What Does Spiritual Mean?

[version]

The spiritual step is to recognise (or imagine) that there isn't a thing and another thing interacting, there's only one thing, that is everything.

That's what I mean by everything's made of the same stuff. It just doesn't feel like some grand revelation or something that fills me with awe or anything like that at the moment. It's like if it turned out the Earth was actually flat. I'd just think "okay, so the Earth's flat".

 

[Corpsey]

What can I say to someone who would shrug off the world being flat?!

You're unconvertable.

 

[version]

:crylarf:

 

[Corpsey]

Anyway, this is the foundation of spiritual thought. The visible material world we see and feel is not the whole of reality. It's an illusion masking a mysterious, ineffable reality. Some spiritual thinkers utterly reject the material world as a consequence (the gnostics considered this world evil, Blake too), others see the material world as manifesting the divine - so it's not just an illusion, but a sort of symbol of or fragment of, a higher reality.

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands—
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

 

[Corpsey]

I've had feelings of interconnectedness and awareness, both on and off acid, but it just felt like "yeah, everything's made of the same stuff, moving around in time and space and corresponding with everything else in various ways". It didn't feel like some ineffable or mystical thing -- just common sense.

So common sense takes us this far - but...

Time and space are made of the same stuff, too. Nothing is moving around "in" time and space. Nothing is made of something other than space. There IS no nothing. (Was there ever? Maybe. It's equally impossible to imagine there was ever nothing, and that there was always something.)

Even time is something that we move through as human consciousness but physicists postulate that time is simply another dimension of the same thing.

Time exists for us, of course. But does it exist in some easily understood way outside of our conscious apprehension of it? (You might well say - how can this possibly matter to us, since time is what we experience... For practical purposes, it is useless. But if we want to find some meaning in our lives, we can't look for it in common sense. Common sense says we're born, live and die, more or less meaninglessly. The spiritualist refutes this - there is some higher, hidden purpose. The religious perspective is (generally) that this purpose directly concerns and benefits us.

 

[Corpsey]

I don't think humans are more important than anything else in the universe, really, except to ourselves. But that doesn't mean that NOTHING is significant. Everything is!

 

[version]

I take a very bland view of this stuff at present. It's just stuff that either exists or doesn't, happens or doesn't and I adapt to it as best I can. I find it very, very difficult to be convinced by any particular belief or interpretation. Maybe there's a higher purpose, maybe there isn't.

 

[Corpsey]

Don't get me wrong I don't walk around thinking about this stuff. Drugs are my conduit to it.

The woah dude effect.

I always had this tendency though - when I was a teenager I used to stare at the sky for hours and feel this great sense of spiritual uplift and wonder.

The Christian myth just seemed entirely pedestrian compared to such Romantic feelings.

 

[Corpsey]

I do wonder what effect the internet has had on the spirituality of people. I'm so immersed in my phone these days that often I forget the material world even exists.

 

[version]

when I was a teenager I used to stare at the sky for hours and feel this great sense of spiritual uplift and wonder.

I get that whenever I look at the sky, particularly the night sky, and get a yearning to be "out there" rather than down here, but it's usually coupled with images of space from film.

 

[version]

luka said something a while back about feeling like he was in a video game, but playing by the rules anyway and that's often how I feel. I struggle to really think of it all as 'real' but go along with it as best I can because it's all I've got.

 

[Corpsey]

WE ARE OUT THERE!

I'm going to baptize you somehow version

 

[version]

Maybe if I tried DMT...

 

[shiels]

One of the most beautiful conceptions of the spiritual i've read by a neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio at the end of Looking for Spinoza
pasted the full section in here, worth 5 mins of your time https://justpaste.it/5c31r

Spiritual experiences, religious or otherwise, are mental processes. They are biological processes of the highest level of complexity. They occur in the brain of a given organism in certain circumstances and there is no reason why we should shy away from describing those processes in neurobiological terms provided we are aware of the limitations of the exercise. So, here are the answers to my friend's questions. First, I assimilate the notion of spiritual to an intense experience of harmony, to the sense that the organism is functioning with the greatest possible perfection. The experience unfolds in association with the desire to act toward others with kindness and generosity. Thus to have a spiritual experience is to hold sustained feelings of a particular kind dominated by some variant of joy, however serene.

