Disenchantment: Revelation of the Mundane
There are six more days to the week besides the Sabbath!
The following is an answer to a homework question, “What are my spiritual and/or religious beliefs? Do I have any?”
I must admit that my spiritual and religious beliefs are largely formed in a reactionary sense against the many organized systems of belief which are institutionally propagated today.
I personally know, and regularly meet and talk to many self-styled gurus of modern syncretic systems of spirituality. Some are New Age, some are their own thing. I generally consider and address them as cult leaders of a benign and mild sort. We live in “post-religious” society of life-long children: too early-maturing, yet never fully-matured. Cult social dynamics emerge naturally from these conditions.
Intellectual circles are snake pits of charlatan spiritual leaders. My own experiences with psychosis and the “magical” aspects of the schizotypal condition have given me a lot of insight into the vulnerable state of followers who enter into these traps. I am very wary of contemporary “spiritualism” of every flavour, New Age or otherwise.
My beliefs, as they stand, are that any merely mortal human deluding his or herself into proclaiming an otherworldly spiritual status—taking on “Christ consciousness” or otherwise speaking for God or analogical higher spiritual forces—is a danger to the premises of the mundane, day to day stability of the civilization we all take for granted.
We live in a largely boring world of rather mundane material needs that need to be met. We need electricity and running water and garbage pick-ups and healthy food to eat. All these things are not a matter of God or religion, they are a matter of human secular affairs. Individuals who abandon their responsibilities to the this secular, human world—by engaging in efforts to short-cut a relation to the next one—embody dangerous examples to vulnerable, meaning-starved or schizotypal minds.
The webinar we watched tellingly gave a description of the balance of healthy developmental forces as “being in the world.” I believe that the full phrase, taken from Christianity, is to “be in the world while not being of it” (Ellul). Six days for one, one day for the other seems like a good balance to me.
I believe in the tenant that God helps those who helps themselves is one of the most poingnant for our age. From it, it follows that the other six-days of the week besides the appointed day of worship are probably best spent learning best how to live in and take care of reality in this world. No accomplishment of good works in this world should be considered as a guarantee of salvation; yet paradoxically I suggest they are absolutely necessary for salvation. A solid, established secular life is the grounds for even having any life at all which is capable of fostering a meaningful spiritual or religious aspect.
Therefore, if I have a “spiritual” mission, it is to clean up the low-hanging fruit of establishing the non-spiritual nature of our material world by the disenchantment by revelation of the mundane. For it is here where lays the burden of public-facing religious work today.
