Who do you regard as the ultimate authority in your spiritual life? Is it the church, or some other representation of organized religion; a spiritual master (guru); or your own experience?

This tussle between spirituality and organized religion has been going on for centuries in one form or another. Today though, with the growing interest in lesser-known forms of spiritual knowledge, the battle is out in the open and central to mainstream culture.

In the early 20th century, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung claimed that psychotherapists were the new priesthood. They, he thought, were the ones people turned to for help with their deep spiritual and existential problems. Often these troubles occurred in middle-age and manifested as simple depression or anxiety. Many patients didn’t even recognize them as a spiritual dis-ease. Following on from the “God is dead” movement in the mid-19th century, it was clear that the church was in serious decline as a source of comfort to modern, western people.

Since then, the rise in so-called New-Age thinking ~ often confused and too eclectic to have a settled meaning ~ has further chipped away at the authority of churches and other forms of organized religion.

In opinion polls fewer and fewer people claim to be religious. A growing number prefer to call themselves “spiritual”.

Where does this come from? I’ll be looking at various aspects of this major shift in sensibilities in this series of posts. For example, is spiritual a more advanced position to take than merely religious? I believe it is.

In the top tier of all religions there are a group of people who are best described as “mystics”. They form a special group who have experienced the extended mind, or, what I call, Nirvanic experience. Such people “know” rather than believe. Whichever religion they come from, they speak the same language. They also refuse to confuse mysticism with politics and power. They are the true peaceful warriors.

The fact that most westerners now prefer to be known as spiritual rather than religious may reflect a higher level of awareness, hence experience, or the decline of organized religion as a central force in society.

I’ll be looking at these issues in future posts.