If a sage today were to give one piece of advice, what would it be? What could best guide the lone seeker towards spiritual fulfilment whilst improving communal behaviour in our shared home, Earth? It’s easy to assume that the semi-mythical words of Buddha or Jesus are just as potent today as when first spoken in a very different world. But away with such huge assumptions, and away with the inherited weight of so much baggage! Let’s imagine that you, passenger on the journey of life, are restricted to just one item of wisdom, stowed on board at your feet.
Times really have changed. When the old scriptures were written, most people never travelled beyond their own village. Very few could read. Except for gentlefolk and scholars, life was “brutish and short”. But spiritual life—worship, prayer, sacrifices, rituals—was intense. Much was felt inside, the heart bursting with heightened emotions; though I have only imagination to tell me so. Life was full of natural sights and sounds and smells, sharp pains, bitter cold, burning heat. What did “beliefs” matter? Bow before this god, you survive. Bow before that one, you are tortured and killed.
There are parts of the world where some still live in those old ways. We may find it difficult to understand what makes them ready to die for a certain form of society, or conversely risk their lives to escape it. Our own ancestors were no different, so let’s not hasten to condemn.
Whatever doctrines may arouse our passions, we still have Maslow’s pyramid to climb, that hierarchy of needs: food, shelter, dignity . . .
When the walking distance to fresh water no longer robs our time and energy, when our stores of food no longer run out, we are rich: rich in leisure to dream and speculate, like princes of old. We are at the top of that pyramid and still not exhausted, so we float in the three-dimensional sky like drifting balloons.
In the new world, a realm of choices and plenty, there’s no bedrock of religious certainty, just fluffy clouds, shapely landscapes till we get close and see that they are just a fog with no foothold. In olden times, the search for Truth was a perilous quest for which we might have to renounce the world. Today, we are accosted by pedlars of wisdom, wooed by promises of euphoria, relentlessly pursued by “solutions” we have not sought.
In this transformed spiritual landscape, what few words (e.g. three!) might a sage offer as guidance, to cut through the fog, the mitote*, the dream of the planet?
* From The Four Agreeements, by Don Miguel Ruiz:
Your whole mind is a fog which the Toltecs called a mitote. Your mind is a dream where a thousand people talk at the same time, and nobody understands each other. This is the condition of the human mind — a big mitote, and with that big mitote you cannot see what you really are. In India they call it maya—illusion. It is the personality’s notion of “I am.” Everything you believe about yourself and the world, all the concepts and programming you have in your mind, are all the mitote. We cannot see who we truly are; we cannot see that we are not free.
a wayfarer’s notes 
Mind your own.
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Governance by LOVE.
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i don't know.
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you mentioned in your post that “we still have Maslow’s pyramid to climb, that hierarchy of needs: food, shelter, dignity . . .”
is spirituality part of the pyramid of needs? does it go away when we reach the top of pyramid?
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Is spirituality part of the pyramid? I just checked out Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs on Wikipedia – o, we take this instant research for granted these days! At the summit we get “self-actualization needs”, consisting of “morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem-solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts.” These sound a little strange to me as a list of needs. They sound more like a list of attainments possible when the needs on the lower slopes have been satisfied.
Hm. Perhaps research has to take a little longer than 1 minute, despite the WWW and Google and broadband connections!
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Ah, this is what we were looking for, Kathy (again from Wikipedia):
At the top of the triangle, self-transcendence is also sometimes referred to as spiritual needs.
Viktor Frankl expresses the relationship between self-actualization and self-transcendence in Man's Search for Meaning. He writes:
The true meaning of life is to be found in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system…. Human experience is essentially self-transcendence rather than self-actualization. Self-actualization is not a possible aim at all, for the simple reason that the more a man would strive for it, the more he would miss it…. In other words, self-actualization cannot be attained if it is made an end in itself, but only as a side effect of self-transcendence. (p.175)
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The change will be REAL change, nothing on the order of this present world, so thinking of the Better Future, using this present world as a model, is setting the future up to fail. Bad deal. And not the case, this world is transition in nature, not anything to be kept and used for a model.
My views.
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Also in terms of that judgement crap, about the next stage of Life, the Judgement will not be 'this world based', it will be about things not considered existent in this world, and again, it is nothing to worry about. This stuff of this world, is play, not real.
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Thanks Vincent
I too looked at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs on Wikipedia…interesting. I think spirituality is found at the bottom of triangle, like you mentioned in Jesus days and before people (hard working people and uneducated) have embraced spirituality and most are on the bottom, Buddha was a prince and he gave up stuff to embrace his spirituality…just thinking out loud here.
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This is getting exciting Kathy. There is much to say about your conjecture, I'll have to do a post on it to discuss!
Jim, if you are right, then without studying the Hebrew Torah and the Kabbalah, one can't say anything at all. So there is a consistency about your position. On the other hand, in order to accept it as the truth, it may be necessary to have gone through an intense and sustained journey of revelation and study like yours. The rest of us have to wait and see!
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i guess the answer would be to love humanity. respect human beings.
religions are our own inventions isn't it.
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[…] my One Piece of Baggage post, I spoke about people who reach the top of the Maslow pyramid and then float off like balloons […]
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