Spirituality has become an pretty often encounter in our modern society. It is also understood, in majority, more correctly than before, as being different from religion and that knowledge alone is an evolutionary step. It is given to the so called New Age Movement that this concept has been put in center stage, and although many people do not agree with the movement itself, concepts and topics of today are evolving more and more into the pattern described by the New Age ideology.
This ideology asserts that man must accept old spiritual believes about the power of the human spirit over the body, and combine it with modern day scientific discoveries (like the ones in quantum mechanics field) in order to achieve greatness of human society. It defies dogma and borders.
It only uses religion's concepts as tools that each individual can shape to fit his own different spiritual path, as every path feels different to everyone. It might, and it does, sound fictional for the skeptic to be able to transcend it's own limits through the use of a system created from a rising human ideology. I mean, it just seems the same as every ideology, and man is firmly convinced that what comes from man cannot have divine quality of real evolution. For the skeptic, this is another stage of the game that society has always been playing with itself.
If we pretend that religion doesn't bring with it a lot of prejudices, the process developed now is similar to the more passive and unorganized one started by psychoanalysis way back. Jung's and Freud's work of theorizing the subconscious has brought new perspectives upon that age and people kept close to those perspectives up until recently.
It is the new understanding of our minds that later brings news understandings about life.
Although not proving the truth or the error of those theories, the concepts used to justify behavior now are more closely related to the new age spiritual dimension than to the psychological one from then. More versatile people combine all of them very well in an understanding about themselves that is just as complete, because the two ages do not contradict each other.
All that being said, the modern civilized man has managed to transform the spiritual concepts into tools of self deception. They are being used as cures for the Freudian man, the neurotic man with lots of repressions and hidden urges.
This is where the follower of the New Age phenomenon actually confirms the skeptic's impression by trying to prove him that the spiritual path is working.
The truth is, modern man is without hope. He doesn't really believe that anyone is able to cure his weaknesses, not even God, and so, he can't proceed going on with his life other than by taking everything into a dialectical game. Spirituality for the man who works in a corporate setup and struggles with sleep, love and confidence, is just a conversation for self-persuasion. What the New Age movement has brought to us are the tools to cure what Freud stated are our downs. The spiritual comes like a light that shines upon the subconscious darkness and it does so by being exterior to us, failed humans. The light is coming from a pure place, in a unpure soul. But in order for this to happen, one must meditate, be "zen" (which in our central and western societies means chill) and pretty out of focus with the physical world.
Yoga and meditations have become like gyms, place where you go to be spiritual, which again constitutes an argument for the exterior nature of the spiritual. It is also a lifestyle, one which has been shaped accordingly to fit with the identity that one desires. The action we have done is we have taken spiritual facts from older societies and integrated into our own by conceptualizing them. Only in this way, language can alter them, we can make of them what we want.
So, is spirituality a thing right now ?
Not really, it is a topic, something to do, a new therapy, a lifestyle. All this things are not excluded from the spiritual process, but all of them exclude the spiritual process. One of them is beyond conceptualization, so it's capable of containing concepts and still be much more than that. But concepts in themselves are only language extensions, and by definitions that imply limitations.
A man who wants a cure for the bad things in his life must take certain spiritual acts as cures. He must not try to cure his problems. All of that is dialectical as well. The spiritual man gives himself up as an individual. He starts from the realization that all of the "problems" are psychological and physical problems (usually derived also from the psychological ones). And these two dimensions combined form the identity, the ego, the persona that man manufactured for himself in order to function in the "tribe" he was born into.
Without maturing and had reality facing, the spiritual process cannot start. The problems one has will indeed be cured if the inward search starts, but because this search is greater than concepts, and it integrates them without being about them. Starting this process in order to get rid of problems mean you have not yet gone over yourself. This is the hardest thing to do for the modern man - to think that he is not a character in some series of events that become his story, but more of an observer which at times can decide to make an action in the physical world however he sees fit.
My advice to you, if you want to start really digging inside, into more than your subconscious, is to start thinking about how much of your persona are willing to give up, if any at all. Most of us who really get to face this question, in a serious and honest way, will realize that the spiritual path is not for them.
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