What We Talk About When We Talk About Spirituality
It seems people often describe an intensely emotional experience as spiritual. This really bugs me: emotions are biological reactions based on how we interpret events. Reactions are happening on a electro-neuro-chemical-endocrine level. There's nothing spiritual about them. I think intensely pleasurable emotions are often described as spiritual by people because they want the experience to mean something. They want it marked as more important than other experiences. Our words fail us in our attempts at making meaning, so we take it to another level and call it spiritual.
What do we mean when we say we feel spiritual or have a spiritual experience? There's the idea of literal spirits: ghosts, demons, angels, shamanic animal spirits, and so forth. None of these have been proven real (or, perhaps more to the point, corporeal) beyond any doubt. And what do these spirits have to do with what we feel? Unless a person claims spirit possession, not much, I would say. There's the idea of spiritual as in religious ecstasy. But to me, that's no different than any other kind of emotion, since we have no evidence of the existence of the supernatural. The emotions brought about by religious rituals and activities are fueled by belief combined with hypnotic, repetitive actions. These "spiritual" emotions can arise in anyone practicing any religion, from convulsing spit-spraying Pentecostal fundies to Candomblé or Santorini trance rituals, to Sufism, to a "coven" of self-styled Wiccan priestesses or even a hiker taking in a gorgeous sunset from atop a mountain. The feeling of inner peace or calm is often described as spiritual, and I wonder why. Can we not feel inner peace and tranquility without assigning supernatural qualities to it? Why must we feel we have to say these feelings come from a an imaginary supernatural being and not from within ourselves? If the hiker at the top of the mountain was leading a blind man, would the blind man also have a "spiritual" experience? Somehow I doubt it. If the sighted hiker claimed he had a spiritual experience watching the sun set, nobody listening to him tell his tale would openly doubt him. It's as though people forget they are observing, that the barrier between the observer and the observed suddenly doesn't exist for them. Maybe this is what people mean when they say they felt as if they were "at one" with their surroundings or with other people. Not that they know that's what it means, but that's what's happening when they say it. When we experience love, we often say that is spiritual. Love is certainly complex, and the emotions we feel about it arise from a complex array of sources within us. These emotions form a whole, a totality we call love. But if there is no spirit world, no spirituality, then love can't be spiritual. Free of illusions about it, love can be what it really is in our lives: an emergent force that perpetuates friendship, procreation, compassion and kindness, which is for the greater good of a family, tribe, or all of humanity. Maybe all it comes down to is that I'm not spiritual, and so nothing for me is ever going to be spiritual. That doesn't mean I don't feel my breath taken away by beauty, or that I cannot feel the complex pleasure and pain of loving someone deeply while knowing all the while we're all mortal and someday will die. For a person who believes in the spiritual, anything can be spiritual. They're free to throw that word around, and I think they do so a little carelessly. But that's just me being picky about choosing the right words, as though I were a writer, or something. And of course I don't mean that they're profaning the spiritual, I mean that they're mistaking emotions for spirituality. I don't take drugs, but when I was young I did more than my fair share. Nowadays I like to have my mind as clear and as sharp as possible. But back then I believed psychedelics caused a spiritual awakening, opened the third eye. I long believed what some anthropologists now suppose: that psychedelic plant-induced visions were the basis of early human spirituality. Anybody who's ever dropped acid can see why: it seems like the skin of the universe is peeled off of everything, revealing underneath a crawling, writhing world of anthropomorphic faces and spirits. Suddenly everything has a face. Everything seems alive, imbued with its own spirit--spiritual. You feel like you're one with the world, resonating with it. A "primitive" human would think he or she was now living in the spirit world. Things didn't just happen, they happened with earth-shattering meaning and synchronicity. The mind is slowed down in some ways, sped up in others, and everything seems to sprout a million meaningful connections to everything else. And of course, you see some really trippy shit and it's totally mind-blowing. I felt like the trees were whispering to me like Tolkien's Ents. Grass waved and sang to me. Clouds in the sky exploded and re-exploded into wispy fragments over and over again. I felt like I had glimpsed the secret clockworks of the universe. In other words, I felt like I had a spiritual experience, just like an early shaman entering the spirit world to have a vision. It was a fantastic feeling. It was profound and beautiful, and I'll never forget it for as long as live. Later, I learned that the way LSD works is by eating away and reacting with the vitamin C in your brain, and so modifying how your nervous system works temporarily (that's probably not quite it exactly, but something like that--we used to drink orange juice before we tripped to heighten the experience but I didn't know why it worked for a long time). Learning this made be feel sad and disillusioned. I no longer believed my experience was spiritual, although it was still beautiful and profound and I wouldn't take it back for anything. I've also had my share of pseudo-spiritual moments in church. At the time, when I was making a confession because I felt exposed and wracked by shame & guilt, or when I felt like I was a part of something positive, I would have described my experiences as spiritual. Looking back on it now, what I feel is a little embarrassment as being so easily manipulated. Nothing spiritual about that at all (there's a fine line between marketing and preaching--a very fine line). Dr. Andrew Weil wrote an excellent book years ago, called The Natural Mind. In it, he talks about how human beings seem to have an innate need to seek out and experience alternate states of consciousness, if for nothing else than to perhaps break the monotony of a single mode of existence. In so doing, we come back to the normal mode of perception with new eyes, and he suggests this is necessary for our well-being (and why drug laws will never work). Maybe this helps explain somewhat why people want to constantly tether intense emotional experiences to spirituality. Look at how different Pentecostals are compared to, say, Buddhist monks. The first group rejoices in the emotional (they believe spiritual) release of shaking, thrashing, speaking in gibberish, fainting, and worse. The second group is the picture of grace and discipline. When a Buddhist (or whatever) monk experiences enlightenment, is it emotional? Who knows. People in both of these groups claim to be spiritual. One group freely confuses emotions with spirituality, while the other cleanly separates them. It's not that they wish to separate them, it's that they were never confounded together in the first place. So even if you don't think as I do that there are no gods anywhere for anyone, nothing supernatural whatsoever, Eastern religions at least give us a model where emotions are not confused with spirituality. I'm not saying Eastern religions are better than Western religions, because to me all religions are falsehoods. Spirituality is a discipline, a dedication, never-ending action, a practice. Spirituality is not rampant emotions running out of control. Emotions have nothing to do with it. I think if you're going to be "spiritual," then emotions are to be subjugated to the discipline of the spiritual, not the other way around. PS - I'm not here to tell you what to think or believe. I'm only telling you what I think and believe (after all, this is my personal blog). I'm not an expert in these things.
