Spirituality without religion

[Bobbyj]

What do you think about it?

[DWill]

The only definition of spirituality that has made any sense to me comes from Jonathan Haidt's recent book, where he says that spirituality is the sense of awe at being within something much larger than oneself. So on that basis, I'd say not only that spirituality doesn't depend on religion, but that religion sometimes fails to be spiritual.

[geo]

I agree with Haidt's definition. Spirituality is usually seen as an aspect of spirit as opposed to something material or physical. But spirit itself is such a nebulous word, referencing something that doesn't actually exist (at least not that we know of). However, the sense of awe is something real.

It seems to me that we have a choice what we do with that emotional sense of awe. Certainly some people translate it into a reverential belief in a supernatural being, but that's making a leap where none is really needed. Why can't it be just a feeling? A spiritual feeling.

[Randy Kadish]

To me spirituality is being connected to all that is good in the world - e.g. nature, love, art, and yes, religious thoughts/ideas. But a person can experience spirituality without religion.

Randy

[MaryLupin]

Have you guys read the <a href="http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt07 ... Edge-Haidt article</a>?

Here's a quote from the article: "In what follows I will take it for granted that religion is a part of the natural world that is appropriately studied by the the methods of science. Whether or not God exists (and as an atheist I personally doubt it), religiosity is an enormously important fact about our species. There must be some combination of evolutionary, developmental, neuropsychological, and anthropological theories that can explain why human religious practices take the various forms that they do, many of which are so similar across cultures and eras. I will also take it for granted that religious fundamentalists, and most of those who argue for the existence of God, illustrate the first three principles of moral psychology (intuitive primacy, post-hoc reasoning guided by utility, and a strong sense of belonging to a group bound together by shared moral commitments)."

I think his 2012 book might be interesting to read and take apart based on his "there must be" assumptions about how we have come to be this way.

[Robert Tulip]

Welcome back Mary, long time no see.

Spirituality without religion is often seen as an oxymoron, like breath without lungs. And yet, many people find personal spirituality attractive because the degraded nature of institutional religion is most definitely not spiritual, but exploits popular spirituality for political purposes.

The question this raises is whether an institutional spirituality is possible, or whether the process of community consensus inevitably destroys the fragile flower of the numinous.
The very meaning of religion, a rebinding to the ultimate, illustrates that authentic spirituality should be at its focus, as the vision of truth. But such vision is highly contested, given that most religious people believe things that are not true.

My own view is that in the medium term, spirituality is only sustainable through a corporate community expression. As well, I consider that Christianity expresses profound truths about human life on earth, but these truths are so painful that they have been hidden and forgotten behind a comforting veneer of what Kahneman calls cognitive ease. The Biblical description* of Jesus Christ as speaking as with a tongue on fire illustrates a vision of integrity, but these days such a vision is hard to separate from fanaticism. So people prefer to quarantine spirituality within a private realm. The problem is that the private inevitably escapes into the public, and the church then has the difficult task of articulating a sense of common purpose.

The phenomenology of spirit, assessed as real observable, finds that spirit is always located within language. A thing is what it is, but it is also what it is for us, related through appearance. This relation is formulated as concept, and provides the context for the meaning of spirit as conceptual relationship. Often such relations are inchoate, as when people cannot find words to express love, and poetry and philosophy are needed to find words for the feeling. A concept has a precarious existence, relying entirely on human understanding. And yet, a concept can persist through time in ways that a material object or person simply cannot. When concepts touch on a perceived eternal meaning, something that is true for ever regardless of circumstances, they enframe the human idea of contact with the divine, rebinding with the ultimate. This is entirely the intended purpose of religion, to express authentic spiritual connection.

* Actually I am mixing up Bob Dylan's Its Alright Ma I'm Only Bleeding with the mouth sword lines from Revelation.

[MaryLupin]

Welcome back Mary, long time no see.

Thanks Robert.

I'm only going to address one aspect of your post. Not ignoring the earlier statements, just wanting to focus on what you say about language and concepts.

