What do people mean when they say, "I am spiritual not
religious?" According to Wikipedia:
·
Historically, the words religious and spiritual
have been used synonymously to describe all the various aspects of the concept
of religion. Gradually, the word spiritual came to be associated with the
private realm of thought and experience while the word religious came to be
connected with the public realm of membership in a religious institution with
official denominational doctrines."
As such, "spirituality" has become synonymous with
"what works for me." The spiritual person aims at authenticity and
genuine encounter rather than a set of sterile doctrines, which they experience
as coercive and artificially imposed by external authorities.
In Mama Lola: A Voodoo
Priestess in Brooklyn, Anthropologist Karen McCarthy Brown confesses her
attraction to Voodoo as experiential and non-coercive:
·
No Haitian—certainly not [Voodoo Priestess]
Alourdes—has ever asked me if I ‘believe’ in Vodoo or if I have set aside the
religious commitments and understandings that come from my childhood and
culture. Alourdes’ approach is, instead, pragmatic: “You just got to try. See
if it works for you.” The choice of relinquishing my worldview or adopting
another in its entirety has therefore never been at issue. (10)
Here, Brown expresses a common sentiment among those who are
embracing spirituality. It is not about truth but about experience and the now.
In Soul Retrieval,
Sandra Ingerman, a shaman, expresses the same sentiments:
·
As you read this book and wonder whether or not
what I am talking about is real, I ask you not to enter into a battle between
the right brain [reason] and left brain [intuition]. Simply read the material
and experience it!... Does the information that comes from the shamanic journey
work? Does the information make positive changes in a person’s life? If so, who
cares if we are making it up? (3)
We want results, now! Doctrine doesn’t seem to deliver as
quickly as the spiritual realm. In The
Secret Ways of the Lakota, Black Elk, a Sioux shaman states, “You don’t
have to wait for five years…The spirit comes and takes me somewhere.”
However, critical questions are seldom asked about the
nature of the experience. In Drawing Down the Moon, the late spiritist,
Margo Adler, affirmatively quoted another “spiritist”:
·
It seems like a contradiction to say that I have
a certain subjective truth; I have experienced the Goddess, and this is my
total reality. And yet I do not believe that I have the one, true, right, and
only way. Many people cannot understand how I find Her a part of my reality and
accept the fact that your reality might be something else. But for me, this is
in no way a contradiction, because I am aware that my reality and my
conclusions are a result of my unique genetic structure, my life experience and
my subjective feelings…This recognition that everyone has different experiences
is a fundamental keystone to Paganism; it’s the fundamental premise that
whatever is going on out there is infinitely more complex than I can ever
understand. And that makes me feel very good.
For this unnamed spiritist, her “subjective feelings” take
precedence over all else, even over understanding. Why this disconnect between
mind and heart? Adler explained:
·
They had become Pagans because they could be
themselves and act as they chose, without what they felt were medieval notions of
sin and guilt. Others wanted to participate in rituals rather than observe
themselves.
Experience is non-coercive. No one can say that your
experience is wrong. It places no guilt-inducing demands on the spiritual
practitioner that serious moral thinking might impose. At least, that’s the
hope. Instead, it is possible that the more we live in opposition to our
conscience, the more we will oppose and detest other sources of authority and
tradition.
Adler argued that plurality of experience and lifestyle is
preferable to a singular set of truths:
·
Polytheism is… characterized by plurality… and
is eternally in unresolvable conflict with social monotheism, which in its
worst form is fascism and in its less destructive forms is imperialism,
capitalism, feudalism and monarchy.”
If there is one God, there is no choice. This God then is
necessarily the author of a singular set of truths and moral codes to which we must
conform. As Adler maintained, for the spiritual person, monotheistic truth is
experienced as fascistic, imperialistic, and feudalistic, depriving the
spiritual person of choice and their self-centered universe. Monotheism is the
anti-thesis of the instant gratification of the “me generation” and the “now
generation.”
However, the existence of objective and unchanging truths is
the bedrock of science and of all
learning. Without these truths, there can be no learning, just experiencing.
Should we then suppose that spirituality should be absolutely bereft of
objective truths?
What happens when spirituality is divorced from questions of
truth? It cannot see beyond the now. But why should it? Here are several
considerations:
What feels good in
the short run might not be good in the long run. Drugs, junk food, and
unprotected sex might suggest that forethought is important.
How does this pertain to spiritual matters? For example,
Mindfulness Meditation has become
fantastically popular in the West. However, many have reported on its long-range
downside. Melissa Karnaze reports on
17
Ways Mindfulness Meditation Can Cause You Emotional Harm. For brevity sake,
I will list only the first 11:
1.
You start to judge uncomfortable thoughts and
feelings as inferior, unreal, or bad. Which gets in your way of actually
learning from them, experiencing and healing them, growing from them, and
integrating them.
2.
You get good at stuffing anger and other
negative emotions. Which might make them go away — temporarily. But hasn’t
shown to be very effective.
3.
If and when a traumatic or emotionally painful
experience occurs, you don’t fully process it, and cut your grieving process
dangerously short.
4.
You have low tolerance for processing grief. So
if you start to remember something traumatic, you stuff it down, potentially
re-traumatizing yourself.
5.
You expect meditation to fix your problems for
you, resolve your relationship conflicts, and make you happy. Each of those
things requires hard work, commitment, and realistically, some discomfort. When
you look to meditation to save you, you stop putting in the hard work and
commitment, and evade the discomfort. Which makes it harder to effectively work
toward your goals.
6.
You detach yourself from conflicts in your life,
expecting that meditation will get rid of the negative emotions — and fix the
problem altogether. The emotions just signal the problem. Even if you ignore
the emotions, the problem is still there.
7.
You detach from your partner or loved one when
they’re upset or experiencing an emotion you see as undesirable. You wish
they’d just meditate it away, calm down, take a walk, get a grip — do whatever
it takes to get rid of the emotion. When you invalidate your partner’s negative
emotions, you cause serious wounds to both of you, harming trust and intimacy.
8.
You find it difficult to connect to your
feelings when you want to be emotionally honest with yourself and others.
Because you’ve trained yourself to avoid them. This impairs your ability to be
emotionally intimate with anyone.
9.
Your relationships deteriorate, because you lose
touch with what interpersonal conflict really means. After all, no one is
really experiencing hurt feelings, right? Those feelings aren’t really real;
just dissociate from them. Or, “observe” them.
10. You
struggle to empathize with others, or understand their pain. If you don’t feel
your own pain — you can’t expect to have compassion for another’s pain.
11. You
lose your ability to naturally feel upset, sad, or concerned when there’s an
issue in your life that you need to address. This puts a damper on healthy
discernment.
Perhaps some of these dangers are exaggerated, but the spiritual
person, having divorced himself from reason, will not even bother to research
them. He will not ask, “Has mindfulness advanced the human condition?” After
all, it is all about the now and experience!
An exclusively
subjective spirituality fails to provide the needed guidance. It cannot
answer the questions, “Why am I here, where am I going, and what should I do
about it.” Instead, subjectivity divorces us from community and a common
language, if all we have is our own experiences. It also alienates us from a
quest for truth and even what it means to be fully human.
A plane lacking one of its wings cannot fly. If it does get
off the ground, it will soon crash. The spiritual person might reject objective
spiritual truth as coercive and imperialistic. However, the alternative is far
worse.
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