Spirituality and paradigm shift

According to the great spiritual traditions, we are experiencing the end of a major cycle of this humanity, and this appears all the more evident as this “descent” at the end of the cycle has as a corollary an acceleration of the global processes at work in the world.

For example, our experience of time and space no longer has anything to do with that of our grandparents, and the computer revolution is undoubtedly one of the main upheavals that humanity has experienced. In fact, we are experiencing firsthand the failure of the type of “modernity” imposed on the world by Europe in the 16th century, and relayed in the 20th century by the United States. This modernity (- because different human civilizations have proposed other types of modernity in the past -) is ultimately schizophrenic, since it promised material, techno-scientist “progress”, without any concern for the spiritual evolution of humanity.

This is how Emir Abdelkader, founder of the Algerian state in the 19th century but above all a spiritual Muslim anchored in the universal, accompanied the technical progress of Europeans, while warning them that the “sky” was going to close in on them.

Current human consciousness, driven by this Western model while increasingly observing its aberration, reveals itself for the moment incapable of bringing about a global ethics, based on what I call “spiritual humanism”: we see this every day in the geopolitical field.

However, whether we like it or not, whether we are aware of it or not, we are in the process of changing paradigm: after having experienced the mythos – the era of myth- and the theos – the era of the theological-, humanity must now move on from logos At holosor ”universal consciousness”. We must – because we have little choice – free ourselves from the dictatorship not of reason as such, but of a “reason” instrumentalizedof a logos enslaved to utilitarianism and partisan, unilateral profit.

We must give up a one-eyed, because one-dimensional, vision of the world, to recover a “relief” vision, where verticality and horizontality, reason and intuition, awareness of the universal and awareness of the local, experimentation in the phenomenal world and interior experience, etc. intersect. This is already being done, but with major tensions due to the importance of the issues. Holistic consciousness knows that we are all interdependent, and that harming others is harming ourselves.

The Sufi Ibn ‘Arabî (d. 1240) tells us that we are immersed in the illusion of living in bodies or autonomous entities; in reality we are all connected by the unique and complex web of life. The famous “butterfly effect” has been explored for a long time by spiritualists of all traditions.

Thus, we have no choice but to abandon the model pyramidalestablished on the sole ”having”, on injustice, competition, duality, the hypertrophy of the calculating mind, to fit us into the model of circle which gives priority to ‘being’, to equality (there is neither first nor last in a circle), to the principle of a generous Oneness which encompasses the multiplicity of life. This is a model that gives its right to each level of being. In the history of humanity, the civilization resulting from Western modernity is the only one to have denied the existence of planes of being other than the material plane.

It is true that religions themselves have sometimes fallen into what the Tibetan lama Trungpa called “religious materialism”. They sometimes impose a reductionist, mutilating vision of reality just as much as techno-scientist positivism. Will spirituality differentiate itself from established religions, taking on more diffuse, more secular forms?

It’s a movement that seems to be at work today. In the same way, if certain authors such as the French metaphysician René Guénon (d. 1951) hoped that the East would fertilize the West so that the latter would find harmony between spirit and matter, it is clear that the consumerist temptation currently affects all human societies, each according to its own cycle of evolution.

In truth, what we call postmodernity marks the end of certainties, and this is one of the advantages of the IT revolution: the hypocrisy of the global governance system is revealed more and more every day; the pretenses fall away and, to use a Sufi expression but which is also that of the physicist Bernard d’Espagnat, “the veiled Real” is revealed… We can even precisely measure today the anxiety generated in man by the globalization savagery and the imperialism of techno-capitalism, as well as its impact on the psychic and physical health of man, not to mention the other kingdoms.

Spirituality aims to open the human cognitive field to the universal, to the presence of the other, whoever they may be. In a context of disintegration of
landmarks, and a multipolarity that is still confused on the geopolitical level, spirituality teaches us to uncondition ourselves from our false identities, which are secreted by the ego: I am thinking in particular, in the context of UNESCO, of state nationalism, which is doing so much damage in today’s world.

It still teaches us to move away from exclusivist binary logic (yes or no, you or me), to access an inclusivist supra-logic, called the “included third” by certain physicists: yes and no, you and me, because ultimately it is He – whether we call Him the Principle, God or otherwise – who governs us.

Those who thrive on the current political-economic system of governance know very well that, due to the hegemony of this system, humanity is heading straight into the wall. They even call for a world republic, a universal council of wise men.

Of course, we are all steeped in contradictions – and not just them – but work on ourselves is urgently needed to facilitate the transition between this ending world and the one that is to be born. Work on oneself, as we know, is a prerequisite for any spiritual approach, and it concerns at once the individual, the State and all of humanity.