Spiritual Activism

Spirituality Has Failed to Create World Peace — Here’s Why!

We need more than spirituality — We need to Wake up, Clean up, Grow up and Show up.

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Spirituality’s Poor Record on World Peace

VARIOUS forms of spirituality (including both formal and esoteric branches of world religions) seem to have been around since the dawn of humankind. We have had innumerable numbers of enlightened and highly awakened individuals. Has this had any significant impact on bringing the world closer together?

I don’t think so.

India may, arguably, have developed the highest level of spiritual understanding, along with many Saints (living and past), and spiritual influences expanding around the globe. Has this made India a better place, free of violence and corruption?

I don’t think so.

In fact, spirituality has long been a source of ethnocentric and cultural conflicts, wars, hate and exploitation. This continues today, and even more so if you consider politics as a form of modern religion, as many people do.

So why should we expect spirituality to bring about World Peace today?

Human Maturity & Integral Theory

Ken Wilber, in his Integral Theory, argues that there are 4 fundamental forms or paths of human maturation, all of which must be developed in unison for a fully balanced individual and the world:

• Waking Up — the path of spiritual awakening (spirituality)
• Cleaning Up — the path releasing subconscious shadows (psychology)
• Growing Up — the path of social morality toward others (ethics)
• Showing Up — the path of global engagement and activism (action)

We can, I think, easily think of how an individual tends to identify with one of these forms of maturation and to promote that one form as the answer to our personal, social and global problems. The approach they are promoting is usually the one that is best developed within themselves.

However, because of the way our society is currently structured, they often have a lack of maturity in at least a couple of the other areas. This creates a blind spot in their vision and understanding of the world and others.

For example, I am a strong proponent of “Waking Up” as the path the World Peace. For example, in ‘Visions of a “New Earth”’, I channeled a message from my Higher Self about how personal Waking Up is the best path to creating global ascension.

However, I have been meditating over 45 years, so Waking Up (spirituality) is probably my area of personal strength. I Show Up mostly through my writings, which I think is good. But not so much in person, which might be a shortcoming. And I have focused very little on Cleaning Up and Growing Up in this particular incarnation.

The Limits of Spiritual Waking Up

THE problem with most spirituality is that it often assumes that Waking Up (samadhi or nirvana, for example) is the one solution that will fix all of the issues in our physical world. While that may seem true for some individuals, Wilber notes that for many others that is not the case.

Here are examples of what happens when Spiritual Waking Up is strong, but other areas are out of balance:

(1) Many (maybe most?) spiritual gurus, both in the past and today, have achieved extremely high levels of Spiritual Waking Up (“enlightenment”), with advanced psychic abilities and the ability to perform “miracles”. However, they have also showed (and continue to show) a weakness to money, power and sex.

That is because their Growing Up was poorly developed, if not totally overlooked. See, for example: ‘The 100 Year Experiment in Eastern Spirituality’, which provides a critical assessment of the positive and negative history of Eastern gurus coming to the West.

(2) Probably more people today are experiencing Spiritual Waking Up than ever in the past — or at least they are talking about it on Facebook. At the same time, the calls for help with “Dark Night of the Soul” experiences of deep depression following an awakening experience is also at an all time high.

This is because Wilber’s “Cleaning Up” has been poorly developed. This type of maturation was developed in Western psychology and is popularly known as “shadow work”.

WE obviously cannot assume that Spiritual Waking Up is the be all and end all of our individual maturation.

To me, these examples show that no matter how developed an individual is — no matter how enlightened they are — there is still a degree of ego present that may be very immature in terms of Growing Up, and there can still be a lot of psychological shadow work that has been poorly Cleaned Up. For more on the diversity and shortcomings of Waking Up, see: ‘Awakening vs Enlightenment’.

[Wilber suggests that our traditional religions were unaware of the subconscious when they were founded, which is why none of their versions of spiritual growth addressed shadow Cleaning Up.]

Integral World Peace

IN terms of bringing about World Peace, the specific challenges that could possibly be overcome through each these processes of maturity are:

• Waking Up — Personal direct experience of the deeper nature that connects all beings and our world, and seeing how pure bliss and World Peace is possible for ourselves and our planet.
• Cleaning Up — Bringing up, addressing, and overcoming shadows of the past that cause us to behave in ways that we know are not in our best interest, and which then become barriers to creating World Peace.
• Growing Up — Learning how to treat others and our planet respectfully as ourselves (The Golden Rule), but especially from the basis of being Woken Up and Cleaned Up, which are personal experiences, but are required to work with others to create World Peace.
• Showing Up — Expressing our pure self (Woken Up, Cleaned Up and Grown Up) and accepting our responsibility, or our mission, to create World Peace as best we can and in our own distinct way. [A fifth area in this model is “Opening Up”, which is maturing into our individual unique gifts, which is an aspect of Showing Up in the context of World Peace.]

Integral Theory as Spirituality in Action

INTEGRAL Theory is usually considered a part of contemporary New Age spirituality. It makes logical sense, but given the diversity of New Age teachings, and the relative complexity of Integral Theory, it is currently only a niche perspective.

However, the lessons of Integral Theory are profound, even if its details are challenging.

What is needed for anyone and everyone who desires and is working on World Peace today is to consider:

• Peace In Ourselves: How we personally balance our full maturity in all four areas to bring about our own, personal, internal peace.
• Peace Towards Others: How we incorporate and advance the four areas of maturity in the way we personally support and advocate peace in our communities and the world, including our natural environment.
• Peace In Our Collective Groups: How we work with others to promote a balanced approach in these four areas of maturity and development to advance World Peace.

WE all have talents and passions that drive us to make our world better. But we all also have areas in which we are personally less developed and less mature that we could be.

Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory does not provide all the answers we need for World Peace. We still need to figure out on our own how to advance our individual and collective maturities to fully Wake Up, Clean Up, Grow Up and Show Up.

To some degree, that will be different for each individual. But we now have at least one map that offers some promising directions toward achieving the dream of World Peace, which has so far been been so elusive.

Notes

This article was prompted by Darshak Rana, the editor of Spiritual Secrets, in an article titled, ‘The Role of Spirituality in World Peace’, which provides a good background supplement to my comments above.

This was only the second time that I have responded to a “prompt” from an editor to write on a specific topic. That is because I write when I am inspired, and so I mostly wait for that feeling to arise before typing.

In this case, I felt the topic was aligned with many of my writings, so I tried to write an article on spirituality and world peace. My first attempt was a total failure and I gave up after a few hundred words.

Later, I was guided by circumstances (by my Higher Self guides, of course, who always co-author articles with me) to listen to Ken Wilber being interviewed by Rich Archer on Buddha at the Gas Pump from several years ago. Inspiration to write this article, obviously, came from that interview.

Related

• For more on Spiritual Activism & Social Issue, see this collection of articles.

• Note that the articles in that collection are behind the Medium paywall. For paywall-free access to my articles, go to www.AlanLew.com, linked below.

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