Blog to share writings and musings related to the late Doris E. Roberts, PhD (Metaphysics)

Month: June 2012

More on Spiritual Sophistication

Has love taken a back seat?  It certainly has no direction and no purpose for many of us.  We usually take love for granted if we feel it at all in present day life. We talk about our conscious decisions and unconscious habits, or even our conscious egos and our unconscious motivations, believing they try to run and rule our lives.  But are we sure we know what we mean when we say these things?  While there are many of us who believe in consciousness as a very special genuine thing like love or gold, we are also being advised that it may all be an illusion, that none of it is real.

 

*********************************************** 

C. Dennett in his book, Consciousness Explained, (1991:23), contended that in this (today’s) conscious awareness, we limit ourselves to not having the thrilling, devastating, or energizing experiences of love that our ancestors had. Therefore somehow we feel a sense of loss, of something missing from our lives. And most of us are not sure just what is missing.

Perhaps he was right. Do the majority of us in or out of any type of relationship (including the three mentioned) feel incomplete, for the dominating shadow side of our minds say that life is neither as fulfilling nor satisfying as it once was?

Dennett also states that, “consciousness like love and money is a phenomenon that does indeed depend to a surprising extent on its associated concepts.  Although, like love, it has an elaborate biological base; like money, some of its most significant features are borne along on the culture, not simply inherent, somehow, in the physical structure of its instances.”

If Dennett is right, if we have succeeded in overthrowing some of our basic cultural concepts, will the phenomena of consciousness be threatened with extinction completely?  And if it goes, will love and money also go along with it?  What is a phenomenon anyway?  Can we handle it whatever it appears to be?

Our human ability to conceptualize consciousness is what creates and dissipates life, as we know it now.  If this concept of our own consciousness were to fall into the hands of our dispassionate scientific community only and totally out of the realm of creative spiritual passionate fulfillment, what happens to unconditional love and free will?

If we were to reduce life to be merely a matter of motion, what happens to our appreciation of love and growing pains as well as dreams and the joy of living life to the fullest?  What about compassion, which requires both mind and heart (reason and emotion)?  In what other form can human passion truly exist?

Spiritual Sophistication

What is happening in the world today?  Our Spirit appears to be lost and our love relationships are continually changing.  Long ago and far away from some now unknown and no longer recalled source, the word ‘spiritual’ was an idealistic concept that was described as a:

1)      Special relationship with self,

2)      Satisfying relationship with other human beings,

3)      Superior relationship with God or some other form of Infinite Intelligence.

The understanding of these three aspects of spirituality was required to graduate from the University of Planet Earth.  All worldly cultures and classes of people at one time appeared to maintain the belief of one or all of these basic human conditions.  It was a slow, oftentimes comforting process to encompass all three at the same time.  What happened?

C. Dennett in his book, Consciousness Explained, (1991:23) suggests that when we entered the 21st century that a special phenomenon dominated our social world culture.  He believes that a dramatic shift in the way humans think about love and life has occurred because we became more sophisticated as a society.  He wrote that people used to talk and think about love in ways that are now practically unavailable – except to children, and to those who can somehow manage to suppress their adult knowledge regarding love – and that was that we use to love to tell those we love that we loved them and to hear from them that we are loved in return. 

When we were children, love was a purely simple unconditional and fairly reliable thing.  Are we now better or worse as adults?  Are we are not quite as sure anymore if we know what love means as we once did?  Has there been a truly dramatic and possibly traumatic shift in love consciousness in this day and age?

Dennett suggested that love is not completely socially uniform anymore for everyone.  As a whole, he propounded, our culture has become more sophisticated.  It is his contention that even if we think of love like those in a romantic novel best seller, we know better than to express these imagined feelings to anyone including ourselves. 

He wrote that we think that it wouldn’t be the manly or womanly thing to do today. Obviously, in Dennett’s opinion, love does appear to be a “control device” in our current society. Admitting to passionate love is admitting to being weak…and as simple as a naive child who doesn’t know any better. Is this really true in this day and new age?  Do we really think of love as a “control device?”