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Spiritualization, a pending task

07/11/2024

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Rafael Domingo Oslé

Full Professor of Roman Law and head of the Chair Álvaro d'Ors of the University of Navarra.

Gonzalo Rodríguez-Fraile |

graduate in Law, chairs the Foundation for the development of Conscience.

In the era of globalization, new technologies and artificial intelligence, our new social model should help us to live in peace and happiness, enjoying the wonderful opportunities offered by the universe and living together with other human beings. This does not seem to be the case. The World Health Organization sample us the harsh reality: more than 300 million people in the world suffer from depression and more than 260 million suffer from anxiety disorders. If all depressed and anxious people lived together in the same country, it would be the third most populated country on the planet, well above the United States, Indonesia and Brazil, even the European Union, and only surpassed by China and India. 

If there is something missing in humanity, it is peace: peace in the heart of every human being, peace in homes, in companies and institutions, in forums and markets, in towns and metropolises, in nations and continents. We live in permanent status of conflict, at staff, family, professional and social level. The woke culture shows us this on a daily basis. And so it is impossible to achieve the desired peace for humanity, no matter how much we denounce wars and continue to expand the list of human rights. Even though it is of great importance, peace is not brought about by official declarations. Peace is not imposed by decree, nor is it approved in parliaments, nor is it negotiated in stock markets, nor is it assured in the most advanced democratic countries. Peace is the work of each individual, and humanity will not have peace until it is achieved by every woman and every man who inhabits our planet.

Sometimes, we identify peace with the satisfaction of verifying that things in life happen according to our plans and tastes. agreement . Other times, we equate it with the tranquility we feel when we have managed to escape from the circumstances that upset us. We think that peace is achieved by working so that everything goes well and does not go wrong. And when, by chance, things get complicated, we try to flee from the status of conflict so that it affects us as little as possible. 

Spending one's life dodging conflicts produces a great drain on vital energy, which slows down the process of acquiring peace. It is like driving a car in the wrong lane for a lifetime. Everything is stress and tension, if not collision. This is not the way to live, or rather, it is not the way to live, but this is, in fact and unfortunately, the way most of humanity lives.

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In Espiritualizarse ( Rialp, 2024) we approach the topic of peace from a spiritual perspective, much deeper and more stable, in order to learn how to maintain it in the face of any adverse circumstance or conflict. Our thesis is that, to achieve peace, one must see God's will in everything and accept it; to accept it, one must spiritualize oneself, and to spiritualize oneself one must first perfect the ego and then learn to transcend it. Only from the depths of the soul, life takes its fullness and we can come to understand why everything that happens is the best for our own development staff and we can come to fully accept ourselves. Then, and only then, peace becomes undisturbed. 

We call ego the way of perceiving reality and reacting to it from the lower dimensions of the human being -the physical, the emotional and the mental-sentimental-, and we call soul the spirit that informs the body and survives physical death. The physical, the emotional, the mental-sentimental and the spiritual constitute the four operative centers that the human being, as a corporeal-spiritual unit, must manage. The higher the center from which the human being operates, the greater his inner peace will be. The human being is more soul than physical body, even if both are integrated. The physical body, as we will explain, is the most basic, but the least relevant; the soul, on the other hand, is the most relevant of the human being but the least basic. Therefore, we cannot live on this earth without hydrating the body (this is basic!), but denying the existence of the soul, that is, what is relevant. What we say in no way detracts from the importance of the body, but it does put it in its place.

Peace, true peace, only becomes undisturbed when we operate from the soul, using the lower operative centers to act in the world, but not to direct or dominate us, and even less to be trapped in them. The soul is the bonfire of the human being, which warms and illuminates the remaining operative centers. From the watchtower of the soul, any conflict generated in a lower operative center can be solved, no matter how complicated it may seem. Instinctive conflicts are not solved in the instinct, but by transcending the instinct. Emotional conflicts are not pacified with emotions, but by transcending emotions; sentimental conflicts are not pacified in the mental realm, but fundamentally in the soul, by purifying the intention. The soul should be the control tower of the human being, which radiates peace, harmony and light to all the lower bodies. 

