Why I Hate "Spirituality"

Just kidding, I love spirituality. But can't we find a better word for this thing?

1.

The word ‘spirituality’ is problematic.

On the one hand, the 2023 Pew Research study on “spirituality in Americans” found that 70% of adults call themselves ‘spiritual’ in some way. So it’s popular. People also had what I consider to be an appropriately broad understanding of the term. In a ‘choose as many answers as apply’ question, 74% said the word means “being connected to something bigger than myself,” 70% said “being connected with God,” while 64% said “being connected with my true self.” Other answers included being connected with nature, with other people, or with loved ones who’ve died.

And in an ‘in your own words’ question, common responses included being one with your soul, emotions, feelings, actions; believing in something larger and more creative than science; being ‘One with the universe!’; or theistic answers like ‘the belief that a supreme being is the creator of the universe, and that humans’ existence in this realm is transient’ and ‘having a relationship with God and a belief system that includes a responsibility to do what is right.’

This breadth, I think, is good; spirituality can entail all of those things, and many more. It can be religious or non-religious. (Nerding out for a minute: in the study, 22% of U.S. adults said they are spiritual but not religious, 21% said they are neither spiritual nor religious, while 10% say they are religious but not spiritual. The mind spins.) It can be connected to ethics, myth, love, and community, or to none of those things. One writer associated it with “an elevated level of awareness and an ability to transcend the mundane and materialistic concerns of daily life.”

But the term’s conceptual vagueness also enables the term to mean whatever we want it to mean, including things we don’t like.

If you’re a rationalist not into weird stuff, you might associate spirituality with astrology, angels, crystal healing, magical thinking, the law of attraction, anti-vaxx nonsense, or an over-reliance on intuition over reason. If you’re concerned about ethics, you might associate it with narcissism, with elevating one’s subjective experience over ethical responsibility to others or to the planet. It might just mean muddled thinking, or jumping from experience (or imagination) to belief.

Twenty years ago, I was interested in finding some conceptual coherence to the term. “What is spirituality?” I asked in one 2006 article, continuing

For some, the word connotes the fantasies of the New Age, from harmless notions like astrology to dangerous ones like apocalyptic messianism. For others, the word means precisely the opposite: not seeing the imaginary, but seeing the real more clearly, from the stirrings of the heart to the infinitesimal miracles of everyday existence, which, like motes on a sunbeam, ordinarily escape our notice.

I was clearly with the ‘others’ on that one. A few months later, I was at pains to differentiate the kind of nondualism-oriented spirituality I practiced at the time from more conventional types. As I wrote in another article from that year:

To many people, spirituality is about having certain feelings, and spiritual practices are those actions which bring the feelings about. Light the candles, and feel “connected.” Pray, and become inspired. One does these practices in order to have certain feelings, or mindstates, to which one may attribute a range of mythic or psychological meaning. Conversely, if a practice isn’t working for you -- that is, if you don’t get the desired feeling -- drop it…

From a nondual perspective, spiritual practice is not about having a particular feeling, but about waking up to the shocking reality that your conventional self only exists as an appearance, a mirage. Like the Big Dipper, it is “there” in some sense, but not in the deepest sense; it’s not a structure of reality, but merely a way reality appears when looked at from a certain way. Spiritual and contemplative practice, in the nondual view, exist to wake us up from that “certain way,” which also happens to bring about all kinds of suffering, selfishness, and violence.

To do so, nondual spiritual practice must be all-pervasive. If you suppose that God is only present in the pleasant stuff - on a summer’s day but not in a cancer ward, when you’re feeling relaxed but not when you’re tense — then you’ve still making the same dualist error: God is here, but not there. In fact, the best spiritual practice might be one that neither provides the allure of the present nor the expiation of the difficult — but one which is utterly transparent, colorless, and thus always available.

It’s fascinating (to me anyway) to look at this work from twenty years ago, with its combination of vitality and blindness. There’s a kind of energy of discovery in that period of my writing that I really do love — and yet, I was also full of shit, by which I mean, full of ideas and assertions and opinions, blind to their particularities and my own biases.

