Spirituality and atheism

[DeistPaladin]

I agree with Harris that religion has claimed an undeserved monopoly on spirituality and that we can gain the benefits without the woo. Spirituality can mean very natural things understood at the level of the brain, from emotional well-being to a sense of meaning and accomplishment in this life. None of this requires that we follow any religion or embrace any beliefs in magic.

The very word "psychology" translates to study of the spirit. If by spirit, we mean our conscious selves, then yes, spirituality can be a good thing and requires no woo. Helping ourselves to gain a better state of mind can allow us to live healthier and more fulfilling lives.

It reminds me of "The Secret" and how, in the midst of all that woo crap, there is some really good advice: get clear on what your goal is and have confidence you can accomplish it. Even doing nothing else, just getting clear on what we want makes us more likely to attain it and having the confidence we can certainly doesn't hurt either. It's not magic or wishing or "the universe grants you yatta yatta". It's just cause and effect and it's quite easy to understand.

I sometimes wonder if free thinkers could establish a "Church of Reason" that would duplicate the fellowship and provide a place for milestone of life rituals (such as marriage) that religion traditionally provides without any dogma or woo.

[max-greece]

What is Spirituality?

I gave kudos to your question because there seems to be very little consensus on it and its the question I would have asked had you not beaten me to it.

For me it has nothing whatsoever to do with religion. My experiences that I would tentatively label as spiritual probably wouldn't qualify for others.

I can't give you a definition - I have been struggling to put it into words for the last half an hour. My experiences have kind of just happened - when I wasn't expecting them. I certainly can't force it in any way as it is the opposite of forcing something. It really feels like it is something that is happening to you - sometimes from the most mundane causes.

Fucked that up good and proper - sorry and still not given you any explanation.

OK - I'll try some examples:

Voice:

I was a teenager with my mother for the day running various errands. One stop was at the travel agent to book their holiday. The woman dealing with us was attractive, but not that special and heavily pregnant, but her voice.....mesmerized me. She spoke and I melted. I could feel her voice with every part of my body. It wasn't erotic. It was akin to having your soul stroked by a gentle hand in a velvet glove. I didn't get a single word she said. I was lost in the melody of it.

When my mother ran out of questions and got up to go I was quite desolate as I tagged along.

Eyes:

This is kinda corny - eyes meeting across a crowded room. At a party a girl I didn't know, quite literally at the other end of the room. Lost in her gaze. A connection at what felt to be a very fundamental level for a few seconds. The she smiled and the moment vanished. Nothing wrong with her smile - it just broke the spell. We never even exchanged a word - she "got off" with someone else moments later. No idea if she felt the same thing, I like to think she did. I never even knew her name.

Music:

I was an audiophile for many years. This meant I had spent considerable time and money attempting to get the best possible sound quality from my home stereo. It was something of an obsession. I was a member of an audiophile club and had learned to listen to a system analytically. To dissect the listening experience and be able to discern what was good and what was bad about the way a system replayed a given recording.

The problem was that whilst learning that I had somehow stopped hearing the music. I heard amps and speakers, impact and decay, balance of treble and bass, midrange bloom and all the rest of the crap - without ever realizing it was happening.

2 things saved me. The first was hearing test which showed just how much my hearing has actually deteriorated now. I have 50% hearing loss at frequencies above 10 KHz in my left ear and 30% in my right. I can still hear almost all the music but I can hardly be a judge of systems with that equipment on my head.

The second thing was a few nights later. My wife was in bed and I was in the living room listening to Elgar's Cello concerto at a relatively modest volume level. I was drowsy, comfortable and relaxed and kind of drifted off into a reverie. For the first time in years I wasn't hearing the damn system I was hearing the music. One by one the components of the system disappeared from my mind along with the chair, the room, the location, and finally me until eventually it was just the music. I was the music - we'd merged.

When the concerto ended I was no longer an audiophile. Sadly I have never been able to repeat that experience - it was a one off. Maybe one day it will happen again when I am least expecting it.


Now to me all of the above were spiritual experiences. I've had others (one during a BJ) but heaven knows if reading about them would mean anything to you.

I have a feeling what I have just described as spiritual wouldn't qualify for others.

[Angrboda]

If I'm not misrepresenting him, what Sam Harris means by spirituality is what a monk finds in deep meditation. I will confess that I've only just begun studying the physiology of meditation, but that just strikes me as wrong, and largely a product of Eastern wisdom envy. It sounds suspiciously uninformed by his neuroscience, and listening to him talk, I suspect it's not so informed. I suspect he has non-overlapping magisteria in his thinking on such subjects.

