There is this really useful word, immanence, that I wish were more widely known. Basically it means “focused on this world and human experience.”
I learned this in A Secular Age, a fantastic book by the philosopher Charles Taylor. Basically the book is about how modern western society is increasingly immanent, focused on this reality and not on what is after life; e. g., heaven and hell, punishments and rewards after life, personal experience after death, and so on.
I bring this up because I think a decent working definition of spirituality is how one navigates this immanent situation. It seems to me that there quite likely is something beyond the bounds of human experience, but we aren’t quite sure what it is. A successful version of spirituality, to me, would be a way of navigating this situation in such a way that is psychologically healthy and philosophically justifiable. Simply denying existence outside of human frames seems like a denial of reality.
> It seems to me that there quite likely is something beyond the bounds of human experience, but we aren’t quite sure what it is. ... Simply denying existence outside of human frames seems like a denial of reality.
My extended family has protestants, Catholics, ex-chatholics, atheist and then my father. One of his parents was atheist and the other descended from a long line of quakers and catholics. Around my late teens I finally asked what his thoughts were on the subject. His reply was something like, "let me know when it helps in any real meaningful/tangible way to provide for the family; then I will think about it and let you know." He never spoke anything on the subject, as if it didn't exist. Not against it, not for it, not even a curiosity. He is also the type that worked 2 jobs while also starting his own business that drained money for some years before providing a comfortable living. I would not say that he was at all in "a denial of reality". Quite the opposite.
Personally, I think the thing beyond the bounds of human experience is science waiting to be discovered. I have always found it fascinated that other animals have differing zones or frequencies of senses. How there are sounds we can not hear, colors we can not see but other creatures can. There is a whole world within our world that we can't always directly experience or when we do, we don't always have a way to link it to measurable things; yet it is still there. We should be spending more time discovering the reality just beyond our senses, or at least building that curiosity in the next generation to pursue instead of focusing on fairy-tale magical explanations.
By “denial of reality” I am referring to the totality of existence. Not the reality of working a job and paying for things.
Not everyone is curious about ultimate questions like these. That’s fine, but for those of us that are curious, they are very important questions indeed.
"Reality" is such a loaded word. It assumes a lot: existence of something outside the observer; its durability and continuity; presence of other similar observers, who also sense the reality in "essentially the same" way, with a lot of problems in defining the "sameness"; the idea that the "objective reality" also still exists in absence of any observers. For the reality to be "objective", the observers also need to be somehow durable, so with passage of "time", they could make some repeat observations and notice that the results are the same, that is, the reality must have "laws".
It's pretty tall order.
But, if we go with it by extending the reality past human death (why only human?), we, the humans, usually make it hugely anthropocentric, often more so than when astronomy put Earth in the center of universe. For me, it's a sign that many spiritual movements try to serve as a consolation to humans fearing death, rather than an honest research of anything past "this side" of reality. Certainly there are kinds of spirituality that avoid this trap, e.g. Theravada Buddhism; sadly it tries to describe provably incorrect things, like a number of heavens at particular heights above Earth.
A spiritualism that tries to pass simple checks should either actually predict "physical reality" and thus become science, or drop any pretenses that it can be observable in the "physical reality", thus going firmly into the realm of not even fairy tales but of strictly internal experience of an observer, hence becoming solipsist. Solipsism is logically entitled to anything :)
If you just "want to believe", the Pascal's Wager is as good as it has always been.
> A spiritualism that tries to pass simple checks should either actually predict "physical reality" and thus become science, or drop any pretenses that it can be observable in the "physical reality", thus going firmly into the realm of not even fairy tales but of strictly internal experience of an observer, hence becoming solipsist.
The above works if you disregard that all observations of “physical reality”, any models, and the meta mode of attending to reality that leads you to structure your models in a particular way and choose which experiments to perform, are all a product of your mind and start treating physical models as gospel.
Natural science is about making predictions, not speaking truth. It offers models as a shortcut to predictions, but does not even claim to offer complete knowledge or “true” models. The territory is unknowable, all we have is maps, and all maps are wrong (physical models being a special case of maps). Natural science by design is not equipped to get us to any true reference points, and becomes remarkably useless as soon as our mind gets under the spotlight—though what it does do is provide us some useful maps (notably, “useful” as defined by our minds. You see the pattern).
