How we lost collective spirituality - and why we need it back | Lisa Miller 

In her book "The Spiritual Child," Lisa Miller explains, "Spirituality is an inner sense of relationship to a higher power that is loving and guiding. The word we give to this higher power might be God, nature, spirit, the universe, the creator, or other words that represent a divine presence. But the important point is that spirituality encompasses our relationship and dialogue with this higher presence... This two-way spiritual dialogue may or may not include religion." To watch more from Lisa Miller, check out our other video: How spirituality protects your brain from despair ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-T0GETX5_VJ4.html

Ideas of philosophers, self reflection and meditation give me all the answers I need. There should be a renaissance of philosophy rather than “spirituality“/religion.

Even though I agree with the overall message of this video, I really dislike the mind-heart dichotomy. "The heart" despite all romantic notions is also inclined to let us tap fully into cognitive biases, common fallacies and dogmas of all sorts. It's how religion instrumentalised faith. "Listen to you heart" is not the road to spiritual truth, but to emotional obedience. True spirituality incorporates the whole of the experience - mind & heart.

A person can be spiritual without the dogma of religion.

The most important part about freedom of religion is freedom from religion.

My grandparents grew up through wars, genocides, famines but that didn't turn them to be religious or spiritual in any shape or form and yet they were the kindest, the most moral and the best humans that I have ever known. Big Think and The Well used to be reasonable sources of information but lately started to invite all sorts of religious nuts. Humanity doesn't need religion or spirituality in order to be kind, moral or good. But I can understand why there's a "spiritual awakening". In majority of western countries it's all due to the cuts and privatisation of welfare, health and social services. Everything these days is about profits and dividends of very few and impoverishment of the rest. What humanity need is fair share of the resources and all will be good. I'll go a bit further, I'm a father of three beautiful children and one of them is the kindest person alive but not due to religious or spiritual beliefs but rather due to the immense value of life, because they (not a pronoun, rather animosity) almost lost their life in a battle with illnesses related to premature birth on one side and on another side, a barrage of doctors telling us that we should let them go or the outcome will result in almost a vegetative state.

"We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives" Tyler Durden would be proud if so

Thank you for posting this. I find it helpful and informative. Spirituality gives me comfort, hope and guidance. It gives me a deeper perspective to the world.

The problem is that people misidentify spirituality with religion. And I think religion can be a beneficial , it’s when dogma takes over the religion that it turns bad.

Virtually Everytime I get a wish denied and I cam accept it, sonewhat thinking"Thy will be done", something good, something surprisingly intense is about to Happen. If I cling autistically to my wishfull thinking, humiliation and the like are a likely outcome....

I'm a fan of Lisa Miller's work -- the importance of her messages about spirituality cannot be overstated in today's world. But I disagree that the further separation that she mentions, which was a continuation of the separation of church and state, was the sole or even most salient reason we lost spirituality collectively. That separation was, at root, not a separation of government and religion per se, but a separation of Christianity from government, so that Christianity wouldn’t continue to dominate American society. It was an attempt to curtail Christian hegemony in American politics and culture. And if we look at what some groups within American Christianity are doing now, imposing their minority views and attitudes on the majority of us, I'd say that was a wise move on the part of the founders and the continued movement toward inclusivity. What is more, if we take a historical lens, we see that Western Christianity -- which was functionally re-formed into a branch of imperialism and conquest after the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine -- was itself one of the major reasons spirituality, and other modalities/groups of spirituality, were eradicated or suppressed in the first place. That imperialist, hierarchical mentality of Christianity is the driving force behind the global loss of collective spirituality that we all need to heal from, overcome, and transform.

Thank you for this video. It came at the most opportune time for me. Earlier this morning, I had been thinking about similar concept as red door vs yellow door and separately googling Lisa Miller on spirituality. Lo and behold! A video that combined both things I was searching for appeared!

Such a challenging topic to navigate and she did an amazing job doing so. As a "recovering catholic" I was tense initially considering this POV, but can see how this focus on "spirituality" is about bridges across individual meaning + fulfillment and not organized religion. Phew!

Thank you. I appreciate this video.

Not lost - distracted and have been for centuries where as our indigenous peoples have always been connected as natural part of their culture.

