Spiritual Schmiritual
So, in my last post, I mentioned my desire to be so divorced from all things spiritual and personal development-ish, that I couldn’t even be called a critic.
But before I could do that, I need to know the terrain I’m leaving.
After all, if I want to get out of the game, I need to know where the edge of the game board is so I can make sure that once I step off, I’m off.
That said, I’m inspired to ask these 2 questions:
What is spirituality?
What constitutes personal development?
These words are used so casually, so flippantly, as if everyone knows what they mean.
But, seriously, what do they mean? What’s spiritual and what’s not? What is the evidence of a more developed person?
I’ve got a few ideas and thoughts, but let’s get the ball rolling with your notions (or what you think people are referring to when they use these concepts).
And… beeee-gin!
April 5th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Here are a few thoughts I’ve had on the subject:
What is spirituality?
The language of altered states.
Non-logical or acausal synthesis of ideas and experiences into some sort of whole, either as a uniformity or a complexity depending on thinking style. Ideas of God, everythingness, allness, oneness….
Sameness, the making of one thing into another and perceiving it that way. The transformation of inconvenient facts into agreements. Confirmation bias.
Root word from breathing, air, inspiration, aspiration, etc. Spirit.
Non acceptance of painful or confusing reality and the search for its opposite.
Happiness borne of confusion, excitement, natural vistas.
Mistaking perception for Truth.
Unusual mental conditions, disfunctions and diseases that create perceptual and cognitive distortions leading to atypical conclusions about reality. Manic, psychotic states, synesthesia, stroke, seizure, mass behavior
A side effect of extreme repetition.
What constitutes personal development?
Reproducibility of states. Repetition. Never-ending verbosity. Compulsive synthesis. Longer, deeper altered target states. Seriousness. Lopsided emotional states. Insistence about Truth and reality as a fixed thing. Grandiose metaphor, imprecise detail and procedure. Inflexibility
April 5th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Whew, an exhaustive list.
Reading through it I think I can put my hand up to most of those at one time or another, and ‘never-ending verbosity’ remains a constant. At the time of the experiences, though, I thought myself probably crazy, not ’spiritual’. I have no idea what spiritual means.
Today, and from the other end of the telescope, I see all these traits as simply part of the human condition and as such inescapable. What is odd is how we can see them so clearly in others but rarely in ourselves. I have no idea what ‘normal’ is either.
What constitutes personal development?–again, no idea, not a concept that has ever caught my imagination. Personal survival comes closer to the overriding ambition of my life.
I do like a flexibility of perspective though, which for me means a freedom to choose to think myself crazy one day, a deep thinker the next, sometimes miserable, sometimes not and just a fallible human most times.
The big unmentionable, of course, is death. I, personally, am developing towards death and doing my best to discard the labels and the baggage before I get there.
April 5th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
I’m not sure to what extent this overlaps with what you’re describing, but what I’ve lost interest in is listening to other people’s belief systems about life or giving particular attention to my own. I know lots of people like that where I’m living now in NC (who don’t spend time discussing such things - let along paying to discuss such things) but it wasn’t so common in Boulder…
April 5th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Spirituality may be simply the thing that each of us has in our hearts that desires freedom and mercy, and to be merciful.
I think it has little to do with religion, ’cause so many religions seek to exclude other religions…which means there’s a set o’ rules, so no freedom. It’s a tough word to define in the face of so much New Age terminology, as it’s so often associated with ego-driven goals - as in ‘learning to be more spiritual’. I don’t think we can be ‘more’ spiritual if the quality is set up as something we must achieve through endless self examination & comparison with others.
Personal development is easy for me to define, but it’s PERSONAL! What it means to me certainly can’t be a blanket definition for all. To me, it’s and finding a way to live & express myself that doesn’t hurt me or others. It’s not something I was ever able to learn from a book!
I agree with Brian, I’ve lost interest in the belief systems of others, and identify less & less with my own because in doing so,
I’ve noticed a lot less mind chatter. I’m in NC, too. I don’t bring these things up too often, they can be flash points for
discussing things I’ve settled for myself — for now, anyway — and I’ve no desire to imprint others with my beliefs.
April 10th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
I’ll take the easy one: personal development.
A person looks at their life and decides their life is [this]. They decide they want their life to be [not this]. If the difference between [this] and [not this] is non-trivial (i.e., more than “I’m in the living room but I want to be in the kitchen), they call the path between “personal development.”