It is a struggle to live a life given such uncertainty. We have options as to how to represent the territory, and so we go about it with varying degrees of rigour.
A seemingly popular approach of just taking the current models provided by natural sciences and using them as a proxy of truth does not score high on rigour in my opinion, since it strikes me as taking physics as a poor surrogate for religion.
Thus, I personally have no problem with spirituality, unless it flies in the face of observations and fails to offer sound philosophical reasoning. Like in physics models are shortcuts for predictions, spirituality/religion could be considered shortcuts for philosophy (with a degree of charitability, depending on the views one holds), and reducing philosophy to physics would degrade, not elevate it (after all, natural sciences came from and are subordinate to philosophy, not the other way around).
This is also why being a physicist and simultaneously a religious person (the case with many famous physicists) is not a contradiction.
That can all be true, but still miss the point of what a good spirituality ought to be. Yes, it may be a flaw of human religious systems to put humanity at the center of everything. But that’s only a flaw if we’re looking for an external explanation of reality. The fact is that from our perspective, we are at the center of our universe and psychologically, we are healthier if we have some coherent answers to tell ourselves about reality.
This is the real flaw with the positivist, scientific-dominant world view IMO. It obsesses over this external notion of objectivity while forgetting that human flourishing is (arguably) more important than merely accumulating information.
> how modern western society is increasingly immanent
This misses something about western society, though—it prioritizes immanence but in a way that fails to ever attain it. If you consider a Citizen-Kane type of person who accumulates wealth and fame: the underlying emotional need behind all that accumulation is for love and connection in the present, which if it were attained, would have this character of immanence. Wealth-accumulation is instrumental towards that goal, but Western culture makes it an end in itself. We wind up continuously striving after that "connection in the present" but go searching in the wrong direction, getting trapped on the plane of ideas and vanities and other-peoples'-expectations. But this only bars the way to the actual thing we want. It's a "metric becoming a goal", and therefore moves away from the actual goal.
The linked blog post I think is expressing something along these lines: "our longings, even those that appear mundane or materialistic, often mask attempts to recreate that sense of secure attachment". What's needed instead is an openness to reality, and in particular some way of reckoning with the feeling of the finiteness of one's life, compared to the seeming endlessness of the realm of ideas. (You'll die, but ideas are forever.) And the post rightly emphasizes "safety" as the essential thing.
This is I think what is meant by "we are loved precisely in the midst of our most profound insecurities - this is what it means to stand naked before God." While that God-language might describe what it actually feels like, it strikes me as misleading from the perspective of a person outside that state of existence, who would not know what to turn their attention to.
This article seemed like it was talking in circles and I have a really hard time understanding wtf this guy was talking about. Then I saw the header that this was in part taken from conversations with AI and now I just think it’s AI slop. I’m kind of annoyed I read the whole thing.
It was a difficult follow with a lot of concepts that repeated sometimes with the added "spirituality" parts that vacillated between secular, agnostic and metaphysical. The whole thing could entirely remove the words around "spirituality" and would still simply be about our attachment style with lived reality. I am guessing because they are religious and things heard after catholic mass sparked some thoughts, they have not reached the secure attachment part of their reality to voice these thoughts without adding in something outside of themselves that is needed for wholeness. It's a thinly veiled healing and love are there for us if we openly and securely attach to *cough metaphysical cough* reality.
It's the hyphens that always give it away, hyphen or hyphen family. Just as an experiment, I ctrl'f'ed "-" on this article, 28, then I went to "best medium articles of 2012 2013 2014, average is 6/7 of them with high being ~ > 13
Never the less, the article mostly made sense to me, although it was a bit circular, I still found it tolerable as far as LLM assisted work goes, def didn't feel "written by AI".
Spirituality is not universally a belief in non-reality but it mostly is. This overloading of the word with it's opposite might be useful within their group but I think it'll just cause confusion in a global namespace.
I've always wondered if feeling like I am something in something is the standard human experience. Never mind the philosophy or religion or any of that stuff, just the sense that I am a thing inside a thing (a spirit in a body, but that isn't quite right, more like a body+spirit in a body+spirit world?) I've always wondered if basically everyone feels this way.
