Guided Meditations at Enlightennext
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Why we need a spiritual revolution
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Hello!
This is a recording of the first conference call on the theme 'Why we need a spiritual revolution'. In this talk I give a lot of background especially emphasising how we need to understand the cultural forces which form us and our perspective on life. We need to know about these things so we can begin to navigate and use these forces for change.
The questions and discussion that follow start to go into the how to and why we need to do this together.
Next Saturday, 10th March at 5pm we will pursue this further. Email me at Pbryson@enlightennext.org and I will send you the details.
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Patrick
Posted by Chris Parish at 5:22 PM | 1 comments
1 Comments:
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Hi Patrick, Paul here - I used to come to the Tuesday meditation sessions ages ago - will return at some point soon.
It's really late so I haven't listened to all of your podcast, but I've just been watching a really good documentary called Century of the Self by Adam Curtis. It's on Google Video, I highly recommend it if you haven't seen it as I think it's really relevant to the discussion.
The thing you were saying about a lack of will, I'd like to offer some thoughts. If you're talking about will in terms of cultural transformation, than you're talking about collective will, which makes itself known by manifesting between people. It manifests and is tempered by transactional symbols - language, body language etc - "Let's go to the park" "Ok, sounds good." I think the symbol for collective or shared will, in the most active sense of will before it becomes action, is basically money. An investor gives money as sign of his will to help realise the project invested in - along with money is invested his time, effort, energy. Money is a kind of manifest symbol of will to realise visions or agreements, that goes along with action. Another manifest symbol of will, but on a more visionary level preceeding and then accompanying money, is the vote. Money and the vote as symbols of the various stages of will move through the dominant social structures that govern the realisation of visions that create modern culture - through capitalism and democracy, of which money and the vote are atomistic units. Money and the vote are symbols of the spiritual impulse to will change in the world through the will of individuals contributing to collective aims. The lack of will that you talk about is really lack of money along certain lines of desired or willed action - the will is there, it just isn't accompanied and therefore recognised culturally due to an absence of money. That sounds terribly materialistic, but the symbolic aspect of money and the economy, how energy and will move around the body human, is a spiritual one.
So really, if we are after a spiritual revolution, we have to deal directly and concretely with how we generate, control, distribute, assign value to and use votes and money, i.e. how capitalism and democracy work. Otherwise, as you say, you'll just end up with a lot of people closing their eyes, having wonderful experiences, eating vegetarian food and talking about the authentic self and ego with other like minded people, and then having to return through being locked into the restrictive structures that the collective will power of money and the vote move through. The movement of a more enlightened will outwards into a wider culture will be severly limited. The system through which this will moves through needs to be recast along more spiritually concerned lines.
Essentially we live in a system whereby the will of most people in the world is co-opted by a few in order that they might have their absolute will realised with no temperance of the spirit - their ego can realise it all, as they have all the will or money - hence corruption, war, greed etc.
We need a new, spirit infused economy that can marry our inner development with movement into culture and not only a poverty free world, but a more enlightened world.
Today, shopping is closest thing we have to spiritual worship, which is really worship of the isolated self (small 's'). The economy is the secular religion. Only when a serious and intelligent attempt is made to recast the economy in a realistic and deeply impactful way, not only enabling people to realise their visions but also emphasises what you call the authentic self (the self integrated with the world and others) as the true identity over the ego (the isolated, competitive self that seeks to subjugate the world and others), only then will a spiritual revolution gain the audience it needs.
Hopefully see you soon,
Paul