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The Spirit of the Thing - The materialist shuns spirituality. One central reason for this is the idea that religion caused so much trouble in the past, and continues to do so today. But are religion and spirituality the same thing, or are they totally different? And if so, could we understand a means to accept spirituality without the dangers the materialist fears? Indeed, can we only know ourselves when we do so?
The Natural Umbilical Chord - The first religions were said to be nature-based. How deep was this connection? Could cave art give us a clue? Indeed, could it be that in the cave, prehistoric man communed with his gods in a psychological sense as well as spiritual? Further, could that link between man and nature be identified in a deeply psycho-sexual symbolism that exists in religion to this day?
the spirit of the thing
The directors of modern culture seem to think that mysteries are dead. The world is mechanistic and ordered; the people materialist and essentially atheist. Yet this is to deny most of what it is to be human. And with the growth of New Age and alternative lifestyles, it is clear that many in society still realise that much of life is missing in the materialist construct.
This, however, does not stop them from laughing when subjects such as the paranormal arise; or maybe another conspiracy theory on the Holy Grail. But whilst the cultural director may laugh in order to uphold his worldview, most other people laugh to hide the fact from others that they really believe.
The cultural director knows this, and hates the stupidity of you and me; he fears a return to a world of superstition, where science is shunned and we sacrifice a child with every turn of the weather. Yet, we have come through Enlightened times, realised the benefits of the material, democratic world. So is it really likely that we could de-civilise ourselves once more and become pagan barbarians?
This is unlikely. But the possibility of being in the unique position of being able to pull from the strands of the material and the spiritual in a rational way make this one of the most exciting times to live.
The spiritual, above all else, was not the existence of some other-worldly force or being. Rather, the spiritual was about bonding man to his society and his environment. Armed with the tool of storytelling and illusion, the mystic of old would take the individual and make him fundamentally part of something bigger. In his myths and mantras he would solidify a bond that made people belong to each other and the world.
Such a process was the single most important social aspect of the ascent of man. For in being bonded together, they worked together, and that community of purpose was far stronger than any other species could attain.
Today, this spiritual aspect is forgotten; and whilst we may seem to work together as a species, we are forever bombarded by war, crime and feelings of loneliness in a mass of humanity. This is the price we pay for shunning the reality of who we are. This is the price we pay for being the materialist, and nothing else. But there is yet another reason why the cultural director shuns this vital aspect of humanity. For in early times, certain individuals realised that this spiritual bonding could be an important instrument of control.
We think of spirituality and religion as the same thing. But is this really the case? The history of religion suggests not. Spirituality is an inner feeling of connectedness, whereas religion can best be seen as a social expression of spirituality. When a mystic came along to shake the world, he didn't necessarily provide for us a religion, but advised where we seemed to be going wrong. The religion followed, crafted by men who realised the importance of absolute social control.
This was realised through ideas of vengeful gods, demanding a strict political, social and moral obedience, or the gods would get you. This, I'm afraid, is politics, not spirituality. And when it is expressed, the society involved can become both malign and oppressed at the same time. It is this process that led to excess, rather than the spiritual message itself. But the cultural director does not understand this difference. So spirituality must be shunned, for we cannot trust each other not to descend to culturally controlled barbarism again.
At some point, mankind must learn this lesson; must learn that the material is not enough; must realise that spiritual bonding is the force that brings us together. But we must also realise that religion is not the natural product of a spiritual mentality. Religion is a politicisation of the spiritual. And unless it is tempered by an absolute right of people to be who they want to be, then it is destructive.
At our present point of social evolution we are in the position to pull all these strands together - to create a world combining the best of the material, the spiritual, and a purely benevolent religious mentality to provide meaning and belonging. It is the challenge of man to do this, and stop hiding from the bogeyman behind his materialist wall. Only then will we understand the spirit of this thing called man.
Anthony North, March 2005
the natural umbilical cord
The history of man has been his intellectual requirement to ape nature. And nowhere is this better identified than in religion. Could religion itself teach us anything about our place in nature - so essential to a correct use of technology? One of the earliest religious images is cave art - enigmatic drawings painted on cave walls in deep chambers, reached only by going down long, dark tunnels. Found throughout the world, such drawings go back over 20,000 years.
It used to be thought this was simple graffiti, or representations of hunting cults, the animals hunted being depicted on the walls. But if this was so, why were the images buried so deep in the ground or inside hills? Some deeper meaning had to be had to explain the phenomenon. And a hint came when it was realised that the images were painted at the most acoustic locations of caves, as if singing or chanting accompanied the images.
This grounded cave art in ritual. During the 1990s researchers in Berlin carried out experiments in the deep faint and discovered that such faints incorporated mind-images similar to the near death experience, where representations of heaven and dead relatives are seen. It seems that the mind can be attuned to represent images of a particular culture's afterlife.
Early religious forms included such deep faints through hysterical ritual. Could it be that in doing so the adherents thought they had died, gone to the afterlife, and been reborn? Such death/rebirth ideas exist throughout mythology, from Osiris in Egypt to the death and Resurrection of Christ. Going back to the earliest religious forms, we find they are grounded in the belief in animal spirits and fertility.
Could the images in cave art be representations of the animal spirits visited in this death/rebirth aspect of hysterical ritual causing the deep faint? If we are prepared to accept this as a possibility, then we can place a Freudian interpretation of the cave itself. A chamber deep in the Earth, accessed by a long tunnel, is highly representative of a vaginal tract and womb. Could it be that the adept could visit a cave to be spiritually reborn?
Later religious expressions went on to identify the Earth as female in the Mother Goddess. This deity tied the death/rebirth of man with the death and rebirth of nature through the seasons. To early man, the two concepts were one and the same. The burial mound can here be seen as a form of womb on the Earth, allowing rebirth of dead souls, the concept becoming more mathematically perfect in the pyramid. And monoliths such as Stonehenge, with their alignments to the sun, also show this marriage of man and his environment.
We can see here that early technology was part and parcel of the natural experience, being used as representation of the Divine they thought they saw about them. This technology was nature enhancing, as well as allowing man a focus for his society and culture. Today we seem to have used technology to leave behind this automatic relationship between ourselves and our environment, and in doing so we have left the human behind too.
Death/rebirth no longer seems important to us, but this is a very recent development. For even as Christianity formed and ruled for nearly 2,000 years, Christ’s death and rebirth took place at Easter, the time of rebirth of the natural world. Of course, we could ignore this possible religious past. We can call it superstition. But unlike those people of the past, we have broken our natural link, which is so much a part of who we are. Maybe, through an understanding of religion, we can rediscover ourselves, our meaning, and what we are supposed to be.
© Anthony North, November 2005
