Spirituality must also be absence of control
People who study spirituality need to remember that it cannot be limited to a disciplinary mentality, a mentality of study, control and academic research. Spirituality means inner experience, which is also affection, heart, feeling, emotions, humor, sex, lack of control. Ancient history witnesses that, in the past, religion was interwoven even with practices of sacred prostitution, dances, drunkenness, use of drugs. However, if, on one hand, the absence of control, programming, is a vital aspect of human existence, it is also clear that in such contexts troubled waters, trickery, imposture, loss of seriousness, of critical sense, and therefore of value, of spirituality itself, find a fertile ground. As a consequence, we have the problem of choosing between giving hospitality to the non-controlled and trying hypocritically to repress it, or even choosing a middle ground of moderation, half-measures, a way of being neither hot nor cold, which may be even worse than excesses.
In general, spirituality has no rules and does not forbid any, so that everyone can choose their rules, if, how and when to continue to abide by them or to stop doing so. It turns out that spirituality must necessarily be a pluralistic fact, since being with and without rules, with and without control, are ways of life that cannot be met simultaneously in one person. In other words, spirituality cannot have reference characters, such as Jesus is to Christianity, Buddha to Buddhism, Muhammad for Islam etc. In the context of Christianity, for example, Jesus is able to be the reference character at the cost of being contradictory on many points; issues arise easily and the contradictory nature of Jesus can even become the solution: he can be portrayed in the Gospels as kind and severe, glutton and ascetic; however, it is difficult to portray him as male and female at the same time, and so sexism problems emerge hopelessly in the Church.
Anything pluralistic can be accused of confusion: this is, for example, an accusation that Catholics make against Protestants, who are fragmented into innumerable ramifications. It is the eternal problem that repeatedly occurs even in politics, between democracy, dictatorship and middle ways. Trying to find definitive solutions to this problem would be a mistake, since pluralism means nothing other than becoming and we cannot expect to master the becoming of the world; we can only try to live there – I say to live, not to stay there – in the ways that each time we find better.
So, if a cold and academic discourse, in addition to the advantage of allowing a recovery of spirituality to the world of serious, valid and consistent things, has certainly its limitations, the remaining solution is to keep walking, to cultivate self-criticism: after all, this is what we are doing by considering the questions I have introduced. Protecting spirituality from anarchy, from impostors, from fake spiritualities that are just deceit, must be a job performed by spirituality itself, similarly to what happens in arts, in which, for example, a doodle could pretend to be a masterpiece, but in fact this does not happen thanks to a continuous work of criticism. Jesus did not protect the Church from deception and hypocrisy, but this happens to the extent that it is not a dynamic walking and does not practice criticism and self-criticism.
Hello, everybody.
This video is a supplement to the article in the “Spiritual Study” website “Spirituality and control”.
As a supplement, I will try to consider in more depth a question, that is: how do we know if we are really creating something or if we are just in a cage, that is, obeying to rules?
Because the article talked about control, but, if we are entirely under control, where is creativity, where is spontaneity, where is, at the end, spirituality?
The short answer is a quick answer: there is no objective criterion, that is, whatever criterion we use, it can be criticized, easily, because anybody, coming from another perspective, another way of considering things, they can tell us: you are not free, you are not creative, you are unaware of the cages that your brain is inside in, so you are just obeying with other rules and you just don’t see how you are just an instrument of something else.
Something can be objected actually in both sides, that is, we can say to people who think that they are spontaneous, creative, we can object: no, you are not creative, because I can see clearly that you are just a passive instrument of mechanisms, of industry, even of our biology, our nature. And vice versa, that is, somebody, who has a lot of control on their life, actually they might be considered really free, because control means also criticism. Criticism means trying to be aware of a lot of perspectives and see their flaws, their defects, their problems, so, the more perspectives I am aware of, the more free I am.
But, as I said, these are not objective elements. As I said, each side can be criticized endlessly. What can we do? We can just try to consider in more depth, at least, the problem, the question.
As I was going to say, some people think that, if they organize, for example, in their life, a path, with some perspective, with a destination to reach, and even with some rules, many people don’t want to do this, because they are afraid of losing their spontaneity, their creativity, their originality. But, as I said, we can tell these people: you are just a prey of commerce, economy, industry, fashion. It’s like when you go to the supermarket and you think: “Oh, I’m proud, because I’ve chosen this product that is so good!” and a specialist can tell you that, actually, the other product was made by the same producer and maybe they are even identical, they just put a different packaging, a different picture, a different price, to give you the perception that you are making a choice, while actually you are not making a choice, you are anyway in the same product, inside the same industry, so you are doing exactly nothing.
In this context we need something that should be able to put many things together, that is, a degree of control, a degree of spontaneity, a degree of freedom, a degree of obeying to some rules. How can we do this?
My, I would even say, my general, my universal reference point is walking, because it’s movement and movement has this magics: that you can do many things almost simultaneously, because you have different moments: you one moment do this, the other moment do that. This is what we actually do when we walk: we are unbalanced a bit to the right, a bit to the left. This is in bicycle as well: we are not just steady, we go on by balancing right and left, towards the right and towards the left. This means that, in a walk, in a path, we can try to be aware of what we are doing and how we are balancing our control and our spontaneity. In a word, we can say that I appreciate very much walking, because walking is able to negate itself, that is, when you plan your time, you can even think: okay for a period, either one day, one hour, or one week, one year, I want to stop planning and give total space to my spontaneity, to my freedom. Then, the day after, or the week after, I will start again to meditate, to take control, to think: what have I done? What did I reach? So, this way you can balance and mix control and spontaneity.
I would like to point out that pure spontaneity is not salvation, because some people say: okay, listen to yourself, listen to your intimacy, let your yourself go. But, if I let myself go, most probably I’m just letting my nature, my biology, my instincts, so that I’m just obeying to my structures and I’m not free at all, I’m just like a ball that is kicked by somebody and the ball can think that it’s free, but it’s just following the results of all the physical energies, physical forces that have been impressed in it. So, we have these fields, these aspects, these things, that is, to manage moments and aspects of control, rules, obeying, even self imposition: today I want to impose myself, like when we impose ourselves a diet, or going to the gym. Sport people, people who practice sport, they impose to themselves a lot of disciplines and we can’t say that they are just slaves. On the contrary, they are developing their ability to have a freedom in their life. They become slaves of a lot of rules exactly because they want to be free. Even a musician who wants to be inspired by music, exactly for this reason they impose to themselves a lot of discipline in learning the instruments, how make it highly expressive of what is inside your personality.
At the end, as I said at the beginning, there is no objective answer. Unfortunately we can’t say, at any moment: oh, I’m free of all cages. We can just choose which cage we want to be and try to be aware as much as possible of the cages where we are inside, in. It might be, it might seem a pessimistic answer, but actually these cages can also be fantastic, can be also paradises. You think, for example, the cage of love. In the cage of love you obey to a lot of things, but you also enjoy a lot of things. So, cages are not entirely oppression and slavery. If you manage them in best way, by using all of your abilities, all of your resources, like intellect, biology, feelings, emotions, you can turn cages into positive resources, to build a good, I would say, freedom in your life.
Okay, I would like that everybody would find good ways to develop good spirituality through this meditation. See you either in the forum or in next videos.
Bye-bye
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