There's a lot of talk about spirituality and consciousness/enlightenment increasing worldwide. I wondered if this was supported by google statistics.
Here are some searches I did, interestingly searches for the term "spiritual" and "spirituality" have decreased over the past few years:
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Spirituality
But on the other hand "spiritual enlightenment" has increased considerably:
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Spiritual awakening
I'm not sure we can take the idea seriously that there is global awakening until more terms like this are used more often.
My gut instinct on "spirituality," though I am more than sympathetic to what's implied and desired, is nothing more than what happens when a society becomes overly comfortable and affluent. In other words, I actually believe spirituality - no quotes - is born more of hard and difficult times, when food and normal resources are lacking, when fears are forced to be faced. I don't want this, exactly, by the way. But I'm pretty confident that as long as (Western) society is in no danger physically, direct or food/water supply, then the term takes on a whole new (diluted) meaning that probably doesn't mean what it should. In other words, I think word phrasing on google is almost entirely useless in determining such a thing.
Here's how we might determine spirituality:
What would be our reaction if the grocery store and water company shut down tomorrow? . . . and we didn't know when they'd resume business? This would be a marker of spirituality . . . not how many times Western society read articles on "spirituality."
With these things in mind, I would be more inclined to wager that society as a whole has placed too much emphasis on the physical body and life as we know it (even through (or especially through) well meaning progressive ethics), but that "spirituality" has declined: we're less likely to be able to relinquish the body or comforts than several hundred years ago . . . I believe people have equated "spiritual" progress with greater material abundance and physical earthly equality and that that's probably more or less an error. For all we know (or I would imagine), greater physical earthly
inequality might very well produce greater spiritual strength.