#22: spirituality

Now the holiday is upon us - I can detect it in my network here on LinkedIn. People have shut down the computer left for celebration and time to relax with friends and family (the select few and with corona compliant behavior). I think therefore it is appropriate with a little piece on spirituality. 

I am not religious far from it - I consider myself to be a scientific agnostic. This means that I do not believe in the divine, but still being open to facts proving me to be wrong. I have, when I was very young experienced a religious feeling. I was visiting B?rglum Abbey with my family - and In the church I got a weird sensation of being in touch with a spirit or some kind of energy - I remember it as being a cold sensation sending shivers down my back. In this moment I interpreted the experience as a connection to the history of the people who came before me and who lived in abbey hundred of years before I set my foot there. 

Having a religious feeling and being religious is not the same thing. I know I am not alone in this line of thinking, one of my professors in my early university studies in Science of Religion conveyed a similar experience and upholding the standpoint of the agnostic. It may be that having this experience or feeling a religious feeling is partly the reason why I am not a full blown atheist. 

Since then - and in my early academic pursuit - religion and spirituality have been something I was aware of. It has broadened my scope of thinking and understanding to study religion (from different perspectives) and to think about spirituality. Spirituality as a contemporary phenomenon is strongly linked to New Age (with core beliefs like that the universe consists of energies interpreted as love or concepts similar to karma from Buddhism). New Age is characterized by diverse groups and individual spiritual leaders, the proselytes of New Age are often people rejecting established world views or consider themselves seeking without finding the right answers in established religion. 

Why is this interesting for business and life? It is because - purpose - (as we touched upon in a previous post) has become so central to companies vision forming and leadership. And here I can detect a more personal and spiritual language for talking about the drivers of top executives. More and more executives are expressing, trying to or seeking a sort of calling. A professional calling is nothing new, we especially know this concept from the profession of medicine and the accompanying Hippocratic Oath. 

I think it is a good turn for CEO’s or others in power to consider their calling, having a sensitivity towards their own meaning creation and what they derive meaning from. Albeit it is a good turn there is a lack of suitable vocabulary to talk about this. The same holds true for concepts like intuition (which I also touched upon previously). We are simply not there, where we want the CEO or the Chair of The Board to refer to spiritual or metaphysical wisdom, when forming the vision and doing strategic planning. On the other hand the times we live in calls for new orientations, and I do not think referring to the last Ironman Triathlon will cut it either.