Spirituality today is the risult of a path
Being interested in spirituality today, practicing it, or, on the contrary, ignoring it, may have different reasons for each. Personally I think I can find in spirituality an outlet of western culture. We can consider that the greatest effort to identify the most important things worthwhile to deal with was accomplished by philosophy and religions. I find that the greatest effort of loyalty to critical sense is in Greek philosophy and the Judeo-Christian religion. Greek philosophy tried to understand what the world is, what being is. Soon it realized that it was better to shift attention to man, subjectivity. Hence today’s interest seems to turn to the practical, concrete action. Meanwhile, in the Christian religion we are acquiring more and more clear awareness about the unsolvibility of the problem of theodicy and the openness to criticism of the concepts of dogma and truth.
Advantages and disadvantages
Between religion and philosophy, the former has had the advantage of more clarity with regard to spirituality today, meant as action, as a matter of practicality, source of doing, although it may seem that a person who meditates is inert, with head in the clouds. In this sense, philosophy in an attempt to go to practice, is oriented towards the social and political commitment, lacking a base study on what is meditation, concentration, silence, contemplation, in a word, spirituality; things on which religion moves instead at ease, plays at home. It is not that philosophy means dryness: in this sense we can read with profit Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a way of life; but compared to religion, philosophy certainly cannot boast of a spirituality lived with the same involvement. Religion, on the other hand, lacks critical dispassion, the courage to expose to detailed criticism the idea of a personal God or of a supernatural world, till renounce definitely to them; this happens because in religion there is not experience of self-critical reflection as an event of spirit; they should do it, they know that they should do it but they do not do. I think we are, then, in the confluence of these two paths, religion and philosophy, into the practice of spirituality. This view of things is obviously subjective, simply a method to try to find an object of interest that today should be valid, interesting, fruitful.
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