Shyness and spirituality

[Swift]

I asked each man whether he accepted a basic principle of Spiritualism which holds that God exists within and throughout all of nature, including the minds of all human beings. Fully 93 percent of the older love-shys together with 87 percent of the younger ones indicated basic agreement with this viewpoint. I suspect that few of these agreeing respondents had much awareness of the implications of this principle. Be that as it may, just 42 percent of the non-shy men endorsed it as being valid.

In sum, the love-shys appear to be quite a bit more "open" than
the non-shys to an "other worldly" type of orientation and world view.
To some extent this may be a byproduct of the fact that this world has
not provided the love-shys with the range of rich satisfactions and experiences with which it has provided the non-shys. Long term deprivations have forced the love-shys to look in unusual directions for the possibility of satisfactions. And in hitting upon the psychic and occult, many of them felt privileged—as though they were in possession of a secret knowledge and awareness which the majority of people are "too dense" to be able to share. In essence, the non-shy men were experiencing a sufficiently rich life right in the here and now; and many of them did not feel any special need for a higher spiritual world, or for personal immortality.

By the way, I am not making these statements in order to disparage a belief in Spiritualism or in psychic and occult subjects. Years of intense study have convinced me personally of the fundamental validity of many occult ideas. I am merely suggesting that people who feel driven from an early point in life to study Spiritualism and the occult have very often had to deal with a range of hardships and privations.

Dr. Brian G. Gilmartin - Shyness & Love (http://www.love-shy.com/Gilmartin/Dr._Brian_G._Gilmartin-Shyness_&_Love-(onepage).pdf)
Page 502

PS: Coincidence or not, this is my 666th post. 8O

[Imen de Naars]

To some extent this may be a byproduct of the fact that this world has
not provided the love-shys with the range of rich satisfactions and experiences with which it has provided the non-shys

This point is actually against the thesis. If the real world have fulfilled your desires and expectations, why do not believe in the godness of the whole natural course?
Conversely, if the world has more or less always been a source of delusion, why bother believing that his nature is intrinsecally divine? If you don't, at least you give yourself a chance for something that might come after.

[Swift]

No, it is not against the point of the thesis, which states that people that get satisfaction in the real world are less inclined to seek any further. And being disillusioned in daily life does not mean you will be disillusioned in your spirituality also, on the contrary perhaps.

An illustration of this is the fact that most Western society's, with exeption of America, have become more and more secular as the wealth and the everyday living conditions of ordinairy citizens improved, while very poor country's, like in Eastern-Europa or Latin-America for example, are still very religious.

Swift

[antireconciler]

Swift, it could be that the "non-shys" feel more deprived and have had seeminly more success in making up for perceived lack through material gain, making it easier for them to believe they are happy and secure.

Of course, hitting upon secret divine knowledge could be equally shallow and unfulfilling. It's because BOTH viewpoints assume competition for happiness, when actually such a thing is held on to only by giving it away freely. Adopting religion because the world sucks for you or denying it because the world is so great for you both imply that religion is a fearful way of extracting joys equivilent to those made by material gains. It can be, but then it's not really religious or spiritual at all and is merely worldly which is what we started with.