What Spirituality Means?

20 Oct, 2024

Outline

• Exploring other modalities of spirituality
• A unified view of spirituality

Exploring other modalities of spirituality

I titled this series "Spirituality", but given the contents of previous posts, it might well have been titled "Buddhism".

Why "spirituality"? A short answer is that Buddhism is only part of my spiritual influences, even if an important one. In fact, the spiritual seed that empowered me to lean into Buddhism was Catholic.

"They flew"

In my senior year of college, a dinner seminar prompted me to take spirituality more seriously, as another subject of inquiry.

During dinner, National Book Award-winning historian Carlos Eire talked about visiting a church in a country I've now forgotten. A nun, showing him around, pointed to a window and said, that was where St Joseph of Cupertino levitated¹. She was not at all abashed. Many centuries ago, St Joseph levitated at that window, as surely as the window had been there.

Eire was taken aback. As a Catholic and scholar, he was no foreigner to miracles, but part of his rigorous training as a historian of religion was to treat miracles only as symbolic or metaphorical. Miracles extended too far beyond common sense to be taken as credible. However, the nun's statement as a matter of fact haunted him for forty years.

It culminated in the book, They Flew. In the best way he knew how, as a historian, he took up the question: did they fly?

That miracles could possibly be real had never occurred to Eire. He'd imbibed unquestioningly the practice of privileging the material and discrediting the spiritual. To do otherwise was crazy! As a good scholar, though, he recognized dogma when he saw one. He challenged it. He subjected it to inquiry. If he treated spiritual claims seriously, like any other historical claim, what would happen?

A unified view of spirituality

Spiritual and Material

I frequently thought back to that conversation with Eire as I embarked on my spiritual journey. My life had a bias towards the material, sensible and physical. I thought of the goals I would achieve, the places I would go, the tangible facts in life I could point to. Meanwhile, my mind twisted itself whenever I considered the spiritual, becoming ambiguous and shifty, self-conscious of the social rejection that treating such topics seriously might bring. I named this series "Spirituality" because I wanted to see clearly and speak lucidly about this subject, as an equal realm of inquiry.

The material is physical, worldly, tangible; the spiritual is non-physical, intuitive and subtle. For example, clothes, wealth, profession, possessions and food are material. Mind, energy, phenomena, relationships and metaphysics are spiritual².

In that sense, we are all spiritual, even if we might not put it in these terms. If you've ever strove for an ideal, that's spiritual. If you've ever thought about your mind, dreams or purpose in life, that's spiritual. It's just that you may have quickly subjected them to the materialist lens, couching them in tangible, concrete terms. Empathy, generosity and meditation are spiritual. They aren't only valid in terms of material goods they could bring you. They are spiritually good, too. They put you in more positive states of mind. They help you look at and relate to the world. That's spiritually good. You have been spiritual before, and spirituality is a valid lens to take.

Part of writing this series is to demonstrate the spiritual aspects of day-to-day life, so that we may have more balance between the two realms. Against a backdrop of dogmatic materialist views, it's worthwhile to pay attention to the spiritual. There are material aspects to spiritual life, just like there are spiritual aspects to material life. The goal is not to turn a blind eye to one of them.

Continuing an Interest in Philosophy and Psychology

If I were to trace the seeds of my spiritual journey, I have many spiritual influences. Eire spoke of Catholic miracles. I started studying spirituality after being inspired at a Buddhist retreat. Growing up, I've had a casual interest in astrology and tarot. I now learn about Yoga and chakras. In the same way that we have Bohr, Dalton and Schrödinger models describing the atom, I take each and every spiritual model seriously. There are confluences and divergences, but they describe the same reality. In these posts, I am also trying to describe the same reality in my own way.

It's very easy to associate spirituality with "religion", since religion is one of today's largest sources of spirituality. However, I find it helpful to think of spirituality as (an extension of) philosophy and psychology, with religion as a mode of spirituality. After all, it proposes a worldview–philosophy–and provides insights into what produces long-term well-being–psychology. I like this frame as it balances the spiritual and material for me. Spirituality is philosophy and psychology; philosophy and psychology are spiritual.

I hope this series helped you identify and notice the spiritual aspects in your life. Writing this series has helped me organize and clarify my understanding. If I'm lucky, it might even have increased your spiritual understanding and well-being too!

Thank you for coming along this journey with me :)

(See Parts 1, 2.1a, 2.1b, 2.1c, 2.1d, and 2.2.)