I mean, I do still believe those paragraphs, but only as one option among many. There’s obviously no one ‘real’ spirituality; definition is only personal manifesto. And sure enough, a few years later, I recanted that supposedly nondualist position, admitting that temporary transformations of mind-states – before the candles, thinking about mortgage; after candles, thinking about the sacred – are actually quite important and more realistic and accessible than ‘persistent nondual awareness’ as we call it in the study of mysticism business. So it goes.

Nowadays, I’m not as interested in definition and more interested in communication. And spirituality is, at best, a mid communicator. It often points in the opposite direction from things I actually care about, like the relationship between peak experiences and personal ethics — which for me are now dominated by parenting, family, and relationships — as well as appreciating the ‘magic of the ordinary’ and the simple sensuality of holding a fork or seeing a glimmer of sunlight. (Ian Bogost’s new book, The Small Stuff, is largely about this – the cultivation of what he calls gratification.) In fact, it can seem like a form of running away from those things into la-la land.

I painted this in 1997

2.

One of my teachers, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, once said “I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in.” (My friend Zvika Krieger is soon to publish a book based on that phrase.) Well, I often don’t believe in the same spirituality you don’t believe in.

But how else do I describe what I do — even what much of this newsletter is about?

I’m interested in the nexus of politics and psychology, religion, meditation, psychedelics, and our beliefs about the world. I’m interested in how our relationship to the sacred (more on that in a minute) shape and are shaped by our cultural conditions and political lives. And while, of course, material conditions like economics play an important role, I’m convinced that psycho-spiritual issues like the meaning crisis are the largest determinant of the messes we find ourselves in, from the rise of nationalism and climate denial to the masculinity crisis and the way working class white people keep electing populist leaders who feed them culture war slop while creating the largest wealth gap in American history. That con has been going on for seventy-five years now, for God’s sake.

In my psychedelics work at Emory University, one umbrella term we use for ‘spirituality et cetera’ is the unpleasant acronym, derived from psychologists David Rupert, Sarah Moon, and Steven Sandage, SERT: Spiritual, Existential, Religious, Theological. SERT is a useful term, and at Emory, one of the things we research is how SERT content (welcome or unwelcome) arises in psychedelic experiences even in secular, clinical contexts. As my colleague Charles Raison puts it, “you can take the psychedelics out of spirituality, but you can’t take the spirituality out of psychedelics.”

What’s nice about SERT is that it covers a lot of ground. Avowed atheists have SERT experiences and so do fundamentalist religionists. SERT experiences can be about family trauma, sex, God, nature, aliens, and everything on the ‘what is spirituality’ list above. Yet they do have something in common – they touch on deep feelings-beliefs-worldviews about who we are, what meaning there is in life, and what matters to us.

What’s not nice about SERT is that no one knows what it is and it sounds like a breath mint.

Maybe what we’re really talking about when we talk about SERT is consciousness; SERT experiences are events in consciousness first and foremost, whether they are embodied or not, externally stimulated or not. Arguably such experiences are, by definition, altered states of consciousness, from flow states in basketball to trance techniques of ecstasy in Siberian shamanism, visiting a sick person in the hospital to imagining oneself immortal on ketamine. In all these cases, there is some shift in consciousness from the ordinary mind to something else, from the tyranny of the Default Mode Network to a more malleable, permeable way of conscious being.

But ‘consciousness’ can be as misleading a word as ‘spirituality.’ To me it immediately invokes the ‘hard problem’ of how the phenomenon of consciousness relates to the physical brain, to questions of neurology and psychology – or, perhaps at another extreme, to ‘cosmic consciousness’, pan-psychism, and other esoteric-spiritual concepts. It’s barely less flaky, less misleading, and less polysemous than ‘spirituality.’

3.

Here’s chess grandmaster turned metaphysician/systems-souls-society visionary Jonathan Rowson on this conundrum and where to go with it:

The composite abstract noun ‘spirituality’ is nebulous; it means little in itself beyond breath and aliveness, it is always at risk of being coopted or commercialised, and by identifying itself, it arguably takes us away from what I believe to be a saner, more accurate and more generative process-relational view of the world. And so, back in the day, I used spiritual mostly as an orienting adjective to qualify a person’s outlook, disposition, or sensibility as a way to reflect interest in the kinds of issues a signpost like ‘spiritual’ might point to.

