What is life all about? What is the meaning and purpose of life? Why am I here? These questions are symptoms of a spiritual crisis in your life.
Spirituality is the quest for answers to certain types of questions about life and your place the universe. Spirituality is about the unknown. To wonder about it, to be curious about it, and to want to discover it.
The human mind is amazingly logical and seeks answers and wants patterns. It doesn’t like the unknown. It doesn’t like inconsistencies.
We are spiritual because of our intelligence and our self awareness. And this is amplified by the awareness of our own impending death. Why? Why? Why? This is the modus operandi of the human mind.
These “soft” questions are what we typically label as spiritual. But unlike science and math you can’t get spiritual answers through direct observation and experiments. And spiritual answers are impossible to verify.
Many people, at least here in the western world where we are exposed to many different and competing ideologies, will experience a spiritual crisis sooner or later in their lifetime. This is where you experience a conflict between the fundamental assumptions you acquired in your youth, with the things you have seen and heard since then.
Often times this is brought on by an event or challenge in life. It could be the death of a loved one. Or some other issue in life that makes the conflicts important enough that you can’t ignore them.
This event triggers your spiritual nature and makes you wonder and start looking for answers to explain the actions of the world.
There are basically two routes you can take to satisfy your spiritual needs. You can either go the religious route or the secular route. But you don’t always have a choice. Your path depends largely upon the environment in the first 5 to 6 years of our life.
There is also the degree to which you sort through your assumptions. Most people will do it very lightly and end up with a blend of religious and non religious assumptions. While these are actually contradictory if you really look at them, if you don’t look too closely they are still compatible on the surface.
But the real solution is to really sort through and verify your assumptions and throw out what isn’t consistent and firmly make up your mind.
Ultimately you will reach a critical point and decide in one direction or another. Then your mind will be made up and no amount of contrary evidence will convince you to change your mind. By then you have enough evidence to make a qualified decision.
Few people ever change their birth philosophy, be it religious or non religious. Most people will wind up confirming what they already believe because they can’t reach the necessary “escape velocity” to overcome their initial assumptions. But this really doesn’t matter so long as you have resolved the conflict in your mind.
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