Who Does a World Spirituality Address?

Last updated on: August 13, 2013 at 2:26 am by Dr. Marc Gafni

Who Does a World Spirituality Address? 2013-08-13T02:26:32-07:00 Dr. Marc Gafni

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World Spirituality is an articulated framework of the essential nature, obligation, essence and invitation of spirit, within which one can organize one’s reality in a way that makes sense. If we discern carefully, we see that World Spirituality is compellingly transformative to four major groups of people (text summarizing this video continues below)…

The first group consists of those who are post-traditional. These people no longer locate themselves within a great tradition or a classical religion, and yet they are profoundly engaged, compelled, and feel invited by, Spirit. Often these people will jump from tradition to tradition, from teacher to guru to teacher, in a confused marketplace of ideas and spirit. There’s a lack of framework to organize all the different spiritual possibilities.

The second group of people are those who are, in part, practicing in a great religion – but they don’t feel their identity exhausted by that great tradition. These people want to be dual citizens. They want to be a citizen of the larger world, while remaining a loyal citizen of a particular people or spiritual system.

The third group addressed by a World Spirituality is the secularists. The secularist is a person who has internalized the modern critique of spirituality: the demand for evidence, which points out that spirituality – and that religion particularly – has overstepped itself. They have also internalized the post-modern critique: that spirituality and religion have often ignored context, and claimed eternity when evolution is at play. Secularists are those who think that religion is no longer a viable option for a sensible, rational person.

And the fourth group is the fundamentalists. This group has rejected as a genuine option the possibility of having a committed, rigorous transformative practice outside of a great tradition, and which views the new age human potential movement (not altogether incorrrectly) as being soft, and not ultimately committed.

For these four groups, which are the four archetypes of Spirit in the world, World Spirituality completely changes the game.

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