I think we tend to miss the fact that life has more dimensions than just satisfying physical needs and wishes or reacting to the continuous tirade of repetitive thoughts. It seems to me that many of us are not able to look at life three-dimensionally, perhaps using the personal, social und universal as a structure, or looking at body, soul and mind, or whatever other triad we have in mind as a concept by which we take a holistic view of life.
We often miss an important factor that we give varying names, whether soul, heart, spirit, psyche or atman and other such forms common to world-views outside of western traditions. We are sure that we have no organ called a soul, and though the heart is often the place in our body where we feel the palpitations of the soul, we generally only experience this aspect of being human when it is shouting at us because we have overheard for so long its warnings.
The soul, or whatever we want to call it, is, also in the interest of a balanced mind, our sense of equilibrium in more than a physical or mental sense. It seems to have a physical aspect in the two halves of the brain, but also we feel the balance (or lack of balance) in emotions, or of male and female attributes, or even the appropriateness (or lack of it) of the intensity of our ego-drive among other things.
These are aspects of being human which we have to actively address, and not something we can ignore for long without suffering disturbances which we call psychological, psychiatric or mental disorders. It is the same with the body (and respectively also the mind), which we have to exercise regularly, care for and feed appropriately, so that disorders are avoided.
Looking at the way we work, with the densification of tasks over the last twenty years, we have increased the peaks and reduced the troughs of work to a minimum, and sometimes even the breaks left to us are expected to be sacrificed, even though it is well documented that performance is better with rest-breaks. Even during physical exercise we are told to pause in between. The question arises why we subject ourselves to continuing stress and whether there is a goal to be gained, or whether we are just surviving.
Habitually doing things which are good for us in a holistic manner, which reach all aspects of our lives, seems to suffer for many people and as a result we are not benefiting from the technological advances, but society is using the technological advance to oust people from the work-market and put the remaining people under more duress. We actually have sold out to Mammon, regardless of what faith we have, and it is true that we can‘t serve both - God and Mammon - but have to choose.
If we see the various religions as expression of this need for holism and the use of epic stories, myth, mythology and analogy to transport very deep truths for which there is a deep feeling, something which ruminates in the depth of our soul, but for which there is no adequate language - as we experience in dreams - we may be able to see that spirituality, as the collective term for numerous and various religious traditions, is something which we desperately need in a world which is more and more a madhouse every day.
Whether three is the number of holism and whether spiritual practise is reduced to what we have come to see in religions around the world, is something we could discuss. What do you think?