The phenomenology of spirit, assessed as real observable, finds that spirit is always located within language. A thing is what it is, but it is also what it is for us, related through appearance. This relation is formulated as concept, and provides the context for the meaning of spirit as conceptual relationship. Often such relations are inchoate, as when people cannot find words to express love, and poetry and philosophy are needed to find words for the feeling. A concept has a precarious existence, relying entirely on human understanding. And yet, a concept can persist through time in ways that a material object or person simply cannot. When concepts touch on a perceived eternal meaning, something that is true for ever regardless of circumstances, they enframe the human idea of contact with the divine, rebinding with the ultimate. This is entirely the intended purpose of religion, to express authentic spiritual connection.

The experience of "spirit" or "eternal meaning" can be formulated as a linguistic concept but if you follow the work of recent embodied philosophy, it is clear that this linguistic formulation (conceptual relationship) is a late-comer based on a somatic concept far prior to linguistic formulation. An example that is often used is "grasping". An infant learns to grasp an object. The process of the body's movements, the feelings involved and the results generate a somatic concept. The term "grasping" piggy-backs on that bodily logic and so we can understand a more abstract form of the same process. It is my body's understanding and logic of grasping that allows my to mentally, and then linguistically grasp a situation, idea, problem, etc. The same satisfaction (that is part of the somatic logic/process an infant gets from successfully grasping and then mouthing the block) is the phenomenology of spirit for an adult doing the very same thing with a new idea. So it's not that the relations are inchoate so much as bodily metaphors are at best an approximation for grappling with new forms and situations. These bodily metaphors (such as grasping) can be translated to non-material cases (as when we grasp an idea) but other metaphors can also be substituted, sometimes with tremendous learning potential. For example, I can also nail and idea. I can drown it. I can absorb it. I can walk it out. I can run with it.

Each of our body's (many, many) logics can be utilized in this way. The idea of something being eternal probably stems from an in-built bodily logic called object permanence. We know (as do many other animals) that if a mouse runs behind a rock it doesn't just vanish. The cat knows that. It doesn't need a linguistic concept for that to be true. It has a somatic one. As do we. What we do is use the same logic to think about the experience of self. However, unlike the mouse, a self is just construction that switches off when we sleep, or are unconscious etc. But we are invested in having one, so we seek a logic that will allow it to continue. Object permanence works. But it doesn't make it true. So I can't agree that with your assessment of the purpose of religion or spirituality. I agree that it exists, but it may just be, i.e. have no intrinsic purpose. But that's something else entirely so I'll not write to it in this post.

BTW, like your poetry.

[Robert Tulip]

The experience of "spirit" or "eternal meaning" can be formulated as a linguistic concept but if you follow the work of recent embodied philosophy, it is clear that this linguistic formulation (conceptual relationship) is a late-comer based on a somatic concept far prior to linguistic formulation. An example that is often used is "grasping". An infant learns to grasp an object. The process of the body's movements, the feelings involved and the results generate a somatic concept. The term "grasping" piggy-backs on that bodily logic and so we can understand a more abstract form of the same process. It is my body's understanding and logic of grasping that allows me to mentally, and then linguistically grasp a situation, idea, problem, etc.

This example opens the problem of what we mean by spirit. All valid concepts, including spiritual concepts, are grounded in their relation to material reality or pure logic. Your example of grasping illustrates how all particular examples serve to enable us to construct a universal idea, a concept in which all instances share. This universal idea can be characterised in this instance as 'the spirit of grasping'. But once we have the universal definition of grasping, it then takes on a life of its own, through relation to cultural motifs.

The same satisfaction (that is part of the somatic logic/process an infant gets from successfully grasping and then mouthing the block) is the phenomenology of spirit for an adult doing the very same thing with a new idea.

I'm really not sure how phenomenology of spirit can be understood like that. I would rather say that we observe all the different instances of grasping, and then distill their common meaning. It seems that your method here of using physical infantile experience as the unconscious foundation for the meaning of a 'spiritual' concept only addresses one part of the source of the full idea.

So it's not that the relations are inchoate so much as bodily metaphors are at best an approximation for grappling with new forms and situations. These bodily metaphors (such as grasping) can be translated to non-material cases (as when we grasp an idea) but other metaphors can also be substituted, sometimes with tremendous learning potential. For example, I can also nail an idea. I can drown it. I can absorb it. I can walk it out. I can run with it.