Sure, there are connotations of “growth” and “progress” and some “path forward.” But all it really is is motion.
April 10th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
And the hard one separately and more cynically:
Spirituality means “I have these experiences/sensations/longings/desires/whatever that people have traditionally explored through organized religion. Except I don’t like the organized religions I know about, so I’ll intentionally not use the word ‘religious’ and instead use something close.”
April 10th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
And your non-big questions:
“What’s spiritual and what’s not?”
Well, what bucket system do you want to use to divide up the world? My observation is that ’spiritual’ usually means ’stuff I have an affinity for and that raises certain brain states’ and non-spiritual is everything else.
“What is the evidence of a more developed person?”
As the father of a toddler, I am not sure the concept “more developed” makes sense except to those people who want to believe they’re better than other people. My son doesn’t care about how developed he is. Does that make him less developed, because he can’t speak in complete sentences, or more developed, in the Buddhist child-mind sense? I find I’m happiest when I mimic him and don’t give a damn about ‘more developed’ or ‘less developed’ either.
April 11th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
I like the way Ed defined “personal development.” I could pretty much go with that.
“Spiritual” is harder, yes. How about “unprovable non-physical assertions?” It seems like no matter what, spiritual tends to get into abstracts and unprovable assumptions.
I’m interested in a working definition of “truth.” Do you have one of those?
Thanks!
Stacy
April 12th, 2009 at 9:28 am
In the current context one might say that Truth is the emotion of certainty, the feeling of being right, an emotional verification of one’s perceptions or thoughts as real. Otherwise it can be thought of as the ratio of correspondence or similitude between two perceived objects, hence rationality most clearly exhibited in mathematics.
April 26th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Personal development=ego development, nothing wrong with that as long as we are aware of it and not fooling ouselves.Ego=our ideas about ourselves. Spirituality? I don’t know. I think spirituality is just another form of personal development for most people. Let’s face it, 99.9% of “spiritual” teachings are either about some type of power (over ourselves or others) or about being more at peace with ourselves. As I have stated in other posts it seems that the people who really have powerful “true” experiences i.e. Ramana or David Carse, see that these experience take place outside of the human egoic condition. Real spirituality seems to be death of the self and no one really wants that despite what they say. You can’t teach or impart Truth, only say what it is not. Just my two cents, ask me tomorrow and I may have a totally different answer.
April 28th, 2009 at 10:22 am
Dave says “Real spirituality seems to be death of the self and no one really wants that despite what they say.”
Death of the self would be the death of me, physically and mentally– I’m not too keen on that and a prematurely dead Ramana or David Carse(?) would have been no help to anyone or themselves.
A personal lack of attachment to ideas about myself has made my life a lot easier, I’d recommend it to anyone, ’spiritual’ or secular.
A more mundane way of saying this is ‘don’t take yourself so seriously’–I didn’t need to climb mountains to hear that but I did need to climb mountains to understand it and, most importantly, put it to work. Well worth the effort.
May 2nd, 2009 at 10:23 am
Hey Ellen, thanks for the feedback. I guess in my experience the death of the self actually means an end of the idea of oneself as opposed to the actuality of oneself. What we think about ourselves is often confused with who we really are. To me, again this is just my take on it, “spiritual awakening” is the falling away of the whole idea of an individual self. Of course there is still the functioning of the body and the mind but it is just seen and observed and not bought into as the end all and be all of existence. The life of the body/mind is seen as a part of a whole, or, as Wayne Liquorman would put it, seen as the functioning of Totality.
When we use the term “myself” we set up a “me” who has a “self”. We view our-selves as something that is separate, thus we try to improve our-selves or love our-selves or not take our-selves too seriously. It seem that in awakened people this separation has disappeared. there is no “my” self there is just self in, and as, all things. Self or God or Being (or whatever word you want) is all there is. One of my favorite sayings is “There is no God. There is only God.”
Anywho, I’ve babbled on long enough. I hope I don’t come across as trying to preach or tell anyone how to think/believe. I’m just throwing my understanding out there and I’m certainly not claiming I know any more than anyone else. Oh, one more thing, I highly recommend reading “”Perfect Brilliant Stillness” by David Carse. I’ve read alot of so called spiritual books and this is one of the best. He’s a carpenter from Vermont, no sales pitch, no sat-sangs or self promotion not even a picture of him on the book. A good, honest, direct, in-your-face look at one man’s experience of the inexpressable.