Spirituality Guide

For part of this week, a wonderful person I know is providing a series of guest posts about humanity and religion. I hope you enjoy these posts as much as I do.

The Birth of Religion - Part One
by Seeker

Of all the life forms on Earth, as far as we know, only humans have religion. It may be that dolphins worship whales or that dogs worship their masters, but the wonderment at the possibility of higher realms and or a Creator seems to be a particularly human trait.

Mind you I am not talking here about any of the established or orthodox religions but rather the personal sense of awe and numinous feeling that there is more to life, more to the universe, than just atoms and other particles.

It seems strange but there is little in the normal world to indicate that people are thinking about just why we have the religious sense – or maybe we should call it the spiritual sense so we don’t keep getting tangled up with Religion.

Why do we have this feeling? When you ask those of science about such things, they talk about how Man would feel so alone, or our need for a father figure, or trying to find answers to the mysteries we see around us. Yet that begs the question of just why we would have those feelings at all.

It seems to me that if intelligence brings along with it such fear of facing the real world that we go looking for phantasms to brace us against the vicissitudes of life, then maybe it doesn’t have so much going for it after all. That if we need to invent a supernatural and omnipotent being to protect us and provide us with meaning to our lives then perhaps we don’t really meet the definitions for sanity and wisdom.

Unless of course, there is actually something beyond our merely physical world – as mystics and sages have been telling us all through history. Unless the sense of spirituality is really based in a recognition of something beyond the mundane and an awareness of lives and self that allows us to reach past the boundaries of the mere mortal world and catch a glimpse of forever.