My definition, from Spiritualise (2nd edition, 2017, p17) is:

I think of spiritual sensibility as a disposition towards reality characterised by concern for the fullness of life and experienced through simultaneous intimations of aliveness, goodness, understanding, and meaning. Those glimpses of wholeness and integration have a texture that is at once emotional, ethical, epistemic, and existential – the feeling of being alive, the conviction that something matters, the intuition that the world makes sense, and the experience that life is meaningful respectively. More substantively...cultivating spiritual sensibility is about deepening our engagement with questions of being(death), belonging(love), becoming(self) and beyondness(soul).

Interestingly, like me, Rowson recanted this view a few years later – in the essay I’ve quoted here, he calls it “cartological schmoozing.” That’s because it didn’t take a position on what Rowson believes is the fundamental metaphysical question: whether there is ‘something more’ or not. Are our experiences of the uncanny, the improbable — what Jeffrey Kripal calls the “impossible” — purely events that take place between our ears and under our skulls? Or is there something more? Is consciousness connected, in ways Kripal has explained in ways I have tried to explain, to, well, Consciousness? Or Nous? Or VALIS? Or God? Or what Rowson settles on, which is “the imaginal realm”:

My impression is that the imaginal realm is a real place that is not a real place. The imaginal is both within and between our material and spiritual realities in ways that are hard to fathom. Although the ‘realm’ has no spatial extension, it has a temporal and causal reality, and that possibility is untroubling for those who can grasp that consciousness exists in time, but not in space. The imaginal realm also appears to be an abode where indwelling occurs, and that becomes credible when we discern that what dwells there are not physical entities, but something that appears to be at once personal, archetypal, normative, ideational, and agentic. This repository of virtuous form reaches us through intuitions and imagery, and these dispatches are not directives of celestial oversight from above but more like a kind of noetic solidarity, liquefactions of our collective mystical heart in the near beyond. While that heart is not a being, it is interactive and agentic Being-in-Action. Meaning arises from there, filtered through experience in patterns we can only perceive in particular ways that might best be described as chiastic, namely those myriad phenomena that criss-cross into the very centre of our lives, a centre that makes us explode with laughter and well up with tears of joy, and that is perhaps best understood as what Jean Gebser called the ever-present origin.

That’s a lot of words right there, but Rowson is arriving at a Wordsworthian destination — recently explored by my friend Rodger Kamenetz in his new book — that the imagination is generative and real, that it speaks to us if we can listen closely enough, that it is the source of spirituality (my term, not Wordsworth’s), art, and even ethics. But also, in ways that Wordsworth seemed less ready to embrace, real in the sense of reality — like, actually real.

One of Rowson’s areas of focus is the persistence of synchronicity — which, by way of full disclosure, I just had a huge dollop of writing this essay. In the last week, I’ve come across two unrelated maxims about the imaginal/impossible: “It’s not woo if it’s true” (source unknown) and Ursula LeGuin’s statement that writers and artists are “realists of a larger reality.” And then both of those phrases showed up in Rowson’s essay.

Coincidence? Theories of pattern recognition and confirmation bias say yes; we notice patterns because it’s evolutionarily desirable to do so, and ignore the patternless noise that comprises the majority of our perceptual existence. And maybe it doesn’t matter; in Jung’s famous-among-Jungians episode of the scarab, the point of the patient’s viewing an actual beetle right as she was recounting a dream of a scarab is that the synchronicity opened her up to exploring the trans-rational. The measure of its value was its utility, not its veracity as evidence of some VALIS-like orderer of the cosmos. If spirituality is, as my friend Chris DiMeglio put it, “a view more than anything else—a way of opening to what is/n’t with wonder, love, openness, freedom from calcified perception” (the is/n’t shows Chris is a good nondual Buddhist), then it doesn’t really matter whether entities are real and other realms exist. What matters is that we are open to wonder, whether in a 5meo-DMT manifestation of Metatron or the delight of my daughter with the slime we made earlier this evening.

But I take Rowson’s point. It’s not just a couple of synchronicities while preparing an essay about spirituality; for twenty-five years now, I’ve had peak experience after peak experience. I’ve had several ego-deaths, one actual near-death, countless sensual and sexual ecstasies (strong recommend), full immersions in the jhanas, Buddhist experiences I’m not allowed to talk about (in two different traditions), devekut (I think), encounters with apparent deities, and dozens of psychedelic revelations that I cannot explain according to Western metaphysics – and still I’m on the fence. Is this Both/And or a pathological inability to let go into the Impossible?

