Spirituality

This entry was originally posted on 13 May 2003 at 1:25 p.m. The author's note that appears in the original was removed and some minor edits were made, but the remainder of the text is unchanged.

Two of my closest friends are atheists. One of them studied English and, later, design/communications, and worked out a strictly logical moral code by which to live. The other studied music and biology, has a very organic view of death, and a sort of live-and-let-live attitude. I tend to think of the second one as being very spiritual, whether or not he realizes it.

The first one (the logical one) once told me that he'd like to be thought of as spiritual. I couldn't picture it. "Extremely moral," i told him, "but i just don't think of you as spiritual." His reply was that there needed to be a better (read "non-religious") definition of spirituality that captured the secular aspects of it. Now, i'm not a religious person. If you've followed this journal with any regularity, you might have picked up on the fact that i'm an ex-Catholic who currently does not belong to (or believe in) any organized religion. I have my own beliefs, and they don't involve the Judeo-Christian God--or any other anthropomorphic characterization of the divine (e.g., "higher power," "divine mother," "goddess," etc.). So i said, "I don't think of spirituality in terms of religion. And i still don't think of you as a spiritual person."

He grumbled something and dropped the subject.

I've been thinking about the concept of spirituality ever since. Don't get me wrong: it's not that i don't respect that friend; i hold him in rather high regard. I'm impressed that he could pick up the works of a certain notorious philosopher of ethics (who will remain nameless), work out a logically coherent moral code, and live by it, more or less. That takes a certain amount of critical thinking and discipline that clash terribly with much of our "cultural" teaching in the US (that's another entry--one about individualism that i've been thinking about for weeks and is way overdue). But the point is, adherence to a moral code, no matter how stringent, is not, in and of itself, spiritual. It can be, but it isn't necessarily so.

For a few weeks i struggled to determine just what it is that i think of as "spiritual." I consulted various websites, most of which defined spirituality in terms of religion. Obviously, this didn't provide me with what i was looking for. The sites that talked about spirituality without mentioning religion all talked about its root in the word "spirit," which connotes a dualist mentality. This didn't quite satisfy me either, as i don't think one needs to be a dualist in order to be spiritual. I tried searching on the term "secular spirituality" and found a few sites that blasted the notion that spirituality can be separate from religion. I also found a link to site called Freethinking Spiritual Wonderment, which no longer seems to exist, but which provided me (in cached form, thanks to Google) the following:

"In the practice of Freethinking Spiritual Wonderment, the word "spiritual" refers to those thoughts, feelings, sensations, intuitions, and experiences which increase our awareness of the reality that we are fundamentally inter-connected to all other living beings, and to our environment. Equally, those thoughts, feelings, sensations, intuitions, and experiences, which challenge the illusion of us being separate from all other living beings and our environment, are also spiritual in nature."

A little more digging turned up a site that must be the descendant of the FSW one (based on URLs and such, thanks again to Google)--The Secular Journey. There i found a section similar to the other one, in their section on language, and nestled in that page was another passage that seems to reflect and expand on the first:

"The word spiritual however, is also commonly used when we refer to those experiences which are awe-inspiring; those experiences which evoke a sense of transcendence beyond the limits of our own individual egos; those experiences which despite being fleeting, have profound and lasting effects upon how we experience ourselves, and upon who we are; those experiences, while often not intellectual or emotional, which can prompt a immense barrage of both thoughts and feelings and new awareness; those experiences which asks us to re-evaluate the impact of our behaviors and encourages us to grow."

Although some may brush these words off with a pfft and a shake of the head as silly or New Age, i think they capture a large part of what i mean by "spirituality."

Wanting a bit more, i posted the question to the World's End forum at the Neil Gaiman Message Board, one of my longtime haunts on the web. The thread is titled "What is spirituality?" and it produced a wide range of responses. Although people generally agreed with one another, no two definitions were the same--more proof of the concept's mutability. I had originally intended to quote some of the responses here, but i think that doing so without the context of the rest of the thread would not do the ideas justice. So take a second and read the thread--there are about 23 posts to it, all fairly brief, and all worth reading carefully.

One idea that stands out in the thread (and that seems to be shared by The Happy Nihilist, Melancolía, and gaist) is that spirituality is something intrinsic to all people, something that defines people when all other influences are removed, the innermost qualities of a person. It reminds me of a phrase from a song--"reaching out to touch our own being"--we spend so much of our time looking to others for the path when, in reality what we're looking for is not a path at all, but something buried within.

But there's still something that i need to understand about spirituality, something that explains why i think of the one friend as spiritual, and not the other. And i think it's this: Spirituality is one's understanding of the fact that all things are interconnected in curious and complex ways; these interconnections inspire humility, awe, and reverence. Knowing oneself is probably a huge part of this--once a person knows the self, that person is free to understand just how he or she belongs to the web of interconnections.

Maybe it works like this:

• Once a person can tune out the environment and create stillness, he or she begins to sense the underlying truth, these little whispers.
• Once a person can hear the whispers in the stillness, he or she begins to understand the self.
• Once a person can still the voices, he or she is open to clarity and understanding.
• And once a person has attained clarity and understanding, he or she can then view the environment again from this new perspective (think Neo at the end of the first Matrix film, where he sees the walls and people around him in code).

"Reaching out to touch our own being" in reverse, i guess.

Thing is, even by this definition, spirituality is still slippery. Or maybe just flexible. But this is a good thing: it means that it can manifest itself in any number of ways--through religion, art, music, science, literature, whatever. As an evolutionarily primitive species (in the literal sense--a primitive species is one that isn't adapted to any particular niche, and is thus able to survive just about anywhere), and as one that has a wide range of mental experiences, we need that kind of flexibility.

I think this is a definition that i can live with. And it's one that i think explains why i think of my one friend as spiritual--i've seen him react to some musical passages with a certain reverence. It also explains why i don't think of the other as spiritual at all--he's very logical and very moral, but he shows no sign of humility, no awe, no reverence for anything. He's critical and skeptical of everything. That isn't to say that he doesn't appreciate things; he just doesn't connect to them in a spiritual way.

I'm not sure if he would agree with me, but i can live with that.