Spiritual Life in a Godless Culture (Part Two)

In the early 21st century, there is one spiritual question that is perhaps the most urgent and important of all – a question to which, arguably more than any other, we need to find a radical and enlightened answer.

We live in a highly sophisticated but largely secular culture that doesn’t recognise the primacy of spirit, and regards any kind of religious expression with deep suspicion. When spirit does show up, it is usually in its archaic, mythic or fundamentalist forms – or in the endless marketplace of the New Age, where spirituality is merely commodified.

How does one live an authentic spiritual or devotional life in such a setting? What would it, or could it, even look like in this heavily secular post-postmodern context? In Western culture, we have as yet tragically failed to answer this question.

Yet simultaneously, so many sensitive and intelligent people intuit the need for an urgent and fundamental shift of values towards a higher, more awakened engagement with life. For those who feel this deep longing, it can often seem that there is nowhere to turn.

So what would a life of deep and authentic spiritual aspiration or intention look like in a hypothetical future – a post-secular culture? What kind of society would be evolved enough to support and uphold interiority as a foundational principle?

Would there still be a need for monastic traditions, dedicated theological learning, and other religious structures? Or would our values have evolved so far that the spiritual life would be fundamentally embedded in culture, so that we would be living one life, not two?

In part two of this talk, Andrew Cohen takes us on a speculative journey into a world beyond the prevailing divisions between the ordinary and the numinous, inviting us to imagine how Manifest Nirvana might actually look and feel. It is cosmic consciousness itself, Cohen argues, that calls us to utopian visions of heaven on earth – and only through deeply listening to this call can we begin to envision and ultimately manifest such a radical and vertical shift of values.