Spiritual Spinoza

[Jeremy1952]

What extremely interests me is where Damasio stands, not Spinoza. I re-read the last chapter of the book in preparation for the chat, and I still don't quite get it. The best I can extract is that Damasio sees the feeling of spirituality as a real physical event in the brain, analogous to love or hate. What confuses me is what exactly this means, given the traditional correlation of "spiritual" and "god", now that we know "god" was an invention of our intellectually primitive forbears. Does this make spiritualism a vestigial mechanism, like xenophobia? An unfortunate relic of our past? But Damasio obviously doesn't see it that way, because he speaks of spiritual feelings as an important (and implies positive) part of the human experience.Maybe the answer is, spirituality is real (a real feeling), so do something positive with it; since we know "god" doesn't exist, open your mind to the awe of an eagle in flight. Experience the joy of life for the sake of being joyful, separate from the question of whether or not there is "really" anything to be joyful about. If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything. Daniel Dennett, 1984