What does “spirituality” mean to you?

[DarkRange55]

What does the word spirituality mean to you?
In what ways do you consider yourself to be a spiritual person?


Please read, apologies for the length! For some of you this may just be a repeat.

I have just always found it to be a rather nebulous word with various interpretations.

When you bring up spirit or soul or essence I think it's important to define the realm in which you're discussing it; to be clear, I mean either the physical, religious, or metaphysical. After that then you can get specific as to what definition you're going after.

This is my favorite right now:
"A very common phenomenon on psychedelics is to have this sense that consciousness is more evenly spread over the world and not just locked in here -points to his head- and that other beings are more alive than we realize and I definitely had that with plants. I felt like I was one character among many in the garden rather than the human overseeing the garden. It was a deep connection to nature than I'd ever felt. I don't think there's anything supernatural about that. I would say it's spiritual in this sense… I assumed that spiritual meant supernatural in some sense. That is had to leave the laws of nature and science. And it was an experience that refuted them by showing you that there was a divine force that you weren't aware of or god or whatever. I didn't buy that. But I came to understand spirituality in a different way… and that was that the opposite of spiritual isn't material as I had thought. The opposite of spiritual is egotistical. In that it is ego and the ego defenses that wall us off from the kinds of really powerful connections that constitute a spiritual experience. I'm talking about the experience of love for someone else or for nature. I'm talking about feeling like you're apart of nature, you have that deep connection with nature. The ego keeps us, know you, puts these walls up it patrols the boundary between self and other. It tends to encourage us to objectify the other and not see that there are other subjects looking back at us all over the world, like a tree. When I came to understand that, that was the opposite, that was having spiritual experiences and they were experiences of deep, powerful connection and that's what I think spirituality is. Now for some people that connection is with some idea of the divinity and higher power and I can totally even see that in a naturalistic sense…"
- Michael Pollen

@Pluto
Here (kitty) is a good book about spirituality, psychedelics, meditation, from a non-religious stand point. The author is an atheist and has a PHD in Cognitive neuroscience. He has also practiced with many different types of buddhist and hindu teachers in India and Nepal.

Waking Up

For the millions of Americans who want spirituality without religion, Sam Harris’s latest New York Times bestseller is a guide to meditation as a rational practice informed by neuroscience and psychology.From Sam Harris, neuroscientist and author of numerous New York Times bestselling books...

www.google.com

Thank you Kitty @Pluto for this quote, "Perhaps this is because the very word spirit can refer to a particular zeitgeist or a literal synonym for soul. All these things have value in breaking down the barriers of the separate ego-self, at least for short periods."
- (Pluto)
Love this.

Religion: Daily devotion - most people substitute some kind of daily devotion into that religious slot because it's a human need whether it's a religious source (or philosophy) or not. It's about mindset. I find most modern Christian traditions ignore it though. I kinda like Christian mysticism in that regard. Spark of god within each person. Essentially it's meditation.


Some musings:

Psychedelic - Some attribute that to a spiritual experience, it truly is an experience… Some people get a tangible high from going to church…

@Pluto
I see my region of the omniverse as having creative force, where an entity is often dramatically more than the sum of its parts.
I appreciate the omniverse having such regions, and me being in one.
I am personally thankful for my existence.
In many complex things, the organization of the parts adds more than the parts themselves. A valid point of view is that we are all the omniverse experiencing itself.


@lamargue @Pluto
Part of today's metaphysics will become tomorrow's science (e.g., the nature of the omniverse, the meaning of quantum mechanics, the nature of consciousness).
A few parts are borderline – will we understand why there is anything rather than nothing?
Anything beyond that will become (or remain) philosophy or religion.

@lamargue
Some people's spiritual side is all dedicated to their art. Writing stories, writings poems, that's their spirituality. That's where they get it from but some don't think it's true, some don't think that there's something substantial behind it just because they came up with it. It's for them, it's their imagination. For some, they never really needed that comfort. Even in their darkest times they've never turned to that source for comfort. Instead some turn to movies, and music, and art, and literature and all that stuff. And they think that's plenty, thats all the "god" they need.

I've heard that the purpose of religion is to help provide a path for spirituality.

@Pluto
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/the-universe-may-be-a-giant-neural-network-heres-why/
The similarity of the organization is an excellent demonstration that the same-self organizing principles operate on a vast range of scales.
Non-local connections do not allow information to be transferred faster than the speed of light, so the universe would only have time to have a few thoughts, and not enough time to "learn" much, let alone to become intelligent. However, when one looks at it from a block-omniverse perspective time is not a limitation...

I mean gravity is one power. If I drop something its gonna fall. But talking more about conscious forces, forces with will, with intent. Other than mechanical dropping of an object like gravity as far as "forces."
I think we have to divide those into supernatural phenomenon or we're talking about gods, deities. Talking about those types of forces or unknown supernatural forces? Cryptids & UFO's I would say that those are more along the lines of paranormal phenomenon than it would be as far as like "forces" though.

Thanks for reading/posting! Please leave your thoughts below! Have a wonderful day everyone!