I got out of depression thanks to spirituality. I see spirituality as a spectrum where most people are in the middle. I was on the lower end thats why i felt depressed

Spirituality does not necessarily mean the organised religions. A person can be spiritual alongside being irreligious. The organised religions have been used to justify heinous activities too, so they can not be said to be the only ways of spirituality. As an agnostic-atheist, I see life as a spiritual journey

You are speaking my language! All the best in your quest …

I like to think of religions as schools. The end goal of each one is to graduate its student (enlighten them). But we humans, being the way we are, have leveraged on the segregation and caused this idea of division. We must learn to embrace the teachings, and ponder on the wisdom provided by our own set of eyes. True freedom always lies only one step away.

The analysis at the beginning is amazing, if you ask me. The whole thing worthwhile. It seems rare to find discussion about the chasm between the individual and the group. This discusses it quite well

The key point for me is not about a spiritual quest. It's about the loss of spirituality and religious experience as valid and useful in contemporary culture. We threw out the baby of God with the bathwater of extremism and fundamentalism, and it's a shame.

The heart is the Creator Ma'at with us as us, Truth, equality, balance and order, oxygen consciousness and the universe.

Beliefs (religious, spiritual) comes from a desire to know & understand. Having these personal truths, in whatever way you see fit, in a nation where freedom of thought is protected is necessary. However this is where science literacy comes in.. keep your personal truths, but i present to you objective truths, which are truths that science discovers. These are things that are true whether or not you believe in them. I recommend to everybody 3 books.. (Origins by Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson) (Evolution Vol. 2 by Dr. Alice Roberts) (This Will Make You Smarter by John Brockman)

there's so many useful philosophical ideas in this video, ways of framing your life and the things that happen to you in healthy ways, but then for some reason they are conflated with mysticism and spirituality. i cant wrap my head around that. why must one be spiritual to be introspective? i think its dangerous to tie these things together. it alienates the non spiritual, and it validates the parts of mysticism that otherwise would be (has been) completely thrown out by most. theres no question that dogmatic religion is dangerous, but even individual spirituality can be harmful in its unverifiable nature which necessarily divides us. especially when all of the emotional benefits can be experienced secularly.

This video has been mind-blowing. I get what she's trying to say. Because I am on that path that she describes. Now, I get why people in the comments disagree. But you truly have be there to experience what she's trying to say.

I guess I should be surprised such subjective gibberish would be given any credence, but investing in BS is just who we have become and i certainly isn't due to collective spiritual bankruptcy. In fact, there is a strong argument that spirituality has been so perverted by its membership that its becoming unreliable and therefore rejected.

Read the bible helps me with my anxiety .. words of atrenght gives me strenght .. i think Lot of Ppl Have no mental health bc of the lack os spirituality ... We Have to learn tô Have faith again

Waking up is a good way of describing it!

What is this "Ultimate Reality" of which you speak?

I was wondering when “Templeton” was going to bring in “spirituality”. I would like to see spirituality defined. When is a moment of awe or the feeling of purpose spiritual?

Religión destroyed my life and now I will decide to believe in yoga, spiritual energy, it gets me free

Her research is interesting, but there's a problem: some of us can't believe BS no matter how psychologically beneficial it might be. Learning about the natural world, studying comparative religion, and understanding human psychology are all good reasons to seriously doubt that spirituality is anything other than a coping mechanism.

