Soundtrack: The Fauns, “Seven Hours”
Five years ago, I, for the first time, wrote in my blog that I no longer identified with any specific religion. It wasn’t the first time I’d described my spirituality in this way. I felt that way pretty much all throughout my college years, and a brief period of time in 1996. And this has also been true since that blog post in 2014. But I have gradually felt the need more and more to define my spirituality. Even if it’s not associated with a specific religion.
I am going to go out on a limb and say something radical. When you think seriously about this, you’ll realize that it is true:
The time we live in right now is the most spiritually significant time in tens of thousands of years. It is more significant than during the time of Christ, Mohammed, Moses, Baha’u’llah, the Buddha, and others prophets revered throughout the ages.
That is not to say that the teachings of these spiritual masters and founders of major religions aren’t relevant. Indeed, I’d say they are more relevant than ever. This is the time, indeed, where we are being tested in our ability to intertwine the wisdom from these masters with new realities that have been thrust upon us. The new realities that I refer to are the threats to civilization and life on Earth caused by human activity.
The intertwined activities of climate change, the threat of nuclear war, overconsumption, habitat destruction, pollution, and destructive modern agriculture are new realities we must adjust to. While we Homo sapiens have probably faced challenges to our survival as a species before, it is nothing like this. It could be that our overconsumption and impact on the environment did challenge us—perhaps through over-hunting and over-harvesting the resources of an area. But never on a global scale, and never in a way that threatens life on Earth as we know it.
I believe that we were all put on this Earth at this time for a reason. What we need to do is ask ourselves why we are here and what we are called to do. At this time when the survival of millions of species—including are own—are in question, it’s clear that we are being called upon to do something. And we need to do it sooner than later.