I thought this was good: "spirituality is, at its heart, about our relationship with reality itself. Whether we name it God, Buddha-nature, or simply Life, we are always in relationship with it. The quality of that relationship - secure or insecure, trusting or defensive - shapes every aspect of our experience." - but the author uses "reality itself" and "just like a child" waaaayyy to often, at least they are honest at the start there is a lot of LLM in there.
> What does secure attachment to reality look like? It means feeling safe to experience whatever arises. It means trusting that reality is fundamentally reliable.
In other words, up is up and down is down. Water is not wine. Reality doesn't come and go on the whims of a prayer halfway across the world.
I found this post (and the one he had posted before it) to be very useful and descriptive. I find it very interesting to attempt to view this through the lens of attachment. Creative! I have been going through a similar breakdown the last 4-5 months and some of the perspectives resonate with me. It helped to feel some community in this process.
> God, as I heard recently in a Catholic mass, is always facing us - though we so often turn away. Like a securely attached mother, Reality/God remains present, ready to repair, connect, love, and attune. Our task isn't to earn this love but to develop the capacity to receive it, to stay present even when it challenges and shatters our familiar views of self and world.
I hate to pick out just one quote, but this is really emblematic of the issue I have with the source article. A Catholic mass is not about our psychological status or abstract relationship with reality - it's a remembrance of the incarnation of God into a specific man we call Jesus, his life in the ancient Roman governate of Judaea, his execution and resurrection, and his plans to come back and resurrect all of us at some point in the future.
If you would prefer to follow "Reality/God", more power to you. But it's critical to recognize that you're rejecting the Catholic tradition by doing so, not following some deeper truth.
Readit News
I learned this in A Secular Age, a fantastic book by the philosopher Charles Taylor. Basically the book is about how modern western society is increasingly immanent, focused on this reality and not on what is after life; e. g., heaven and hell, punishments and rewards after life, personal experience after death, and so on.
I bring this up because I think a decent working definition of spirituality is how one navigates this immanent situation. It seems to me that there quite likely is something beyond the bounds of human experience, but we aren’t quite sure what it is. A successful version of spirituality, to me, would be a way of navigating this situation in such a way that is psychologically healthy and philosophically justifiable. Simply denying existence outside of human frames seems like a denial of reality.
My extended family has protestants, Catholics, ex-chatholics, atheist and then my father. One of his parents was atheist and the other descended from a long line of quakers and catholics. Around my late teens I finally asked what his thoughts were on the subject. His reply was something like, "let me know when it helps in any real meaningful/tangible way to provide for the family; then I will think about it and let you know." He never spoke anything on the subject, as if it didn't exist. Not against it, not for it, not even a curiosity. He is also the type that worked 2 jobs while also starting his own business that drained money for some years before providing a comfortable living. I would not say that he was at all in "a denial of reality". Quite the opposite.
Personally, I think the thing beyond the bounds of human experience is science waiting to be discovered. I have always found it fascinated that other animals have differing zones or frequencies of senses. How there are sounds we can not hear, colors we can not see but other creatures can. There is a whole world within our world that we can't always directly experience or when we do, we don't always have a way to link it to measurable things; yet it is still there. We should be spending more time discovering the reality just beyond our senses, or at least building that curiosity in the next generation to pursue instead of focusing on fairy-tale magical explanations.
Not everyone is curious about ultimate questions like these. That’s fine, but for those of us that are curious, they are very important questions indeed.
It's pretty tall order.
But, if we go with it by extending the reality past human death (why only human?), we, the humans, usually make it hugely anthropocentric, often more so than when astronomy put Earth in the center of universe. For me, it's a sign that many spiritual movements try to serve as a consolation to humans fearing death, rather than an honest research of anything past "this side" of reality. Certainly there are kinds of spirituality that avoid this trap, e.g. Theravada Buddhism; sadly it tries to describe provably incorrect things, like a number of heavens at particular heights above Earth.
