Pure Brutality

[The Grand Nudger]

  In some cases this very issue can be a spiritual experience on its own. Like a hunter who is pointing his gun to a deer, suddenly realizing that he and the deer is one and thus being unable to shoot.

Google "buck fever" for the kind of experience your audience may be more familiar with.  Still, I like your idea of the hunters epiphany - and while I suspect that hunters experience more of the former than the latter both are real in any meaningful sense of the word.  As are any number of experiences, some of them deeply antithetical and logically incompatible with each other as truth statements binding upon reality, rather than the limited subset of the reality of experiences.

As it goes - "I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened".

Before the emergence and spread of Political Islam as an ideology (mostly in the 1960’s) the world was a more civilized place. See civility is a choice. So is other neurotic / narcissistic approaches that include both extreme forms of capitalism (like libertarianism for instance) and/or things like Political Islam and/or the socialist experience / Stalinism that maintained itself between 1917 and 1991.

There you go again.  Before the emergence and spread of political islam in the 6 or 7 hundreds ad the world was "a more peaceful place" too.  They're not doing islam wrong, you are - even if you're doing spirituality right, whatever you and deepak chopra think that is.  The thing that animates these movements...each and every one, explicitly, is the return to whatever passes for an islamic golden age in nutville.  Christianity is going through the same shit over here and has been over the same period.  Both groups are convinced that the trouble with people today ™ is their lack of true spirituality.  We are too materialistic today, and not open enough to a spiritual reality - unlike those people who lived in feudal systems or worse in the past - and that's chemical weapons grade irony, when you let it sink in.  People who uniformly believed that people were property (and often still do....) are supposed to be the exemplars of anti-materialist values in comparison.

Sure, though, islamic states are going through a period of regression at the moment, not because they've left their spiritual roots, but because there's a strong period of retrenchment going on rooted -in- those spiritual beliefs.