ON SPIRITUALITY

.........................by Stanley


....For most people ‘spirituality’ simply means the opposite of ‘materialism’. If asked for further clarification they might say that there is more to life than money and possessions; pressed further, they might say it means making room for realities that we don’t understand. A sense of spirituality, they might say, does not allow that kind of scientistic dogmatism that wants to tie everything down, leaving no room for mystery. Spirituality is the sense that there is something invisible beyond our mundane, everyday existence that is, at the same time, vital to sustaining it.
....Such a view has a very long history going back to Greek thought that was later used to formulate Christian theology. This view divides the whole of reality into just two substances or essences. One is ‘mind’ and the other is ‘matter’. Spirituality is just another word for the ‘mind’ category. Basically it means that you are a soul in a body, a ‘the ghost in the machine’.
....Perhaps the value for us moderns is that ‘spirituality’ provides a shelter for all we don’t know, for our sense of the great wonder and mystery of life. And perhaps we need that room where we can house our vast sense of ignorance. That very sense is one of our most important intellectual qualities. Without it a person is a pig-headed and ignorant know-all. With that sense of the unknown one can be truly humble and blessed with curiosity. So maybe the value of the notion of spirituality is that it provides a safe-haven for this most wonderful gift: the knowledge of our ignorance and room for the many-sidedness of life.
....Of course, the question arises: safe-haven from what? I have already suggested: safe from the rising tide of one-eyed scientists, technocrats and know-alls; and for us caregivers of the soul it is a bastion against the behavioural sciences and drug-happy psychiatrists. A sense of the spiritual saves us from falling into the crass materialism that seems to be enveloping our modern helping professions.
....But the idea of spirituality as a defence mechanism undermines the very notion itself. It sets us up as against so-called ‘materialism’; at the same time validating the existence of what we argue against – as all defence mechanisms do.
....The truth is that we are shit-scared of science. It seems to want to turn everything into mechanisms, locking us into a mechanical universe where there is no room for imagination and freedom. We are afraid of materialism. What this fails to understand is that, underpinning science is always a philosophy; and philosophy can always be talked about and questioned deeply. I don’t mean questioning the facts that science has discovered, like physics or evolution, but what at a deeper level they mean or further imply. As Daniel Dennett says, ‘There is no such thing as philosophy-free science’.
....We shouldn’t really run scared. How about being brave enough to consider the universe as one single substance. What would this mean? It would mean that we don’t need the distinction between spirit and matter, between the supernatural and the natural, between science and soul. It would mean that we don’t need a special separate realm to house the unknown. It would mean that the known universe and all that we don’t know is one single continuum.
....Even neuroscience is leaving behind the idea that the body is a machine. Randolph Nesse says that our genetic knowledge now reveals ‘that our central metaphor for the body is fundamentally flawed. The body is not a machine. It is something very different, a soma shaped by (natural) selection with systems unlike anything an engineer would design. Replacing the machine metaphor with a more biological view of the body will change biology in fundamental ways.’ But, he goes on, although the body is indescribably complex this ‘implies nothing supernatural. Bodies and their origins are purely physical.’
....Without actually saying it, all he means by ‘purely physical’ is simply that we do not need another separate supernatural realm to account for it. This is being brave enough to think of the universe as a single continuum.
....In this light ‘physical’ doesn’t have any meaning; any more than ‘spiritual’. They are really superfluous and misleading labels, well past their use by date.
....As an aside, in ancestral times, as in primitive societies today, there was no distinction between spirituality and science. Their science was eminently practical.