Meanwhile, also in the name of religion, violence continues in Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, and who knows how many other locations, each time with faith in a deity as its rationale -- something all parties to these conflicts,"good" and "bad" alike, have in common. In other places, depredations against the earth itself -- for example, the burning down of the rainforests, the clear-cutting of the Southeast Asian jungles (for chopsticks), the sweeping clean of sea life from the oceans, and the promotion of urban sprawl at the expense of nature -- are sanctioned as humankind's holy destiny. In the West, the Bible, written by all too human authors, elevates humanity to the role of über-species, demigods (in the form of the all-powerful God Himself), giving human predators great license. They not only can but must remake the earth, profiting by it in the process. The world is “Man's Dominion” -- or so we've been told by generations of boosterizing preachers. One branch of Christianity promotes the belief that you get what you deserve based on heavenly intervention, but it's not alone in sanctioning behaviors that result in incredible unevenness of wealth and opportunity within and among cultures and nations. Elsewhere, other religious traditions share the biblical authors' ambitions and promote their own forms of exploitation and reward in the name of the Divine. Buying things comes in No. 1 in some cultures.

It's difficult under the circumstances to write about experience and spirituality, which by definition is not about death and destruction sanctified by totalitarian religion, but the opposite: connection with the Infinite, cohesion with the physical world, empathy and compassion, a sense of cosmic responsibility, and deep awareness within. For the moment, the egotistical religious zealotry that terrorizes people and the environment (as it has for millennia) holds the winning hand in terms of forming our contemporary consciousness. Sometimes, things seem to be changing. One hopes....

As i delved into the history of spiritual experience, I discovered that over the millennia, spirituality has run on two paths. On the first path, the pursuit of transcendence and integration with the universe continues as the determined pursuit of an enlightened fraction of the population. On the second path, however, spirituality -- deliberately corrupted and misapplied -- has been transformed from a powerful force for good into a motivator of heinous acts and trivial behaviors (like rampant consumption) based on a coarse understanding of humanity's place in the world, as its Master.

This misappropriation of the most fundamental human experience, spiritual identity, using it to serve evil -- venal and banal -- purposes, may have been the first deliberate act of experience design. It took real chutzpah to seize what was most profound and make it profane. Our challenge as ethical experience designers is to redeem our profession: in this regard, to reinstitute spirituality as a force for improving the quality of life on earth.

I need to meditate on this tonight. Tomorrow, I'll tackle spiritual experience, as promised earlier....