The Nature of Spirituality

Though most people assume being “spiritual” entails being “religious,” this isn’t a necessary connection. When people talk about a spiritual life, they point to someone who has his mind on higher things, who is not obsessed with property or gain, and who is passionately devoted to a belief about the meaning of life and the path to happiness. But this describes any devoted philosopher. When people talk about a spiritual “experience” they point to the combined sensation of awe, inner peace, and enlightenment, which culminates in a reverence for life and nature, and a sincere self-reflection about these things and oneself. And yet that, too, is the experience of any true philosopher. I live a spiritual life, because I live a self-examined life of the mind, I care deeply about my beliefs, I care more about my ideals and human happiness than about material things, and I experience awe, inner peace, and enlightenment when I fathom human minds and the natural world.

As Sagan would put it:

"Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual."

This is not an uncommon sentiment among scientists, proving that spirituality is not exclusive to what we normally regard as “religious” life, nor does the term always entail something supernatural.

Meditation as a secular path to spiritual enlightenment is perhaps unequaled, and ought to be mastered by all. It does have beneficial effects on health and self-understanding. But the most common path to godless spirituality is through an appreciation of science: by truly taking in the awe of nature and her complexity, many a scientist has had a spiritual awakening that had nothing to do with God, but everything to do with profound reverence and amazement in the face of tremendous beauty, fearsome power, and the unimaginable depth and complexity of space and time. It sparks the realization of how tiny and insignificant we are, yet how wonderful we are despite this. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6w2M50_Xdk

We must recognize that experiences we classify as spiritual or religious exist as a subset of ordinary psychological experiences, and not as something separate and different from them. This is not because we are obliged to assume there is nothing supernatural or special that corresponds to spiritual experiences. Rather, it is because before we can reach any such conclusion at all we are obliged to see there is no inherent way to distinguish ordinary psychological events from spiritual events. Because they originate within the same domain (our mental life), the possibility always remains that they are merely different aspects of the same thing. They might not correspond to anything outside of our own, private mental existence.

I think the evidence is clearly in favor of the natural, internal cause, and not of any transcendent, supernatural cause. Religious claims often seem to be believed in more for their personal worth in answering the human need for an ultimate meaning to life than for their logical or empirical merit. While there are many contradictory yet equally ‘real’ spiritual traditions, one thing that appears common to every spiritual experience is whether it is (or can be) interpreted in some way that bears on an “ultimate meaning to life.” And if an experience, however interpreted, accomplishes well the goal of answering our need for meaning, then this will matter more to someone than whether that belief is consistent, justified, or true.

Yet that leap comes with the false assumption that no other answer is as satisfying, and ‘therefore’ no other answer should even be considered. This would explain why true believers not only resist attempts to challenge their beliefs, they are often impervious to them. This kind of behavior, which seems inexplicably irrational, appears at least explicable when we recognize that the religiously devout are often interested in things more important to them than the truth—such as an ultimate meaning to life. Since the personal, emotional benefits provided by spiritual beliefs do not depend on those beliefs being true, their truth becomes irrelevant in practice.

So, for example, while Buddhism and Christianity each provide a supernatural explanation for our ills, and an equally supernatural solution, within all this lies a purely practical belief system that not only provides an ultimate meaning to life, but attempts to produce a greater balance of peace and happiness by providing both a moral standard and a reason to live up to it. But none of this has been worked out scientifically, or tested empirically, and all of these benefits are gained merely by the claims being believed, and not by their actually being true, which is quite unlike scientific claims (much less technological ones), where benefits are usually gained only when we believe in what is true, while definite hazards are often created by believing in falsehoods.

It seems clear that spiritual experiences (even godless ones) are at least potentially beneficial, contributing a useful and necessary quality to human life. No matter what religious spin they are given, they often produce emotional harmony and contentment, clarity of thought and perspective, joy and humility. And as this is an emotion, we can assess whether it is an accurate appraisal of its object. If its object is our self and our relation to the universe, its appraisal seems quite correct to me. And this benefit can be reliably gained from the experiences alone, without any conclusions of an objective nature being drawn from them. But when we add to the raw experience, when we use the inner emotion as a “proof” of something about the universe independently of us, the danger arises that we will mislead ourselves down a false path, a path that may be harmful or destructive to us or others, or that might distract us from even more important and wonderful things.

And we know this can happen. Many Islamists use their spiritual experiences to justify mass murder and the inhumane treatment of women, thus corrupting the very joy their spiritual life brings them, translating it into hatred rather than the love and contentment that they would have settled on otherwise. Likewise, many Christians use their experiences to justify slavish obedience to a human tradition or a book (like the Bible or the Book of Mormon), which contains commandments not healthy for humans or their civilization, and lacks a great deal of crucial human wisdom—and what useful wisdom it does have is often buried and obscured in symbol and metaphor, or simply bad prose, and thus all too often missed or misunderstood. Though Buddhism and Taoism are more in touch with human nature and human needs, more easily channeling their spiritual experience into a genuine life of love and contentment, they still promote many false beliefs, such as reincarnation, or the evils of technology—or impossible goals, such as the abandonment of self and desire.

Two conclusions should be taken from this:

First, even as a matter of principle, theories about the world outside our minds can arise from spiritual experience. For this is true of all states of consciousness. A mere random whim can produce a theory that could just happen to be right, and this is even more likely when the whim comes from a mind that is thoroughly steeped in the relevant facts and regularly contemplating them. And in a meditative state, your thought can sometimes be clearer than ever, and gain access to information inside you that was not being accessed before, or perceive patterns previously missed. But all such theories are no different than any others: they must still be tested logically and empirically before they can be assigned any knowledge value. We cannot declare the truth of a theory right out of the door, based on a purely subjective insight. That is a bad method, as we all know.

Second, it is vain to appeal to how a spiritual experience transforms someone’s life as a ‘proof’ that a religion is true. Life transformation results whenever anyone pays more attention to an ideal than they do to the details of life, it happens whenever anyone has a natural emotional experience like I describe above. It does not matter whether that ideal is real or not, or how that experience is interpreted—hence Kamikaze pilots, Islamic suicide bombers, Marxist fanatics, the Heaven’s Gate cult, Jonestown, stories of powerful personal changes through Scientology, all these involve experiencing the transformation of lives every bit as much as any other, such as Born Again Christians or Buddhists describe.