Rowson at least is able to come out of the metaphysical closet:

In all cases, there is scope for scepticism and alternative explanations, but these days that feels indulgent, like an epistemic alibi I don’t need, because I’m not guilty. For me, these experiences, combined with intellectual inquiry into how they could make sense, place the idea of something beyond the veil interacting with us beyond a reasonable doubt. More precisely, while there is plenty of uncertainty over the details, this sense of other worlds intersecting or overlaid on our own is real for me beyond the polite social doubt required to avoid dogmatism or proselytising.

Ah, but there’s the rub, because the majority of humans who believe in “something beyond the veil interacting with us” are extremely conservative fundamentalist religionists of one faith or another. It’s only quasi-secularists like Rowson and me who have to deal with “polite social doubt.” In the rest of the world, the problem isn’t too little reliance on intuition, but too much. Billions of humans experience what Durkheim called “collective self-effervescence” in their churches or temples, feeling a shared emotional-spiritual charge (itself likely the product of evolutionarily desirable traits, like the ability to build group cohesion) and thus arrive at problematic conclusions like epistemic certainty, in-group identification, out-group demonization, and dogmatism. In that context, I’d rather sit on the fence.

Maybe “not knowing” is both a copout and a beneficial embrace of epistemic humility. Maybe the skepticism is part of the practice.

4.

Where Rowson and I agree wholeheartedly is that it is not possible to address the Meaning Crisis / Polycrisis / Metacrisis / Everything Crisis without including Whatever This Thing Is, whether we call it spirituality, SERT, Religion with a Lower-Case R, et cetera. I’m not sure that I agree that the roots of the crisis go back as far as Rowson thinks they do, but here’s how he describes it:

The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing, and misappropriating of reality… a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.

As I’ve written in these pages before, I think much of the metacrisis comes from more recent phenomena: the decline not just in religion but also in the value placed on institutions, communities, and relationships. Technology has played a large part in that decline, as has the ‘Elephant Curve’ and the wealth gap, as well as ultimately positive changes in the status of women, non-whites, and other formerly non-dominant groups (including queers like me). Those are all more recent than the disenchantment of the world wrought by modernity. (Alexander Beiner Beiner goes back even further, to matter/spirit dualism.)

But setting that quibble aside, we agree the remedy to the crisis has to be a reconnection to sources of meaning that exist outside the hyper-conservative revanchist ‘alternatives’ that have besotted many elites of late, from regressive masculinity and anti-science conspirituality (which seems superficially liberal but which on closer inspection is radically conservative) to ‘traditional’ (though anti-Pope-Leo) Catholicism and post-liberalism.

For me, the basket called “spirituality” holds most of the golden eggs that give meaning to my life: mindfulness, myth, mysticism, ritual, altered states, sacralizing the cycles of the year and of life, communities of meaning, meditation, love, family, responsibility, political protest, and the simplest of all esoteric practices, turning the attention away from the ordinary mind and to the awareness of awareness itself. (Also, strong recommend.) I don’t think spirituality is the only basket — many people will hate it, just like I hate watching golf — but for me, it is the primary one.

So why is it so hard to describe? Why, when I love the flavor of the sacred, can I not describe it to anyone without sounding like a fool? Why do I feel so uncomfortable talking about the font of meaning that I am in fact quite fortunate to have discovered? Why is there not a better word for the ineffable?

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Thanks for reading. Funny, I wasn’t sure what to write about this week but once I got going on this, I kept going. Thanks to my paid subscribers who make these free posts possible.

Here are some other things I’ve read on the internet lately:

• As I’ve mentioned, I’ve hit a miniature writer’s block when it comes to climate change — I’m just not sure what to say anymore. Fortunately Rebecca Solnit hasn’t — her new piece on climate is fantastic.

• For the Forward, I wrote about how, contrary to the handwringing in some parts of the American Jewish communinty, Abdul El-Sayed’s views on Israel/Palestine are actually almost the same as mine. Meanwhile Robert Reich wrote an excellent take on his victory.

• I’ve probably quoted Jonathan Rowson enough already but his new piece on temporality and the sublime is, itself, sublime.

• If you enjoyed by take on the Odyssey, you’ll probably like Sean Illing’s take as well.

See you next week.