Valdar's Blog

There is no obstructive repulse between modernity and spirituality, as they can both be balancing factors. The modernitry should go with the Spirituality. To deal with the hazards modernity may pose, one may need to go back to spiritual roots.

While modernity brought rising disposable incomes, a widening basket of goods and services, falling prices, access to information and a potential for high quality of life, it also made individuals into robotised consuming machines, brought in an advertising onslaught and information overload, besides neglect of health, intellect, aesthetics and spirituality. Modernity largely rejects tradition. One could say that one of the characteristics of modernity is rejection of tradition; conversely, rejection of tradition is a symptom of modernity.

Scholars’ theories of modernity differ in important ways, they agree on two fundamental ideas. First, there is a crisis of meaning in modern society; the social differentiation and specialization that characterizes modernity has drained meaning away from daily life. Second, modernity does not have to be this way; people can bring meaning back into daily life by coming together to create new shared meanings through talk.

An optimal priority order for a healthy model of life would involve spiritual evolution followed by aesthetic sensitivity, intellectual depth, psychological maturity, physical fitness and material prosperity.

The deepest spiritual insight is that we are all inter-dependent and connected. That’s the fundamental spiritual insight of every tradition. And because we are interconnected, and because we are interdependent, we have to treat each other in a certain way. For the first time in human history we actually have a technology that matches that spiritual insight. That’s what it means to have a global community. That’s what it means to be able to have a global web. People really are interconnected. And so that technology, which in a sense concertizes and realizes the deepest spiritual insights, now it realizes it in the material world what this spiritual insight is. It was more than just the material world, but it’s an emotional, and intellectual, and spiritual, and ethical world of meaning that has to match up to that technology.