Abstract
Emphasizing thinking from a holistic point of view, it is argued that many world problems will be difficult to solve without involving spirituality. Issues such as the current crisis of meaning and the danger of fundamentalism, climate change and the energy crisis, the threat of peace and the peace between religions, the problem of poverty and the justice in distribution of wealth, the production of scientific knowledge that supports life and the problem of how the scientific processes is steered, the importance of values and the problem of non-commitment, and the problem of splitting and the unity of the world are discussed within this framework.
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- 1.
It goes without saying that I am using the current topic of Islamic versus Christian fundamentalism only as an illustrative example for its political prominence. I could use Islamic fundamentalists, versus Islamic liberal forces, Hindu fundamentalists, Shiitic fundamentalists versus rational forces in Iran, or Catholic fundamentalists versus a liberal mainstream in the Catholic church – examples galore.
- 2.
It is easy to see that the real motive behind this alleged war on terror was political domination and economic profit.
- 3.
Note that this is exactly where an over-emphasis on logical-analytical thinking goes against the very goal of rationality: In the name of rational analysis completely irrational decisions are taken. This is so because a broader concept of rationality that also takes into account deep layers of reality is lacking. This is where spirituality can help as an antidote to logical-analytical reasoning overstepping its boundaries.
- 4.
Incidentally, a lot of them do so, but they don’t dare speak about it. What would happen if they did that publicly and openly? There are, of course, groups of scientists and small communities that already do this. In the US, the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the Union of Concerned Scientists are examples; in Europe the Scientific and Medical Network is another example. But all those groups are comparatively fringy and the question is: What would happen if the mainstream operated according to the points mentioned here?
- 5.
See Understanding Consciousness (Velmans 2009) for a similar proposal.
- 6.
It is important to put aside the conventional connotations of “abduction”, such as in criminal cases of abduction or the sci-fi alien abduction. This notion has nothing to do with it and is simply a scientific neo-logism from the Latin “ab-ducere – to lead away from”, in juxtaposition of deduction, derived from Latin “de-ducere – to lead down from” and “in-ducere – to lead into somewhere”.
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Isaiah 45.7; all English texts according to King James Bible.
- 8.
Mat 13:30.
- 9.
These are some of the findings discovered in a PhD thesis by Liane Hoffman, who found that two-thirds of a random sample of German psychotherapists find this topic important, and roughly the same number report their own spiritual experiences. At the same time, the number of training programs and the way in which therapists see themselves show that a lot of them integrate spirituality into their practice (Hofmann and Walach 2011).
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Walach, H. (2015). Getting on with Enlightenment: The Necessity of a Secular Non-dogmatic Spirituality. In: Secular Spirituality. Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09345-1_7
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