[bennyboy]

I'd categorize spirituality as a heightened awareness, either conceptually or emotionally, of the connections and similarities between living individuals, their environment, and each other. So a buddhist who meditates so deeply that he loses the sense of self, is experiencing a removal of the sense of separation between self and other, and feels "in touch" with the universe. Le petit mort has certainly been categorized by some as spiritual, for the same reason, even though it's the result of such a purely physical act. Similarly, artistic appreciation can let us feel "tapped in" to some kind of shared greater truth, and the feeling that the artist has really captured the essence of that truth, even though the artistic medium is always physical.

My point is that Harris isn't (afaik) using the term to talk about actual spirits, or about any metaphysical mystery. He's using the word "spiritual" to talk about a category of experience or mental state; and he's using this word only because the kind of people who have gravitated to these experiences have used it so often in the past.

-edit-
. . . or just let Harris say it:
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/a-ple...irituality

. . . or just check out the title of his new book:
http://www.samharris.org/blog

[x2theone2x]

Spirituality is just as irritating as any other supernatural bullshit. Its basically making shit up because you feel special.

I agree completely with this.

[bennyboy]

Spirituality is just as irritating as any other supernatural bullshit. Its basically making shit up because you feel special.

I agree completely with this.

Neither of you understands what the word means to many of the people who use it, in my opinion.

Spiritual doesn't have to mean, "Dude, my four psychic winds are balanced." "Yeah, dude, my chakras are fully aligned, too." Just thinking deeply about the vastness of space, or trying to understand quantum physics, can lead to a mental state that I'd call spiritual.

---

I think that Harris is being perhaps a bit liberal with the word 'spiritual', but after having seen him speak and debate, I'm quite confident that he's using that term far differently than Deepak Chopra would in this context.

Yes, but I think they would find a lot of common ground about the subjective nature of spiritual experiences, even if they completely disagreeed about what caused those experiences or what their significance was.

[x2theone2x]

I agree completely with this.

Neither of you understands what the word means to many of the people who use it, in my opinion.

Spiritual doesn't have to mean, "Dude, my four psychic winds are balanced." "Yeah, dude, my chakras are fully aligned, too." Just thinking deeply about the vastness of space, or trying to understand quantum physics, can lead to a mental state that I'd call spiritual.

---

I think that Harris is being perhaps a bit liberal with the word 'spiritual', but after having seen him speak and debate, I'm quite confident that he's using that term far differently than Deepak Chopra would in this context.

Yes, but I think they would find a lot of common ground about the subjective nature of spiritual experiences, even if they completely disagreeed about what caused those experiences or what their significance was.

I see the word spirituality as vague, as vague as the word god when not given parameters.

[mralstoner]

I think what Harris is trying to get at is that living literally in the moment and not being a slave to your thoughts is the key to being happy - and that it's something most people don't even consider.

If spirituality just means meditation, mindfulness, impulse control, etc, then all well and good, if that floats your boat. There's nothing spooky about those techniques. They are all useful for improving your emotional well-being.

But there is one spooky angle that Harris takes on spirituality. He ponders whether there's some higher state of being that can permit us to transcend, or break out of, merely pursuing life's pleasures. He gives examples of spiritual masters who seem to have achieved this higher state of being, and he says we should study these guys to see what's going on. Fair enough, study them. But to think that they've escaped from the pursuit of life's pleasures, and they've tapped into some other source other pleasureless motivation that brings them to a higher state of, ahem, bliss, is crazy talk.

Whatever the techniques of spirituality may be, they don't come with some mythical new source of pleasureless motivation that, ironically, just happens to bring forth bliss.

As Jeremy Bentham said: "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do... In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while."

You can't escape from the pursuit of pleasure, and the avoidance of pain, because there are no other motivations in life. None.

[bennyboy]

I see the word spirituality as vague, as vague as the word god when not given parameters.

There's nothing wrong with things being vague, so long as they're not founded in obvious falsehoods or an unwillingness to observe.

If I had to try to describe what it's like to experience something, like enjoying a chocolate bar, I'd be necessarily vague due to linguistic limitations. Harris, and many others, have had experiences that cannot be easily shared. Some kinds of meditative states take a lot of practice and a lot of discipline to achieve, for example. It's not something you can just take a picture of, and say, "See?"

While these things are not literally spiritual, their rareness and their involvement of non-mundane frames of reference merits the term spiritual, IMO, since this is the word that best captures how unique they are to the normal physical processes of hitting things or looking at them under a microscope to investigate them.

[Angrboda]

While these things are not literally spiritual, their rareness and their involvement of non-mundane frames of reference merits the term spiritual, IMO, since this is the word that best captures how unique they are to the normal physical processes of hitting things or looking at them under a microscope to investigate them.

And exactly how does it do that?