atomizes us by exploding our families. We had to invent the Orwellian phrase "nuclear family" to describe the first phase of family dispersal.
The market’s centrifugal forces have made families so disintegrated nowadays that most kids think the "nuclear family" is the town’s Atom hockey team.
We are produced by society as atomized individuals - with no "ties that bind" to anyone or anything or anywhere - who are easy, peasy prey for global marketers.

Capitalism destroyed our democratic institutions and our common values. Kids graduate high school as highly trained consumers, not citizens. We've been sheared away from our societal roles in our local communities and our civic duties as citizens. Atomized individuals are easy propaganda consumers; there's no family, community, or societal filters left.

Well, you know all this already. And you probably also know that the word "religion" comes from the Latin "religare," which means, "to bind or tie together," as in mooring a ship. Today, the word “religion” has fallen into disrepute. Religion today means “something odious,” like organized crime, or prostitution, or taxidermy. Deservedly so, many would rightly say. Indeed. Say, how does one moor a ship when the piers got blown up? That’s what we’re trying to figure out here.

If there are four or five or so c99 members who would like to converse with me as I think at them about reframing spirituality, send me a pm or say "holla" in the comment section. Here’s what I propose. I’d like to call the series “3D+” and I’ll explain that as we go. The posts will be meant only for folks who experience the universe “multi-dimensionally,” for want of a better word.

Here’s a preliminary indication of what I mean. Much of our western culture requires of societal participants an adherence to the dogmas of materialist reductionism. Materialist = only matter exists. Reductionism = you can have any number of dimensions, as long as it adds up to three.
Everything must be explainable in the three dimensions that humans minimally experience.
(Similar to how Christianity insisted that everything must be explainable through the biblical worldview.) This works well for simple human endeavours such as science and technology.
Your mileage though, may vary as you try to apply it to more challenging things, like living a good life.
Aristotle said in his Nichomachean Ethics, along with most Greeks, that the goal of life is to flourish. Try that in no more than three dimensions :=)

For some people, materialist reductionism becomes more than a worldview. A worldview is one’s general orientation to life: it’s changeable, has many moving parts, and is open to new information. Circumstances may cause a person’s worldview to harden, lose compassion, and reject the new.
Cultural disinformation and internal fears usually form large components of such circumstances.
I have PTSD and am unlearning loads of ideological formations from the dumpster of my mind.
My shorthand for such a person is a “flatlander.” Read the little Victorian novella - the mathematical satire of E.A. Abbott called Flatland: A Romance In Many Dimensions, written under the delightful pseudonym of “A Square.” Here's a little summary:

Flatland described a two-dimensional universe inhabited by figures such as lines, squares, pentagons, circles, and so on. On the eve of the millennium, a sphere passed into the home of a square, an inhabitant of this two-dimensional universe. You can imagine the cognitive dissonance that the square flatlander experienced as the sphere tried to explain the addition of height to the dimensions of length and width.

The sphere then tried to preach to the council of flatland this experience of three dimensions.
The councilors flatly rejected it. Apparently, this particular "lunacy" appeared once per millennium.
So they quickly hid all the evidence and life continued in flatland as before, until the next millenium, which would be someone else's problem.

Thereafter, the sphere took the square on a visit to spaceland, where he saw a cube and speculated enthusiastically (to the horror of the sphere) on the possible existence of four dimensions. Upon his return to flatland, he tried to explain this vision of many dimensions to his grandson and others. Naturally, he ended up on trial for heresy before the council. The story ended with him in prison, dreaming dreams of “upwards, not northwards” and of the “once-seen, oft-regretted cube.”

So that introduces the series title “3D+” Three dimensions plus. Remember, it is a metaphor: don‘t get all literal, eh :=)

William James, the Harvard scholar of the 19th century, was a founder of American psychology and a renowned philosopher. He gave the Edinburgh Gifford Lectures in 1901, which were subsequently published as The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902).
James said this about individuals who have worked purposefully at enlarging their field of consciousness and experience beyond that of their evolutionary endowment and cultural constraints:

He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck (his italics, pp. 498-9).

A flatlander rejects this statement outright, often with contempt. Well dear reader - you who have persevered this far - if James’ statement elicits a smile not a frown, I’d like to converse with you about “the More.” I would like to find words to describe my experience of “the More” over my lifetime, now that the Anglican ones I know have become senseless. For I have always had such experiences: before I became a Christian, when I was a Christian, and now still when I am a post-Christian.

The dumbest question in the world is “Do you believe in God?”
What has belief to do with reality?
I believe that E=mc2 (where's the superscript button?) because Einstein did the math: I’m not smart enough to understand any of it. I believe it because Einstein’s peers agree with him after they reviewed his math. Believing Einstein though, changes nothing in my world. Sure thing, so what?

I don’t believe in “the More,” I experience it. It changes my world and being through experience.
Could you believe in “the More” because I say it exists? Of course not: you experience it or you don’t.
In this 3D+ series I want to talk with other folks who experience “the More.”
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being a flatlander. Same with being a 3D+ person, long as it’s a worldview not an ideology, it’s fine. We just don’t have anything, anything at all, to say to each other, because we have no experiences in common. Cheers and best wishes: stay in your lane.

Oh yes, apart from quotes from pre-modern traditions, we’ll not have much use for the word “God” in the 3D+ series. Within three dimensions, "God" is a verb, as the rabbi once explained. More to follow.

A last word about words. They’re our biggest problem, especially when we mistake words and reality for each other. The Taoist master (we know as) Chuang Tzu (3rd century B.C.E) explained it like this:

A fish-trap is for catching fish: once you’ve caught the fish, you can forget about the trap.
A rabbit-snare is for catching rabbits: once you’ve caught the rabbit, you can forget about the snare.
Words are for catching ideas: once you’ve caught the idea, you can forget about the words.
Where can I find a person who knows how to forget about words so I can have few words with him?
(Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu, 1994, p.276.)

I’m looking for the same people :=) We’ll begin in the next post with the notion of the holon and holarchies.

PS: Those who don’t need any words are in the same masterclass as the Dali Lama. When asked what his religion was, he said, “Compassion.”

Peace be with us (honestly, it's not worth arguing about any of this :=)
gerrit