The problem is the extent to which logic is made to fit social and political needs, that spirituality becomes religion.

For example, a spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence of sentience, from which we are rising, rather than an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the new born, than the wise old man. Consciousness seeking knowledge, than any form, or brand of it. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.

While this might make spiritual and logical sense, it doesn’t easily translate to social cohesion, so we have this father figure lawgiver and his ten commandments. Which is useful for instilling respect for authority, but is fundamentally detrimental to any coherent logic, as it conflates the ideal with the absolute.

While both are superficially reductionist, the absolute is where everything sums out. The zero between plus and minus, the flatline between the ups and the downs.

While the ideal is a far more human centered construct, as some perfect state, or goal. Yet as living beings, we are driven by the anarchy of desire and directed by the tyranny of judgement. The heart and the head, which are in constant tension, as desires are many and it is the function of judgment to referee them. Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree. We can’t have our cake and eat it too. We can’t take both directions at the fork in the road.

So the ideal, as some literal, or figurative pot of gold at the end of the narrative arc, is a fiction and one with deleterious effects, when not kept in the necessary context that gives meaning to reductionist results. Be it religious fanaticism, or the economic reductionism of the bottom line.

As mobile, intentional organisms, we experience our reality as flashes of perception, in order to navigate, then tell tales of our journeys and build civilizations out of the collected knowledge, so this narrative effect is foundational to who we are, but time is not so much the point of the present, moving past to future, as it is change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. There is no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it, aka, causality and conservation of energy.

So it is this ability to escape from the present, that both rises us above other life, yet cuts us off from the roots of understanding the dynamics powering this physical presence; The energy radiating out, as form coalesces in. Much as galaxies are energy radiating out, as mass coalesces in. Or our bodies are the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with the nervous system to sort and distill the information precipitating out. As our societies are organic energies pushing upward, as civil and cultural forms coalesce inward, giving form and structure to this energy. Youth and age, liberal and conservative.

So when we view the spiritual as an unreachable God, possibly mediated by some historical/mythical person, then life is mundane and profane. Homo economis.

A good book on the history of Western religion is Gilbert Murray’s; The Five Stages of Greek Religion. One of the lessons from his writings is that the Ancients didn’t distinguish between civics and culture, so their religious beliefs tended to mirror their political systems. Such that monotheism equated with monarchy. As one god/one ruler. While poly and pantheisms were reflective of more populist, democratic, republican systems. As in many gods, many voices, powers. So that when the West went to a monotheistic paradigm, it was in support of a monolithic political system, aka, the divine right of kings. Such that when we went back to the more populist systems, it required a separation of church and state, leaving our politics and culture separated and confused.