what do you all see in spiritualism?

[robvalue]

It's arbitrarily assigning extra meaning to emotions and experiences. It's trying to leap-frog science by abandoning any kind of rigor and just making things up. Classic woo.

We can study ourselves perfectly well without having to imbue things with magic. We can have amazing experiences, we can meditate and send our mind to all sorts of weird places. But there's no need to make out that it's more than it is.

It need not be that at all. My sense of spirituality is the sense being humbled by the scale and grandeur of our Universe, and understanding how insignificant I am in it -- but at the same time understanding that I'm a part of the Universe too, that we are all parts of it. We're the parts that do the thinking. It's not woo, no matter your preconceived notions; that's simply a dramatic oversimplification, so far as I'm concerned.

Sure, but you're using it in the metaphorical sense. I totally agree. But there's a different, more common usage which is trying to stuff all kinds of mystical properties into everything. I have no problem with people using spirituality as a metaphor, as long as they're clear that this is what they are doing.

It's basically one of those elastic words which doesn't mean anything until the individual has defined it.

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Just to be clear; such usage is metaphorical because it's not talking about any actual existent human spirit. It's talking about such a thing as a way of describing the human experience. It's the only usage of the word that makes any sense to me.