A spiritualism that tries to pass simple checks should either actually predict "physical reality" and thus become science, or drop any pretenses that it can be observable in the "physical reality", thus going firmly into the realm of not even fairy tales but of strictly internal experience of an observer, hence becoming solipsist. Solipsism is logically entitled to anything :)
If you just "want to believe", the Pascal's Wager is as good as it has always been.
The above works if you disregard that all observations of “physical reality”, any models, and the meta mode of attending to reality that leads you to structure your models in a particular way and choose which experiments to perform, are all a product of your mind and start treating physical models as gospel.
Natural science is about making predictions, not speaking truth. It offers models as a shortcut to predictions, but does not even claim to offer complete knowledge or “true” models. The territory is unknowable, all we have is maps, and all maps are wrong (physical models being a special case of maps). Natural science by design is not equipped to get us to any true reference points, and becomes remarkably useless as soon as our mind gets under the spotlight—though what it does do is provide us some useful maps (notably, “useful” as defined by our minds. You see the pattern).
It is a struggle to live a life given such uncertainty. We have options as to how to represent the territory, and so we go about it with varying degrees of rigour.
A seemingly popular approach of just taking the current models provided by natural sciences and using them as a proxy of truth does not score high on rigour in my opinion, since it strikes me as taking physics as a poor surrogate for religion.
Thus, I personally have no problem with spirituality, unless it flies in the face of observations and fails to offer sound philosophical reasoning. Like in physics models are shortcuts for predictions, spirituality/religion could be considered shortcuts for philosophy (with a degree of charitability, depending on the views one holds), and reducing philosophy to physics would degrade, not elevate it (after all, natural sciences came from and are subordinate to philosophy, not the other way around).
This is also why being a physicist and simultaneously a religious person (the case with many famous physicists) is not a contradiction.
This is the real flaw with the positivist, scientific-dominant world view IMO. It obsesses over this external notion of objectivity while forgetting that human flourishing is (arguably) more important than merely accumulating information.
This misses something about western society, though—it prioritizes immanence but in a way that fails to ever attain it. If you consider a Citizen-Kane type of person who accumulates wealth and fame: the underlying emotional need behind all that accumulation is for love and connection in the present, which if it were attained, would have this character of immanence. Wealth-accumulation is instrumental towards that goal, but Western culture makes it an end in itself. We wind up continuously striving after that "connection in the present" but go searching in the wrong direction, getting trapped on the plane of ideas and vanities and other-peoples'-expectations. But this only bars the way to the actual thing we want. It's a "metric becoming a goal", and therefore moves away from the actual goal.
The linked blog post I think is expressing something along these lines: "our longings, even those that appear mundane or materialistic, often mask attempts to recreate that sense of secure attachment". What's needed instead is an openness to reality, and in particular some way of reckoning with the feeling of the finiteness of one's life, compared to the seeming endlessness of the realm of ideas. (You'll die, but ideas are forever.) And the post rightly emphasizes "safety" as the essential thing.
This is I think what is meant by "we are loved precisely in the midst of our most profound insecurities - this is what it means to stand naked before God." While that God-language might describe what it actually feels like, it strikes me as misleading from the perspective of a person outside that state of existence, who would not know what to turn their attention to.
Never the less, the article mostly made sense to me, although it was a bit circular, I still found it tolerable as far as LLM assisted work goes, def didn't feel "written by AI".
I thought this was good: "spirituality is, at its heart, about our relationship with reality itself. Whether we name it God, Buddha-nature, or simply Life, we are always in relationship with it. The quality of that relationship - secure or insecure, trusting or defensive - shapes every aspect of our experience." - but the author uses "reality itself" and "just like a child" waaaayyy to often, at least they are honest at the start there is a lot of LLM in there.
In other words, up is up and down is down. Water is not wine. Reality doesn't come and go on the whims of a prayer halfway across the world.
I hate to pick out just one quote, but this is really emblematic of the issue I have with the source article. A Catholic mass is not about our psychological status or abstract relationship with reality - it's a remembrance of the incarnation of God into a specific man we call Jesus, his life in the ancient Roman governate of Judaea, his execution and resurrection, and his plans to come back and resurrect all of us at some point in the future.
If you would prefer to follow "Reality/God", more power to you. But it's critical to recognize that you're rejecting the Catholic tradition by doing so, not following some deeper truth.
This was a great read!