Organized religion is the bane of our spiritual society

Do not conflate religion with spirituality

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I actually appreciate The Well for posting this interview as it did get me thinking. However, I have problems with what the speaker said. This is disjointed, disconnect. Are these parts of an interview edited together? Usually, in any kind of community (spiritual or otherwise) one has to adhere to the same dogma everyone else in the group adheres to or they are shunned or cast out. If she just means by spiritual the idea or feeling that all life on the planet is interconnected, maybe people have that feeling, but that doesn't keep them from being isolated, especially during times of crisis. (Nor does that necessitate that we believe we are all children of God. That is her metaphysical assumption she is foisting on everyone else.) Only a support group of friends or family members helps with isolation. I studied religion in college. She is picking up on one type or definition of a religious community: that created by shared myth and ritual (Streng). I now realize today that definition idealized such a community. We don't all share the same beliefs. Today, most find it difficult to follow ritual they find meaningless (as we did when we recited prayers in church when we were small that we didn't even understand the meaning of). Also, many people do not feel everything is interconnected, or they don’t care; they merely want as large of a slice of the pie as they can get, no matter what it does to other people or the planet. A belief that everything is interconnected does not protect anyone from these people and the systems they create and support. But she is going beyond this. She has metaphysical assumptions behind what she is saying, assumptions that only a privileged person could believe because their socio-economic conditions allow such beliefs, such as that we are on a quest (warmed over Joseph Campbell), and we have a trail angel guiding us (New Age religion). If she dispensed with those assumptions and merely said that we all have to find a reason to keep going on in order to survive adversity, likely no one would disagree with her. I also disagree that the separation of church and state gets rid of pluralism and does not allow people to share their spiritual practices. Rather, it protects and supports this. It allows everyone to believe what they want to believe. Some adults don't talk about spiritual practices these days because they don't belong to any religious tradition, or they don’t know much about the tradition they belong to. Some have a materialistic viewpoint. That is their metaphysical belief, whether they realize it or not. It might be better to teach people about assumptions (metaphysical or otherwise), so they are aware of these and can better critique their own beliefs. Also, why would anyone pray if they don't believe in a wholly other God? (In the various traditions, there are several different types of Gods, by the way.) And when many people pray, they often pray to get what they want from a supernatural parent. Why is that a good thing to do? That may be comforting, at least until they don’t get what they want. Again, most religious traditions encourage people to pray to be able to have the strength to survive whatever catastrophe is befalling them or to be able to accept the will of God or fate. People meditate all the time, but they have no religious beliefs, nor do they need them to meditate. I agree with her that it is sad that many people do not read works written by religious figures, but not because these works should be used as a source of morality (which often results in using them to support their own bigotry rather than morality). I have done a great deal of reading in religion and philosophy and literature myself (as well as other academic disciplines). I found such knowledge important and necessary for survival. She is correct that there are points in our lives where everything is thrown into chaos and we become depressed, and we must work our way around these and that these have the potential to become times of growth (if they don’t destroy us); this is an insight of existential philosophy, and as Shakespeare and many others have noted, suffering may make us feel more empathy for the sufferings of others. The heart should not guide the head. Human beings are irrational enough as it is. It isn’t necessarily good to say that our emotions should decide what we believe and how we act. What if we are filled with anger and hatred and bigotry? Moreover, she is using language very imprecisely. The heart does not know what is true. The heart is an organ that pumps blood around your body. Our emotions don’t reside in our heart although our emotions can speed up our heart or slow it down. Also, to be envious or jealous or never-satisfied-in most religious traditions or even most psychological theories or moral systems, these are usually not considered positive emotions. Advertisers play on these to get us to become mass consumers. Rarely, if ever, is any good obtained by comparing ourselves to others and feeling envious or jealous or wanting more. Nor do people feel satisfied when they obtain what they want. In fact, this insight, our ceaseless desire to pursue goals that, once obtained, leave us empty, do not fulfill us, is the major insight of most religions she initially laments the loss of. Then she jumps to a mystical experience that we need to have in order to decide whether to marry or travel. A mystical experience is not necessary to make such decisions. Intuition, knowing ourselves (something Socrates endorsed), is important in making decisions about what we choose to do that we will find compatible with our real needs versus what we think we want, but this does not require mysticism. She is correct that we do not have control over what happens in our life. But when we encounter obstacles, we don’t necessarily end up with something better than what we originally wanted. Instead, again, many religious traditions and most philosophy councils that we need to learn to be content with what we have. In fact, one of the things it is said that we need to do in order not to end up bitter and disillusioned in old age is to rationalize our decisions, as Robert Frost says, the road we have taken, so we are content rather than bitter and disillusioned about all the aspects of ourselves that were not capable of being realized. If I remember correctly, Paul Tillich, a famous theologian, wrote about this inability to realize potential and acceptance of this in his works. Maybe what she is offering here is the rationalization Frost suggested in his poem, which is an illusion. To me, open-eyed acceptance of the limitations we encountered (as Tillich suggests) is probably more psychologically healthy. Tillich calls this the tragic vision of life. This is a disjointed piece with many paragraphs because this interview is disjointed. Maybe it was originally a much longer interview and material was cut out. I find myself having the same reaction as I did when I was assigned in college an article by Alan Watts that I had to critique. Like Watts, this interview blends together all kinds of terminology and metaphysical beliefs that are imprecise, incompatible, and don’t blend well.

This is an unbelievable take on the inequalities that are causing a majority of these issues. Not to mention spirituality is based in the belief that something beyond this world exists. I'm very disappointed in the content I'm seeing from Big think. As I continue to see these. Christian underpinnings creeping more and more into their content.

Arguably we have not lost spirituality, it merged with the economic system. Today you “find yourself” and your purpose through work.

