Abstract
In the human experience life is a process of discovery. Born into this world with a consciousness of existence, the newborn moves into the second stage of existence wondering in its own way: “What is this reality?” While in the womb, the experience is closely the same as the mother’s. Nourishment, emotions, and physical health condition the child to the mother’s experience. The birth process itself is traumatic, resulting in a new world. The discovery of new existence can be inviting and welcoming or harsh and constrictive. The child’s new realization will posture him or her emotionally for life.
Practical spirituality approached in this way opens up an understanding of the effects of life’s experiences as developmental from both a conceptual and an emotional viewpoint. Emotional experiences form the internal responses to life’s offerings. As mental reasoning develops itself by the use of concepts and constructs of a worldview, the mental and emotional become related to the diversity and complexities of life. Human emotional history and the mind’s formation informed by culture, ideology, and experience make up the stuff of life. True of individuals and true of society, the implications for human development are here for reflection and study. My goal is to “transform to conform to the way of nature,” by seeking truth.
This chapter presents the challenge of practical spirituality from the experience of the author’s portrayal of the life and message of Mahatma Gandhi.
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Notes
- 1.
Lloyd deMause (2002) claims that all violence is rooted in child abuse and has documented the history of abuse in the West. He founded the movement of psychohistory to show these effects. www.psychohistory.com.
- 2.
Haring, Bernard, The Law of Christ in three volumes, 1954, and translated in the 1960s, moved outside the realm of cataloguing sins to an understanding of love for moral guidance.
- 3.
My unpublished monolog, Love and Hate, Urban American Style, 1968.
- 4.
Becker focuses on immortality as the prime human motivation. “We can see that the self-perpetuation of organisms is the basic motive for what is most distinctive about man—namely, religion. As Otto Rank put it, all religion springs, in the last analysis, ‘not so much from … fear of natural death as of final destruction.’ But it is culture itself that embodies the transcendence of death in some form or other, whether it appears purely religious or not. It is very important for students of man to be clear about this: culture itself is sacred, since it is the ‘religion’ that assures in some way the perpetuation of its members” (Becker 1975).
- 5.
I have applied them to the motivation for nuclear weapons in my book (Meyer 2007). This book also further elaborates on other events and movements in my life.
- 6.
As I walked along the English Coast as Gandhi in 2007 with Footprints for Peace, “Toward a Nuclear Free World,” I learned by observation and new sources about the effects of Sellafield Nuclear Power and Processing Plant’s effects on the Irish Sea and the Irish/English populations. Recently, I came across an important new source which spells out the science and the startling facts about nuclear radiation from Chernobyl (Yablokov et al. 2009). The corresponding data are becoming available for Fukushima.
References
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Freire, Paulo. (1970). Pedagogy for the Oppressed, New York: Herder and Herder.
Gutierrez, Gustavo. (1973). A theology of liberation, Orbis Books.
Cayley, Ivan. (2005). The Rivers North of the Future, The Testament of Ivan Illich, as told to David Cayley, House of Anansi Press.
Merton, Thomas. (1964). Gandhi on Non-Violence, New Directions Paperback.
Meyer, Bernard. (2007). THE AMERICAN GANDHI, My Seeking Truth with Humanity at the Crossroads, iUniverse.
Yablokov, Alexey, Vassily B. Nesterenko, Alexey V. Nesterenko, Chernobyl, Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. (2009). GREKO PRINTING, 260 W. Ann Arbor Rd., Plymouth MI 48170 USA, orders@grekoprinting.com.
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Meyer, B.“. (2018). Discovering Reality as Old as the Hills Assisted with Gandhi’s Light: Some Notes on Practical Spirituality and Human Development. In: Giri, A. (eds) Practical Spirituality and Human Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0803-1_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0803-1_22
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