Let’s continue our look at modern spirituality in the context of the recent past and current trends in society. Make sure to read Part 1 before going further.

We can’t understand modern spirituality without realising how greatly it’s influenced by Buddhism.

Secularised Buddhism

Buddhism is playing an enormous role in modern elaborations of spiritual practices, particularly in meditation and mindfulness.

Meditation is an essential feature both of the Buddha’s original system and in all later elaborations of Buddhism. Right Mindfulness is one of elements of the Eightfold Path. And the first Noble Truth is suffering, the reason many moderns are drawn to spiritual practice.

If you analyse the most widespread modern meditation system, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, you realise that it’s essentially a Buddhist path. The problem? Suffering, in its various modern guises, like disease, mental issues, family problems, work-related stress, and so forth. John Kabat-Zinn calls it the full catastrophe. The solution? The cultivation of awareness through meditation. Isn’t that a near-perfect summary of the classic Buddhist path?

That’s not to mention the many other systems influenced by Buddhism, including Shinzen Young’s Unified Mindfulness, which brings mathematical precision to the Buddhist path.

Isn’t it remarkable that a 2500-year-old tradition is still being transmitted, adapted and spread all these centuries later? It shows us that there is something very real and universal at its core, something that transcends place, time and context. It’s no more than the core problem of human existence: our suffering, our identity, and the question we never seem to answer conclusively: “who am I?”.

Touchy Feely Spirituality

And to round off this short overview, let’s talk about what I call touchy-feely spirituality.

As we know, spirituality doesn’t exist in a bubble. Among the many factors that influence its development, there are the levels of human consciousness that are active in the culture, society and era of interest.

Since the 1960s we’ve witnessed the coming of a new level of consciousness or level of faith development: the Postmodern. This roared on to the world’s stage during the Hippy era via the Boomers, and its impact is being felt more and more as this sensitive, egalitarian, anti-hierarchical stage exerts its influence on politics, culture, education, morals – and spirituality.

I’d say from my non-scientific, anecdotal data-gathering that it’s the most dominant level of consciousness in spiritual circles. Here are some key markers of Postmodern spirituality:

• positive feelings, cuddling, warmth,
• non-hierarchical, community-oriented,
• deep spiritual truths of No Self and Oneness interpreted as orders to see beyond one’s own selfishness and inner blockages and merge into the community,
• anti-materialist, anti-government, anti-achievement,
• niceness and sensitivity are the criteria for inclusion.

It’s empowering to see that this is a new elaboration of spirituality based on the fundamental levels of human consciousness because you can participate in it without getting lost in it. You understand that its adherents are in a certain stage of growth. And you can realise though Postmodern egalitarianism adds vital elements to our spiritual life, it cannot contain true spirituality.