livecollective wrote:
its a case by case situation. but i find a lot of these spiritual cats, utilize spiritualism as a sort of faux-intellectualism. This is where I have a problem.
Intellectualism and Spirituality should never cross paths, in my eyes. They are hugely different in nature. Associated with Burning Man style events you get a lot of under educated people clutching to spiritualism as a sort of totem pole of their intelligence.
Now when you encounter someone who has a sound understanding of spiritualism and is also well educated you can see the glaring difference between them and the GAIA shouting band-wagon jumping fools that will throw mysticism at you like its fact.
yeah fully agree on the case by case thing. and yeah, I basically agree with a lot of what you are saying.
partly though, it is very difficult to talk about topics regarding faith without sounding like a complete dck, and so I am cautious about jumping to conlusions about people. But maybe if we swapped locations I would feel differently. I can definitely see how things can get messy and vastly irritating.
I dunno though. There's a lovely lady at my work who's is more in the 'blind faith' camp, and she is totally wonderful and with a very human deepness. Even if she cannot express herself with tricky intellectual constructs I wouldn't doubt what she says for a second. She loves cats and does the whole Reiki healing thing. She once tried it on a printer that wasn't working. I\m not sure if she was successful.
Slight tangent also... I disagee that spiritual and intellectual beliefs should never cross paths. (well, depending on what you mean with these words). It's wondrous that a lot of scientific research is harmonic with spiritual beliefs. I think in the future there will be further integration of these 2 sides, and it will seem more and more crazy that once upon a time they were seen as opposing forces.