"a way of living"
a directionless inquiry into spirituality, and an inconclusive conclusion.
i’d consider myself a spiritual person. since becoming a fan of nietzsche and philosophy in general during my early college years, i’ve understood the spirit as the essential driver of our passions and our will to go beyond comfort zones for something more in our lives.
but my use of the word “spiritual” appears confusing to new age folk, who are looking for at least a step or two more to the spirit than i can afford it.
so i started looking around the internet for different peoples’ definition of spirituality. here are some that i found:
… Spirituality is the aspect of humanity that refers to the way individuals seek and express meaning and purpose and the way they experience their connectedness to the moment, to self, to others, to nature, and to the significant or sacred. (Christina Puchalski, MD, Director of the George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health)
and
… Spirituality means any experience that is thought to bring the experiencer into contact with the divine (in other words, not just any experience that feels meaningful). (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary, researchers and authors of The Spiritual Brain)
and
Spirituality means knowing that our lives have significance in a context beyond a mundane everyday existence at the level of biological needs that drive selfishness and aggression. It means knowing that we are a significant part of a purposeful unfolding of Life in our universe. (Maya Spencer, MD, Royal College of Psychiatrists)
the pattern i can see between all of them is the argument for something greater in the universe than what we can perceive, which is an intelligent design within the known universe (implied by words like “divine”, “sacred”, “purposeful unfolding of life”)
it’s odd that all these researchers and doctors decided to make such inspirational definitions of spirituality when the dictionary definition is much more inclusive—or at least inclusive of those spiritual ones like myself.
something that in ecclesiastical law belongs to the church or to a cleric as such
clergy
sensitivity or attachment to religious values
the quality or state of being spiritual
and for this fourth line explanation of spirituality, one might ask, “what is spiritual?” and be answered with an uninspired definition like this: “of, relating to, consisting of, or affecting the spirit”.
well, my existential philosophers certainly wrote about topics relating to, consisting of, or affecting the spirit.
despite my lack of use of divine and sacred and intelligent design, i can continue confusing new age folk by saying i’m spiritual.
why are people like myself concerned with the spirit? i believe it’s because the spirit is the non-material stuff of our dreams that leads us to enact such different lifestyles and cultures in the world.
it pushes us to do things our ancestors would never consider doing. it’s the separation of the living from inanimate things.
we all have this spirit—this non-material stuff—that provided us this puzzling opportunity to alienate ourself from the earth. and our bodies can perceive events around us that our conscious mind can’t even fathom until it’s hitting us in the face.
there’s a lot to talk about, a lot to theorize about with regard to our spirits.
it’s this endless well that we can pour in our hopes and wants and desires and fears and hatred and anxieties into. the spirit is everything in our lives, but never quite how we describe it.
i think we’re always a little wrong when we try to put spirit in a box, because it works beyond language.
but then the outspoken spiritual types, like the above specialists in spirit, try to make to define spirituality as the basis of the universe—then they lose me.
it wasn’t my destiny to validate thousands of years of fads in spirituality.
they get invented by someone creative, they stick around for a bit, and they get forgotten—hard. or maybe get turned into a commercial holiday.
consider how tarot as it is today is less than 300 years old, adapted from playing cards with a few shadowy manuscripts using specific card decks as a divination tool.
silly enough is that the first divination-centric deck was created by Jean-Baptiste Alliette in the late 1780s, only because he thought that tarot cards came from Egyptian spiritual practices, even though tarot cards were originally playing cards invented in northern Italy.
the occultist bent on playing cards is beautiful in its own way, and i don’t think it’s a coincidence that the industrial revolution was in its infancy as tarot divination slowly grew, as mass-producing a beautifully-crafted deck for spiritual activities became more and more possible as the revolution progressed into 19th and 20th centuries.
we are a generation born from the commercialization of niche activities, and there’s nothing more niche than the small corners of the internet selling their ideas about how the universe works.
the truth and beauty of the spirit lies in what it does not know—so much! and it spreads its own ideas and systems and hopes into the gaps of our knowledge, in such poignant ways that it circles and around and becomes a spiritual truth unto itself.
in other words, it’s not the form the tarot or the spiritual systems we’ve created that bring truth to the matter of spirit, but the way that we create these systems, and perceive the universe as an extension of the spirit (or vice-versa) is the revealing form of one’s spirituality.
but this also means something else more important: while it is nice and easy to adopt other people’s forms of spirituality, we need to bring something of our own to the table in order to complete a form that truly works for us.
and this is more common than what this essay is making it out to be. imagine that we have 2-3 billion Christian-identifying people on the earth. in truth, we likely have 2-3 billion versions of Christianity, because for all the work that our ministers and priests do to homogenize our spiritual beliefs, we attach onto our religions and spiritualities for very personal things.
the trap is that some people think they’re practicing the most pure form of an adopted spirituality, e.g. Buddhism, Human Design, Christianity, but if each person wrote out a book of their own perception of this spirituality they’ve adopted, you’ll find one specific and important difference that makes it completely unusable to another follower of the same spiritual system.
and this is where dogma occurs: this singular, different attachment for a system’s follower becomes that follower’s reasoning for being a better practitioner of the system than others.
they’re the ones that fully understand, and everyone else is just casually adopting principles for their own convenience.
but it’s not true. that’s just a personality issue. some people are just unaware assholes that don’t realize that they’re in the same camp as everyone else: not knowing.
moving away from that tangent, i want to assert that the beauty of spirit is the natural individuation of its own systems of spirituality. some find it from nature, some from the connection with others, some from connections with things, and some from connections with symbologies. and so on.
we have the responsibility to create our own spirituality, our own universal rules, while also knowing that these rules can and will be broken because we don’t truly know the rules and laws of the universe.
so we communicate and discover new wisdom, and create these approximate models for supposed laws based on these newfound wisdoms—hypothetical laws that will work for how we live, and will be completely useless in the next generation when life has evolved in unknown, unknowable ways.
the best communications we have to date are through symbologies: the tarot, the hexagram, bibles, myths, stories, legends. these are where the beautiful truths of human existence can be transmitted to future generations, through archetypes of the spirit.
that’s why we can’t and won’t let go of spiritual fads, until we forget them entirely—because the best of us will eek out the true wisdom from the fad, the archetypical truths of the human conditions that lies in everything human-created.
so i encourage people to create their own way of living, and not get stuck on the rightness of their way of living, so long as it expresses the internal truth of spirit—as it is, right here, right now—and just as quickly discard these truths for new ways of living as we adapt to our circumstances and become a little bit wiser.
we need to touch on the creations of others to actively steal the greater truths, or else our inner world will narrow and our spirit will become constricted and we’ll react with dogma and spiritual hierarchicalism all over again.
we’ll fall into that trap of thinking we know it all.
a new way of living the spiritual life: recognize what we don’t know, celebrate how we try to know, and learn from the ways we create and invent into these gaps of knowledge.
and i believe that this way of living is certainly “of, relating to, consisting of, or affecting the spirit”—no matter what the doctors say.
thanks for reading,
—dom