The reason for suffering is desire, said the Buddha. What is desire? There can be little doubt that a lot of people walk this earth like pent-up knots of desire, frustration and confusion, glazed with fear. Desire which isn't realized creates fantasies, some times secret and dangerous fantasies, which rhymes in a backward chicken-and-egg kind of way with the Buddhistic tenet that the reason for desire is illusion. It is my belief that a lack of spiritual direction in people will create an abstract hole in the soul, it will turn them into a hungry ghost, filled with an insatiable desire for just about anything. Addiction. Food, drugs, religion, sex; anything that they can get their hands on. Of course, being the capitalist society that we are, this is called consumption and lies at the very bottom of the foundations for our economy. Consumers are what makes the world go round nowadays. 

By spirituality I don't mean religion. Religion is the well nigh opposite of spirituality. Real spirituality isn't hidden, it's nature. Wild and wonderful. It's all around you at all times. The reason why so many can't spot the bloody obvious is because they are insane. There's no other, proper name for it. The human ability to think and create abstractions of the mind has created a situation where we aren't really able to perceive the world around us without "explaining" it anymore. Philosophically speaking, we have definitely left reality and are now living in a collective dream of our own making. This is a very strange situation. The human monkey had so much talent... but now it looks as if we're doomed. Is there a happy ending? Time will show.