My view is that spiritual ideas obtain their cultural resonance from the way they reveal archetypal symbols. The more pervasive the archetype, the more powerful the symbol. But that means these metaphors you give from ordinary experience are only a part of the process of forming spiritual concepts.

Each of our body's (many, many) logics can be utilized in this way. The idea of something being eternal probably stems from an in-built bodily logic called object permanence.

Deriving the sense of the eternal from bodily logic does seem rather reductive to me. I prefer to see the imagination of the eternal as different in kind rather than in degree from ordinary temporal observation. For example many cultures perceive the sun as eternal, because it has been the same throughout history. But then we symbolise the sun (for example in the Christ archetype) as connecting us to an ultimate eternal reality. That process seems to me rather different from what you call bodily logic.

We know (as do many other animals) that if a mouse runs behind a rock it doesn't just vanish. The cat knows that. It doesn't need a linguistic concept for that to be true. It has a somatic one. As do we. What we do is use the same logic to think about the experience of self. However, unlike the mouse, a self is just construction that switches off when we sleep, or are unconscious etc. But we are invested in having one, so we seek a logic that will allow it to continue.

This raises the rather complicated question of the spirituality of animals. Yes, animals have personality and identity, and therefore what we can call soul. But animals lack language, the capacity to represent perception by symbol. This is a decisive human trait that it seems to me makes human spirituality different in kind rather than degree from the spirit inherent in nature and in animals. I don't agree that the self is just a construction. Perhaps that is true of the ego, but it is not true of the id. Per Novalis' translation of Heraklitus, 'character is fate'. This aphorism points to a deeper continuity of self than as something merely imagined.

Object permanence works. But it doesn't make it true. So I can't agree with your assessment of the purpose of religion or spirituality. I agree that it exists, but it may just be, i.e. have no intrinsic purpose. But that's something else entirely so I'll not write to it in this post.

How I see the purpose of spirituality is to connect us to ultimate reality, to comprehend how we are surrounded by eternity, to find the path with a heart. That makes spirit essential to the task of articulating an intrinsic purpose for human life, conceived as speaking the good of the future, in terms of how human life can flourish on our planet.

BTW, like your poetry.

Thanks Mary, I haven't written any poetry for many years, and can't recall the last time anyone expressed an interest. Most of my poems are actually songs, as I rather feebly recorded at purevolume.

[Interbane]

The idea of something being eternal probably stems from an in-built bodily logic called object permanence. We know (as do many other animals) that if a mouse runs behind a rock it doesn't just vanish.

I'm not sure that newborns grasp the idea of object permanence, though they acquire it before they acquire speech. Perhaps not in-built as you say, but not reliant on language either. I could be wrong, however. I'm enjoying reading this conversation, keep it up.

[MaryLupin]

I'm not sure that newborns grasp the idea of object permanence, though they acquire it before they acquire speech. Perhaps not in-built as you say, but not reliant on language either. I could be wrong, however. I'm enjoying reading this conversation, keep it up.

Hey Interbane. Glad you're still around. Missed your posts. OK, so there's still ongoing research on the development of object permanence. It used to be assumed (Piaget) that human infants learnt OP after a certain stage of cognitive development had been met, but since the 90s there's been some research showing that infants as young as 3 months exhibit this understanding. There's also been some research on humans and dogs (both social species) that show that social/facial cues may override or cloud what we are seeing with respect to OP behaviours. I no longer know where I read this, but I have the idea that there has been a suggestion that OP might be multi-centered in the way counting/numbers are. So many animals have number-sense of something like 1, 2, many. Humans have that too of course. But when we count, or work with equations, or other kinds of more abstract number ideas, then we use a different skill set and a different set of neurological areas. If this is the case I think we could argue that the base skill (1, 2, many) is likely a hard-wired ability where the ability to extend that into the development of abstract thinking with numbers (223 as a concept, for example) is something like language - we are born with an ability to "hear" or "recognize" the abstraction when it is used in the environment and then our brains wire as we are increasingly exposed but we are all hardwired to communicate in ways non-linguistic.

Make sense?