Completeness

Without religious experience we are not complete as individuals.

It is possible to cook some things without water but most cooking needs some water. Just as cooking without water cannot include the ‘whole' of cooking, life without religious experience is not the ‘whole' of life. Some things in life just cannot make sense without the spiritual perspective created by religious experience. Religious experience is part of the data of decision making in life. Without it life does not add up.

What is consciousness? Why must we be unselfish? Why must we love? Spiritual experience validates scriptures which answer such questions. They tell us the answers to life. Without these answers life is a worrying maze of painful uncertainty. With these answers life is a divine variety of ultimately absolute certainty. This knowledge is a part of spiritual literacy and a key ingredient in living a meaningful and exciting life. Without it not only are individuals unstable and misdirected but the cultures that they create suffer the same shortcomings

The sense in selflessness

A part of every religion is the practice of unselfishness - or management of our egos. A purely materialistic culture can never present a really effective case for unselfishness. However if we do just live our lives for our own individual self gratification dreadful problems ensue.

Marriage - Successful marriages require so much giving, forgiveness and above all unselfishness. Selfishness means failure. Failure means divorce. Divorce means dreadful suffering both for the couple and their children.

Thus lack of Spiritual Literacy can lead to marriage breakdown which not only leads to misery for couples involved but to far reaching cultural malaise. Huge numbers of people now have to suffer the loneliness of living alone. To do this millions of houses have to be built - many on greenfield sites. Worse still millions of children have divorced parents as role models.

Over thirty percent of marriages fail in the largely materialistic cultures of the west. In religious cultures it is very much less common.

Abandonment of both the old and young - Looking after old people requires careful ego management - or unselfishness. In materialistic cultures the tendency is to discard old people by putting them in ‘homes'. This leaves the younger generation free to enjoy themselves without the constaints of having to care for their parents. There are two major downsides to this apparent selfishness. The first is that when the younger generation themselves become old they are usually condemned to a similar lonely isolation that they imposed on their parents. The second problem stemming from the removal of old people from their homes is that child care becomes an problem. This either means that one parent has to stay at home or expensive professional childcare has to be paid for. Furthermore it is now very much more difficult for parents to pass on their parenting skills to their children when they become parents - because they are not there. When two generations do not live together you inevitably get more amateur parents. Each generation has to learn parenting skills from scratch. This must have an impact on children.

The problem can be solved by careful management of the egos of the able bodied generation. Providing adequate levels of unselishness can be developed, the old can be cared for within the homes that they created. Furthermore the old can often be wonderful proxy parents when couple have to go out to work. If we are unselfish we can both harness what the old can give at the same time as give them the company of their children and grandchildren. Furthermore the selfsacrific involved in living in a multigenerational household produces spiritual growth. Evidence for this can be seen in many parts of the east where it is quite common for three generations to live under one roof.

Durable goals

Anyone arriving at the end of the materialistic rainbow does not find gold but rain.

Graham Green once said that the most disappointing moment of his life was when he took delivery of his second Cadillac. He had always considered the goal of life to be the ownership of a Cadillac. After he had owned one for a while he realised that Cadillacs did not deliver the satisfaction that he was after. His materialistic goals were flawed. We all need more. Spiritual Literacy can put our materialistic expectations in perspective. They are something but not everything.

Expectations and aspirations can drive us to an early grave - again they are ego driven and again usually materialistic and therefore shaddowy goals. However can they drive us to sacrifice friends and family in a headlong pursuit of the resources to buy that bigger car, larger house or newer model. Spiritual Literacy can create a contentment with more accessible goals and therefore reduce the pressure to succeed materially at the expense of all other aspects of our lives. Real deep soul satisfying satisfaction can only come from the cultivation of love and things to love. In our culture even the concept of such a mental condition seems unreasonable - unattainable - irrelevant.

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