We have divided the book into two parts. In the first part, subdivided into three chapters, we offer an explanation of the thesis we have just formulated. We are aware that each heading of the first part would merit a long treatise and that its reading can be laborious, but we think that the effort will be worthwhile. In the second part, subdivided into two chapters, thesis is applied to specific conflicts and specific tools are shown to resolve them effectively. Therefore, the book, although theoretical in content, is eminently practical. 

Peace, seen from the soul or from the ego

Our society has cornered God and, as a consequence, has forgotten the soul, which is precisely where the most intimate meeting with God takes place. The existence of God has been reduced to a mere scientific hypothesis, impossible, moreover, to validate empirically. The reductionist scientism, still dominant, has been trapped by the subject and, for this very reason, is not capable of understanding or defining it. The soul is considered by many a complex and absurd abstraction of philosophers bent on defending the existence of the transcendent. But where, if not in the soul, does the capacity to love, to be free, to contemplate, to see the essential, as well as the ultimate intention of each person? 

As society has forgotten God and the soul, the human being has been de-spiritualized and dwarfed, and has been reduced to pure subject. By placing ourselves in the subject, we have striven to perfect it, which in itself is already of great value, but we have neglected the desirability of transcending it. We have improved and cleansed our egoic prison, but we have not been able to get out of it. Only a transcended body allows the soul to take the keys of the cell and open the doors of freedom that characterizes the spirit. 

Peace is the inner state that occurs when we live in communion with God and in harmony with ourselves, with others and with the universe. This state does not depend on the polarity of feelings or emotions, nor does it depend on external events. Therefore, peace can and must become unalterable.

To have peace, I do not need everything that happens to me to be agreement with my plans. What I need is to have a spiritual understanding that allows me to accept and surrender fully to God's will. From the deep peace of soul that this withdrawal produces, positive thoughts, feelings and emotions can be projected and experienced in a voluntary and sustained way in any circumstance.

Thomas More did not lose his peace in the Tower of London even though he knew he was going to be beheaded; neither did Edith Stein in the concentration camp while she was preparing to be asphyxiated in a gas chamber. The famous Hungarian essayist and thinker Arthur Koestler, whose holon idea we will use in this book, seems to have lost it. He decided to commit suicide with an overdose of drugs and alcohol because he did not accept being consumed by cancer and Parkinson's disease. His logic was overwhelming: in order not to live like this, I must take my own life; but his thinking was wrong. He did not understand that the experience of illness was essentially transformative and convenient for him. 

Access to spiritual reality

Our starting point is the unity of reality. This idea has been validated by almost all spiritual traditions and the most avant-garde scientific advances point towards it. Reality is one; and it is precisely in this unity that one can and must live in peace. Moreover: reality is designed to live in peace. Peace is lost when we fragment the unity of reality through individual or collective conflicts, when we strike it (this is the origin of the Latin word conflictus), when we collide with it, but reality itself is not conflictual.

We access reality through knowledge. This knowledge gives us sample a created reality and opens the doors to an uncreated reality. We call the uncreated and omnipotent Being who is the founder of reality God. financial aid to reach peace, to understand, but above all to experience, that this creative God is, Himself, a being staff, Father, Love and Peace, as well as that everything created is an expansive manifestation of this infinite love. Moreover, this God is not a just God, nor is He vengeful, nor is He sample disinterested in His work. No. God is infinitely merciful and is much more present in each one of us than we are, and much more present in the universe than the universe itself. Therefore, true peace and the source of all love is found by living in God, with God and for God, in full harmony with his children and the created universe. 

If God is peace and source of peace, we must interpret reality from peace, not from conflict. The main loss of peace in the human being is produced by the divergence between the plan that God has designed for each one of us and the one that each one draws for himself from his own ego. Many times, the conflicts that we create in our minds are the result of our ignorance, of our narrow mental context, of our distraction, of an ignoble intention and of our lack of understanding of reality. Rather than blaming reality, if not God, for what happens to us, it seems preferable to understand it, accept it and enjoy it in peace. 