I don’t find what she’s saying to be true. Maybe I’m just living in a different world though.

The problem is that in the USA in order to engage with groups you have to be spiritual 😂

We didn't ''lose'' collective spirituality, because collective spirituality doesn't actually exist. Individual spirituality exists at the behest of the individual. And even then it is usually misunderstood due to collective influences (e.g. cultural biases and influences). What is needed is collective intelligence, which is out there for everyone to experience, if they put their focus onto it. This video is just another attempt to get people to misunderstand the influences of ''traditional religions'', possibly the worst direction that humankind could move toward. It would be a retrograde movement for individuals to do so. So don't do it. Set your ''sights'' on seeking to connect with the Intelliverse of knowledge, rather than spend time with old paradigms.

Who and/or What Am I? Do 'I' even exist? Consider the following: a. I am a human as defined by humans. b. I am an energy based quarkelectronian as modern science claims that all matter is made up of quarks, electrons and interacting energy and I am made up of matter and interacting energy. c. I am a being of 'light', 'if' my current theory of everything is correct whereby the 'gem' photon is the energy unit of this universe that makes up everything in this universe, including space, time and numbers. (Currently dependent upon the results of my gravity test). d. "I" do not even actually exist but eternally existent space time exists as me, currently in the forms as above. * I exist and yet "I" simultaneously do not exist, dependent upon perspective. But yet, do "I" not truly exist in absolute truth reality as only eternally existent space time exists as all things in absolute truth reality? * "I" can mentally change between perspectives thereby experiencing existence from those various perspectives. "My" mind continues to expand, but is it truly 'my' mind that is expanding or is it eternally existent space time's mind that is expanding? In absolute truth reality, it would seem to be the later. * 'To Be or Not To Be'. I am both, 'I Am and I Am Not.' But I Am Not it appears more than I Am. * Consider also: If asked the general question, 'What do you know?'. My current answer would be, 'Not much compared to all that can be known.' (I Am Not, More than I Am). It's humbling. * Is it truly any wonder that the flow of energy in the universe affects species? We are the universe experiencing itself. * Question: If 'I' never actually existed in the first place, how could 'I' ever die?

American Gods - Neil Gaiman

We haven’t lost anything-you can’t loose anything when it belongs to you. peace+& 🎶💥🌸

The way she explains why she thinks it’s a causal relationship in the very first minute is fallacious and deficient.

A trip with Jupiter

Like many of my generation, I had religion shoved dowm my throat at school. I was forced to pray daily to a fictional god. I really don't see how that's a postive thing.

Our society has been so alienated from reason that that's why there is no spirituality. There are no limits to reason. Reason extends to even the domain of spirituality but we are so immature philosophically that no one can even begin to see this. She says that its a bad thing that people haven't been asked to pray or meditate. I say that praying and meditation are the most destructive forces on the planet. Humans thrive when we become rational. When humans are irrational, they suffer. Praying and meditation are irrational. Things today that aren't going well are not going well because of the level of irrationality associated with them. No one has ever gotten smarter or more powerful from praying or meditation. But people getting smarter is the only thing that allowed humans to leave the caves and become the most extraordinary species. There's no such thing as a heart with wisdom that the head doesn't have. She is only recognizing empiricism as the mechanism of rationality when empiricism is philosophically contradictory to reason.

Just because one door is locked doesn’t mean we should stop trying to open doors. Are you talking to the Jehovah Witnesses??????

What about the real apparent truth that 'God' does not actually exist except for as a concept alone, the singular big bang theory is a fairy tale for various reasons, and the universe always existed in some form and never had a beginning, no creator needed? a. Modern science claims energy cannot be created nor destroyed, hence energy is eternally existent. b. An absolute somethingness cannot come from an absolute nothingness, so an absolute somethingness always existed, most probably being energy itself. c. Universe ALWAYS existed in some form and NEVER had a beginning, No Creator Needed. 'a' is true, is it not? 'b' is true, is it not? If 'a' and 'b' are true, then no creator is needed in 'c'. * Some people for some reason (social conditioning/brainwashing/wishful thinking) believe in future eternity without end but do not accept eternity past with no beginning.

The hole in our heart is God shaped. Love is the true answer. Emmanuel Swedenborg builds the bridge between religion and spirituality

this is profound, ly misguided

90% of these commenters are depressed nihilists who atlre completely blind to what this video is saying

Thank you for this💗 truly touched me. Magnificent work & attention to this message.🛤️