In my last post I explained how the term "spirituality" (or "spiritual," or "spirit") has come to lack an essential meaning in our culture. In this post I will advocate that we need to return to the traditional meaning of the term.
It's admittedly a little odd for someone as deeply enmeshed in liberal religion as I am, and who believes that it is vital to bring reason to bear on the religious life, to be invoking a return to the traditional meaning of the term "spirituality." Most liberal religious people of my ilk threw that baby out with the mythical bathwater long ago - on the heels of the Materialist critique of religion in general and human nature in particular (see previous post). How, then, does somebody like me come to hold such a position?
To cut to the chase, one of the many things I've learned in my many years long spiritual practice and experience is that despite the fact that Materialism revealed much religious belief to be chaff, there still remains much wheat to be harvested in traditional religious systems. In other words, through my spiritual practice and experience I have learned that it is far from sound reasoning to reject traditional religious claims in toto. Indeed, the liberal religious penchant to do so flies in the face of the liberal religious insistence to bring reason to bear on the religious life. An honest, rational assessment of the situation will admit that the matter is infinitely more complicated than liberal religious people have hitherto been willing to admit.
For now, I want to use this post to highlight one way in which this is so. Specifically, I want to suggest, on the basis of my own spiritual practice and experience, that there is something meaningful in this traditional notion of "spirituality" referenced in traditional religious systems, despite the Materialist critique. More specifically, I want to suggest that there may be something to the traditional (religious) notion of human nature after all. Perhaps Descartes was right. Perhaps there is a "ghost in the machine" after all (see previous post). Maybe we've simply been missing it because of the limitations of the tools we use in our exploration of both ourselves and the cosmos. Metaphorically speaking, one can't measure the viscosity of water with a ruler. Likewise, one can't detect "spirit" by means of logic and the scientific method.
Of course this begs the question: What tools might one use to detect "spirit"? I will address that question in my next post. For now, I ask you merely to consider the possibility that one can know that traditional religious claims about the notion of "spirituality" are true. If so, the implications of this fact upon our modern notions of "spirituality" are very significant. For instance, as I mentioned in my last post, on the wide continuum of meaning of the term "spirituality" today, all understandings of the term conflate mental, emotional, and physical experiences into an understanding of "spirituality." These three categories (mental, emotional, and physical), however, comprise what in psychological terms is referred to as the "egoic" construct. They are the dimensions of the self we name when attempting to articulate what we are as human beings. Simplistically, "I am the summation of my thoughts, feelings, and sensations." But none of these dimensions of the self, taken either individually or collectively, comprise what traditional religious systems mean by "spirit"; that dimension of the self to which all traditional religious systems refer when speaking of our human nature.
Traditional religious systems tell us that there is another dimension to our humanness, which flies in the face of the variety of egoic understandings of "spirituality" at play in the religious world today. If this is the case, today's religious pursuit of spiritual understanding is far off the mark, never leaving the egoic field actually to discover the "spiritual" dimension. Indeed, this very tendency to mistake the egoic for the spiritual has served to damage and undermine the image and authority of today's spiritual teachers, not to mention religion in general, though this is another post for another time.
In sum, in line with the mystical teachings of traditional religious systems, I am arguing that the egoic is not the spiritual. In my next post I will further this argument by addressing what that other dimension of the self is and how we come to know it.
Two birds of beautiful plumage, comrades inseparable, live on the selfsame tree. One bird eats the fruit of pleasure and pain. The other looks on without eating. - Shvetashvatara Upanishad
Namaste,
Alex
It's admittedly a little odd for someone as deeply enmeshed in liberal religion as I am, and who believes that it is vital to bring reason to bear on the religious life, to be invoking a return to the traditional meaning of the term "spirituality." Most liberal religious people of my ilk threw that baby out with the mythical bathwater long ago - on the heels of the Materialist critique of religion in general and human nature in particular (see previous post). How, then, does somebody like me come to hold such a position?
To cut to the chase, one of the many things I've learned in my many years long spiritual practice and experience is that despite the fact that Materialism revealed much religious belief to be chaff, there still remains much wheat to be harvested in traditional religious systems. In other words, through my spiritual practice and experience I have learned that it is far from sound reasoning to reject traditional religious claims in toto. Indeed, the liberal religious penchant to do so flies in the face of the liberal religious insistence to bring reason to bear on the religious life. An honest, rational assessment of the situation will admit that the matter is infinitely more complicated than liberal religious people have hitherto been willing to admit.
For now, I want to use this post to highlight one way in which this is so. Specifically, I want to suggest, on the basis of my own spiritual practice and experience, that there is something meaningful in this traditional notion of "spirituality" referenced in traditional religious systems, despite the Materialist critique. More specifically, I want to suggest that there may be something to the traditional (religious) notion of human nature after all. Perhaps Descartes was right. Perhaps there is a "ghost in the machine" after all (see previous post). Maybe we've simply been missing it because of the limitations of the tools we use in our exploration of both ourselves and the cosmos. Metaphorically speaking, one can't measure the viscosity of water with a ruler. Likewise, one can't detect "spirit" by means of logic and the scientific method.
Of course this begs the question: What tools might one use to detect "spirit"? I will address that question in my next post. For now, I ask you merely to consider the possibility that one can know that traditional religious claims about the notion of "spirituality" are true. If so, the implications of this fact upon our modern notions of "spirituality" are very significant. For instance, as I mentioned in my last post, on the wide continuum of meaning of the term "spirituality" today, all understandings of the term conflate mental, emotional, and physical experiences into an understanding of "spirituality." These three categories (mental, emotional, and physical), however, comprise what in psychological terms is referred to as the "egoic" construct. They are the dimensions of the self we name when attempting to articulate what we are as human beings. Simplistically, "I am the summation of my thoughts, feelings, and sensations." But none of these dimensions of the self, taken either individually or collectively, comprise what traditional religious systems mean by "spirit"; that dimension of the self to which all traditional religious systems refer when speaking of our human nature.
Traditional religious systems tell us that there is another dimension to our humanness, which flies in the face of the variety of egoic understandings of "spirituality" at play in the religious world today. If this is the case, today's religious pursuit of spiritual understanding is far off the mark, never leaving the egoic field actually to discover the "spiritual" dimension. Indeed, this very tendency to mistake the egoic for the spiritual has served to damage and undermine the image and authority of today's spiritual teachers, not to mention religion in general, though this is another post for another time.
In sum, in line with the mystical teachings of traditional religious systems, I am arguing that the egoic is not the spiritual. In my next post I will further this argument by addressing what that other dimension of the self is and how we come to know it.
Two birds of beautiful plumage, comrades inseparable, live on the selfsame tree. One bird eats the fruit of pleasure and pain. The other looks on without eating. - Shvetashvatara Upanishad
Namaste,
Alex
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