 

[LaVieEnRose]

To quote myself: I believe in spirituality. Spirits can get you quite drunk.

Sorry, I'm pretty much spiritually bankrupt in the traditional sense of that word. Repeated hardship tends to do that to a person (or the complete opposite, but that clearly did not happen to me).

 

[Dr Iron Arc]

To me spirituality is Total BS but only for me because I don't deserve its benefits. For other people, if it works for them then more power to them.

The only remotely spiritual experiences I've ever seemingly felt were when I felt I almost got to enter into a romantic relationship with someone who was interested in me at first almost 4 years ago but that obviously faded when it ended and that was probably just my body and various chemicals trying to trick me into surviving.

 

[Forever Sleep]

I really resonate with your thread. I'd say I have a spiritual leaning rather than a religious one. I actually strongly dislike many elements of orthodox religion and if there is a God, I think they are utterly monstrous.

But yes- similarly to you, spirituality for me is something quite hard to explain. A kind of connection I suppose is the closest thing. That we could in fact be connected in some way to other humans, other animals, nature, time, stories. Anything that makes us feel bigger than we are I suppose. A bit like the idea of 'the force' in Star Wars.

That all said, I wouldn't put it past our brains to trick us. As in- it isn't a real phenomenon. It's simply a feeling we get that probably benefits us. You could argue that feeling love benefits our species. If two people believe they love each other, they may well stay together, have children and be there for their children. If they believe they love their children too, they'll be even more attentive. We need nature to survive. Maybe it's in our interest to feel a connection to nature in the hopes we don't entirely obliterate it. (Not that that seems to be working...)

 

[Pluto]

I don't use the word 'spirituality' for the same reason I limit my use of the word 'God'. Occasionally, there's some poetic value in referencing the arcane, but these words lack a substantially meaningful definition.

I have heard good things about Sam Harris' app. The main contemporary teacher that I follow is Dr. Angelo Dilullo who is an anesthesiologist from Colorado. There are many others, offering a variety of approaches.

At its core, the common report by people who have had advanced insights into their true nature (via mystical experiences, NDEs, psychedelics and such) is that the normal idea we have of being a person in a body navigating a world is completely wrong.

Therefore, the human condition is based on an illusion on a cosmic scale which results in suffering, but can be overcome. (This broadly correlates with the Four Noble Truths.) 'Overcome' specifically means a permanent shift in identity and the ultimate death of the ego, not a passing experience of insight.

The first challenge that arises is that most people fancy themselves as skeptical, but would rarely if ever dare to actually question their own thoughts, which all orbit around the structure of a fictional self called ego. Our bizarre tendency to question everything except our own minds keeps the illusion solidified despite its lack of substance.

For the minority who do not get stuck in quicksand of the mind, the next question is what can be done about it. This opens a Pandora's box of approaches. People of all backgrounds have achieved awakenings. It is everyone's birthright since we are talking about something that was an underlying truth all along anyway.

In the highest sense, religions all attempt to point to true nature via teachings of the various masters who directly or indirectly founded them. This can work best if the aforementioned basic premise – the unreality of the separate 'I' – remains the uncompromised goal throughout. This is easier said than done, to say the least. Keep in mind, the 'I' who wants liberation is not going to get it, it is instead going to be exposed as a fiction.

For example, as soon as religion becomes about competing with other religions, or feeling an inflated sense of superiority by association to some order, the ego has co-opted the process to aggrandise itself. For true masters, the religion is a stepping stone to a state of oneness that is free of all duality, including the basic duality of self and other. So how can there be an exclusive religious identity at that point?

The trick for the intellect is to acknowledge that we are talking not about a scriptural concept but the essence of immediate experience.

As an example, the tree of life starts with life itself. Life is another word that is difficult to define. If we follow select branches of the tree analogy very specifically, we get:
- The known universe is likely a small part of life.
- Earth is a small part of the universe.
- The human race is a small part of the Earthly ecosystem.
- Religion/spirituality is a small part of human endeavour.
- Nondual teachings are a minority within spirituality (including Zen, Advaita Vedanta, Abrahamic mysticism, etc.)
However, then it comes full circle. The actual nondual subject matter is a radical transformation in identity to return to the timeless, pure life essence that the whole tree is based upon. Thus, treating this as an intellectual pursuit is grossly missing the point. The self with the intellect needs to be destroyed, not fed more conceptual fodder.

Another interesting point is the notion of belief, which is central to religions. Belief, even unto a high degree of faith, is very valuable in the early stages. It opens up the individual to the possibility that there is something more than the tired old misery of the thought-based human experience. Profound trust in authentic masters, teachers or deities transcends the ego. However, at this point, belief suddenly becomes the ultimate hindrance since it is stuck at the intellectual realm rather than deepening insight into the underlying reality of immediate experience. Hence the saying to kill the Buddha.

Enough rambling. I don't have any point.

 

[Arachno]

I don't believe in any kind of spirituality or souls, I think it's called materialism, yeah, I guess I'm a hopeful materialist, I hope that it's all just BS since I can't disprove the existence of it. The idea of something existing outside of material realm genuinely scares me. So I'm anything but a spiritual person.