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Emerging Spirituality

Submitted by Ken Watts on Thu, 04/09/2009 - 16:27

I'VE BEEN THINKING LATELY about the transformation we're witnessing in human culture.

I don't mean the results of the recent presidential election in America, though that does appear to be a symptom of the larger change. I'm talking about something much bigger, something that is happening right under our noses, but which is rarely talked about for its own sake.

"For some it's intentional, conscious, and carefully thought out. For others it may go unrecognized, taken as ground rather than figure, but it's there all the same."

I'm more and more convinced that there is a new emerging spirituality, a phrase that I mean in two senses.

This spirituality is emerging in the obvious sense—that it's coming into existence from the bottom up, emerging from the grassroots of the changing culture, rather than being designed by anyone, or prescribed from the top.

But it's also an emerging spirituality in a less obvious sense—the sense that it's a spirituality which values the idea of emergence, which understands and endorses bottom-up processes like democracy, or evolution, or freedom, and which doesn't begin by assuming that what is natural is automatically flawed.

So much for "emerging" for the moment. What about "Spirituality"?

It's a word which is much misunderstood, misused, and even maligned. This is partly because most religions have attempted to claim it as their property, and partly because even the secular world often surrenders it to religion without a struggle.

A "spirituality" is, to put it simply, an approach to being human. It generally involves three interrelated aspects:

  1. A worldview: an understanding of the world we live in, how that world works on a fundamental level, and how we relate to it as humans.
  2. A theory of values: a set of assumptions as to how we go about valuing, and the nature of moral choices.
  3. A method: a set of practices which aim at helping an individual put those values into practice, given that worldview.

So, if you think about it, most everyone has a spirituality. For some it's intentional, conscious, and carefully thought out. For others it may go unrecognized, taken as ground rather than figure, but it's there all the same.

Notice that there is nothing in the list above which requires a belief in the supernatural—no mention of souls, or gods, or angels, or even ghosts. That is simply a matter of the worldview, which varies from one spirituality to the next.

There are spiritualities which are completely centered on a supernatural world, even to the near exclusion of the world we live in, including many different Christian spiritualities. But there are also, even within religious contexts, spiritualities such as Zen Buddhism which do not posit any world but this one.

And, of course, there are secular spiritualities which are not even religious, but still have the three, interrelated aspects above.

One reader objected that since the word "spiritual" contained the word "spirit" it must imply the idea of a supernatural essence within humans. I think this is a mistake, for two reasons.

The first is just a fact about language. The roots of a word don't necessarily determine it's meaning. The fact that the "ceil" in the word "ceiling" originally meant "paneling" doesn't mean that a ceiling must be paneled.

The second reason is more subtle, but also more to the point. It's quite true that most of the people who have used the word "spirit" and the word "spiritual", in modern times at least, have had a supernatural worldview, and a supernatural theory about things like the human spirit, but that has never been the only use of the words, nor is it their fundamental meaning.

The word spirit, and its synonyms in other languages, has generally referred to the conscious point of view of a living person—the "part" of us which can experience pain, happiness, sadness, love, hope, etc.

You don't have to have a supernatural worldview to know what this means, and it is a quite appropriate focus for a spirituality, even if that spirituality is completely naturalistic.

After all, why do we even care about our worldview, why do we value one thing over another, why do we choose to act in one way other than another?

Isn't it all, in the final analysis, rooted in our experience of happiness and sadness, pain and pleasure, love and hope?

At least, that's what I think today.

To be continued...