But even if we accept the idea of the convenience of allying ourselves with the divine plans, the question remains: how can we know what these plans are? The answer we give in the book and try to justify with arguments is clear: we must see the will of God behind everything. And when we say in everything, we mean in everything: the excellent, the good, the regular, the bad, the terrible and the disastrous, no matter how difficult it may be for us to understand it. Obviously, as we will explain in due course, human beings can reject God's love or not cooperate with his divine will (the so-called moral evil), but they cannot prevent God from loving them, nor can they prevent everything that happens from being God's will. 

Being willing to accept and fulfill the will of God is not only a religious committee to be rewarded after death, but also the most intelligent way to live life in the internship. If I go, for the first time, to a city to visit a relative who has lived there for more than thirty years, it is normal for me to put myself in his hands and let him guide me without questioning at every moment the ways of proceeding within that locality. It is the same with God. If we live in the universe, it is logical to place ourselves in the hands of its maker, especially if his hospitality is unsurpassed. That, and no other, is the best way to live. The withdrawal total in the divine providence is the highway that leads us to peace. 

God's will is better understood if we live spiritualized and detached, rather than materialized and attached. It is easier to understand God's will, to listen to His voice in our soul, if we pray, meditate, contemplate and intuit, than if we argue, get angry, fight or panic. financial aid also use properly the three eyes with which we know reality: the eyes of the senses, the eyes of reason and the eyes of contemplation. By making good use of them, we will be more efficient in understanding reality and we will stop making the categorical mistake of using them for what they were not designed for.

With the intention of helping to improve the knowledge about ourselves, we deal with the differences between mind and consciousness and between mind and brain, as well as between emotions and feelings; love and attachment or egoic affection; instinct, reason and intuition; and mind and soul. We will also analyze the differences between insensitivity, sensitivity and metasensitivity or holy indifference, which has nothing to do with insensitivity. This understanding is fundamental for people dedicated to the service of others (physicians, teachers and educators, psychologists, spiritual counselors, etc.).

To assist in situating oneself in the soul, we include an explanation of what we call levels of consciousness or spiritual capacity, which serve as a map on the individual's path to attaining peace. We also deal with prayer and meditation as two different, yet interconnected, methods of raising spiritual energy. Prayer is to spirituality what words are to poetry, or colors to painting. All prayer, be it board member , mental or contemplative, demands a deep interior and exterior recollection oriented towards God. Meditation has been frequented by the ancestral oriental religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism or Jainism, among others. Also by many Eastern Christians.

The management internal conflicts

The second part of the book deals with the internal management of conflicts in order to learn how to recover the lost peace and try to prevent them from happening again. Some are personal conflicts, such as, for example, those related to the management of thought, ego, freedom, victimhood and lack of self-responsibility or the management of time; others refer to social circumstances of human life or institutions, such as conflicts arising from migration, the media, emotional attachment to religious institutions or the ego of nations. 

Given its unity, the division into two chapters within this part only responds to the needs of composition of the book. Basically, every social conflict has an individual dimension and vice versa. From the unity of reality, the distinction between the social and the individual, although basic, is not excessively relevant. The outline within each section is quite similar: we identify the concrete conflict and then apply the necessary tools of understanding. The idea, at final, is that each interested reader will be able to resolve his or her own conflicts using the tools we offer or others of his or her own elaboration. 

Although each conflict is managed differently, there are common elements. Therefore, we do not intend to exhaust all possible conflicts, but only to analyze a few as sample. Any subject conflict, no matter how diverse, can be resolved at its root with purity of intention, spiritual understanding of reality, spirit of service and using the tools of wisdom applicable to the specific conflict.

In a appendix, we explain some differences that can serve as financial aid in the training staff to acquire inner peace, as well as some spiritual axioms that synthesize in a lively but disordered way what we have tried to say in this book: life in peace is possible and this is achieved by living from the soul, not from the ego, and learning to manage thought properly. final It is a matter of living in the plural of "we", that is, with God and others, integrated in the creative work and not imprisoned in the egoic "I".