One thing I noticed after being down in Mississippi for the shoot was that words like "God" and "Jesus" are used all the time, but they're not specifically referring to Jesus. It's sort of this accepted phraseology for love, or spirituality, or whatever it is you personally believe in.
I grew up in a religious family and, like, that was a very big part of my life, and still, very much, is even though I don't affiliate with any specific religion. It's just, for me, you know, the spirituality of being able to own up to your sins, as they're called, and take responsibility for your actions really hit me this time around.
With movement, families get split. With the politicization of religion, spirituality gets diluted. With people intermarrying and falling in love outside of pre-existing defined groups, the tribe is disappearing. I'm not in favor of going back to those things, but you can't take those things away without putting something new in its place. So finding a way to make transience more acceptable, even beautiful is key.
Spirituality actually must be above politics. Or some other sort of business.
I can do what my energy, my time, to my other sort of commitment. And then also emotional, religious harmony. So in these two field, now that more or less I think the spirituality or human values in these fields, I may consider my only professional field. The political, national struggle, these are not my profession.
This - where we are now - is where a culture gets to, when it has chosen, for many years, banality over intelligence, the literal over the immaterial or complex, materialism over spirituality. This is the result of many years of disrespecting the intellectual project - of a collective acceptance of the idea that thinking and reasoning and reading deeply in difficult text and being respectful of history are somehow "wimpy" or secondary.
There are many concepts of spirituality, among them, various notions of divinity developed in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic religions. Within these the concepts vary greatly.
I actually feel that personal matters, like religion and spirituality, are things that I really discuss only with intimates. I think it's, in a way, like sexuality, something where it touches upon something very private.
The patriarchal model of spirituality was, I think, a necessary step, as a baby learns to crawl before it walks.
I think sometimes you can grow up with faith, or if you're just the kind of animal who grabs onto it or doesn't grab onto it. I wasn't a big grabbing-onto-it kind of animal. I found my faith to be more about my belief, my spirituality, about nature.
When we start making distinctions between soul and spirit, we're in very, very murky waters. There is the whole issue of the English language, which has a rather limited vocabulary when it comes to psychological descriptions, not to speak of spiritual descriptions. We're good mythically - the English language is superb for myth. But we're not very good for psychology or spirituality.
What I find on the Internet is fascinating because whole subcultures are developing. And they really are cultures. They have their art forms, their music, and their language. They have their spirituality, they have new names. It's almost like watching colonies of little organisms develop under a petri dish. You can really see these cultures swarming and growing and developing and spawning on the Internet.
I'm the type of spiritual person that doesn't speak openly about their spirituality. Irony is probably my religion.
I don't think religions will merge into a great global faith. But I do believe we're moving toward a global ideology that has a place for religion and recognizes the contributions of the different traditions. Hopefully, it will have an overarching view as to how we can work together for the promotion of human values and spirituality.
I definitely believe in spirituality. I like to pray, but I'm not praying to something that I can define; I'm just speaking because I know it does have an effect. I believe there are some great things that I've taken from the Bible in terms of loving the world and trying to be kind. There are a lot of good things to take from the Bible, and I like to think I try to apply them to my life.
Many times - especially when I'm playing an historical character - I want to be really on target with how I create that character and really nuanced with who that human being might be. But I don't want to lose the likeness of me or the depth of my own personality. So meditation and my spirituality has helped me to realize that, yes, I want to get out of the way but I also want the ability to hold on to what the audience likes of what they see of me.
I met somebody once who said, "I'm a lapsed-atheist" by what he meant was, "I don't believe in God but the older I get the more I realise there is a spirituality in everybody that has to be cherished and nourished." That made a lot of sense to me.
I'm gonna try to talk about this in a secular way, but where's the spirituality of just being a person? I think it contributes to this rise in bad manners and mean comments; people are being driven by seeking something that's just designed to keep them seeking something. I'm not reducing people in this age to phone-addicted dum-dums, but we have to remind ourselves to also study compassion and inner life as well.
Spirituality is when we can't explain everything in life, totally. So, we have a spiritual meaning for it; we don't know why we are here really.
I'd met so many enlightened spiritual teachers that it became a challenge to select one. I believed in the oneness of spirituality - unconditional love for God, and unconditional compassion for the beings of this world - but I also understood that unless I chose a particular path, I couldn't focus and take blessings from teachers that would allow me to have deep realizations and spiritual experiences.
The word "spiritual" normally means something that's distinct from the fleshly or the material. It's not of the world. But that version of spirituality is bankrupt today. It had its use when the program of science divested matter from the spiritual qualities - - the qualities of a self, or of a being. When science divested the world of those qualities and made it into just a thing, rather than a self, it gave us license to treat it as just a thing, and not as something sacred, conscious, alive, intelligent. So this is tied into the whole trajectory of our civilization.
You could conceive spirituality as the study of the immeasurable, of the qualitative. But that's very different from the way we typically use the word. A spiritual person, in the popular conception, is somebody who's kind of aloof from the world, introspective, meditating, communing with non-material beings. That's the spiritual realm, and we elevate it above the material realm. What's more worthy, what's more admirable? Who's the one who has done this hard work on the self, and has done a lot of "practice"? That's the spiritual person.
Even if we profess to be non-judgmental, there's an inherent judgmentality and hierarchy in which the spiritual person, the conscious person, the mindful person, is more developed than the typical truck driver or waitress or heroin addict. This is a red flag, another problem built into the concept of spirituality. The truth is that every person you meet is in some way more developed than you are, and that the multiple modes of development that a human being can pursue require the whole of humanity to pursue. We're in this together. Enlightenment is a collective effort.
Traditional spirituality often made pleasure, joy, good feelings. the things to overcome. It said you couldn't just indulge in your desires; that would be selfish. Anyone who has been in a spiritual community recognizes the dangers of this kind of joyless spirituality, where everything is somber and heavy and serious. We recognize that as kind of a trap, a false path.
I think there are strands in all of our lives that can be seen if we step back to recognize them. Coincidence is probably as close as I'll get to having spirituality. I do see patterns in my life sometimes, and I am thrilled by what I see. I don't think I'm going to have any further shot at it after death, and I don't think there's anybody upstairs orchestrating it for me, but I do think it happens. If there are miracles in my life, they are rooted in the fact of coincidence.
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