The center of mass of the feelings I call spiritual is located at an intersection of experiences: Sheer beauty is one. The other is anticipation of actions conducted in "a temper of peace" and with "a preponderance of loving affections" (the quotations are James's but the concepts are Spinozian). The e experiences can reverberate and become self-sustaining for brief periods of time. Conceived in this manner, the spiritual is an index of the organizing scheme behind a life that is well-balanced, well-tempered, and well-intended.

One might venture that perhaps the spiritual is a partial revelation of the ongoing impulse behind life in some state of perfection. If feelings, as I suggested earlier in the book, testify to the state of the life process, spiritual feelings dig beneath that testimony, deeper into the substance of living. They form the basis for an intuition of the life process.'

Second, spiritual experiences are humanly nourishing. I believe that Spinoza was entirely on the mark in his view that joy and its variants lead to greater functional perfection. The current scientific knowledge regarding joy supports the notion that it should be actively sought because it does contribute to flourishing; likewise, that sorrow and related affects should be avoided because they are unhealthy. This entails the observance of a certain range of social norms—the recent evidence, presented in Chapter Four, that cooperative human behavior engages pleasure/reward systems in the brain supports this wisdom. Violation of social norms causes guilt or shame or grief, all of which are variants of unhealthy sorrow. Third, we have the power to evoke spiritual experiences. Prayer and rituals, in the context of a religious narrative, are meant to produce spiritual experiences but there are other sources. It is often said that the secularity and crass commercialism of our age have made the spiritual all the more difficult to attain, as if the means to induce the spiritual were missing or becoming scarce. I believe this is not entirely true. We live surrounded by stimuli capable of evoking spirituality, although their saliency and effectiveness are diminished by the clutter of our environments and a lack of systematic frameworks within which their action can be effective. The contemplation of nature, the reflection on scientific discovery, and the experience of great art can be, in the appropriate context, effective emotionally competent stimuli behind the spiritual. Think of how listening to Bach, Mozart, Schubert, or Mahler can take us there, almost easily. This is an opportunity to generate positive emotions where negative emotions would otherwise

It is clear, however, that the sort of spiritual experiences to which I a m alluding are not equivalent to a religion. They lack the framework, as a result of which they also lack the sweep and the grandeur that attracts so many human beings to organized religion. Ceremonial rites and shared assembly do create ranges of spiritual experience different from those of the private variety. Let us now turn to the delicate issue of "locating" the spiritual in the human organism. I do not believe that there is a brain center for spirituality in the good old phrenological tradition. But we can provide an account of how the process of arriving at a spiritual state may be carried out neurobiologically. Since the spiritual is a particular kind of feeling state, I see it as depending, neurally speaking, on the structures and operations outlined in Chapter Three , and especially on the network of somatosensing brain regions. The spiritual is a particular state of the organism, a delicate combination of certain body configurations and certain mental configurations. Sustaining such states depends on a wealth of thoughts about the condition of the self and the condition of other selves, about past and future, about both concrete and abstract conceptions of our nature. By connecting spiritual experiences to the neurobiology of feelings, my purpose is not to reduce the sublime to the mechanic and by so doing reduce its dignity. Th e purpose is to suggest that the sublimity of the spiritual is embodied in the sublimity of biology and that we can begin to understand the process in biological terms.

 

[version]

The crossover between science and the spiritual is what I liked about that description of ATP I posted in the Deleuze thread:

"It's packed full of magical secrets—this book was when I realized critical theory is just the rocket science of occultism—modern, hyperspecialized, and hyperocculted in the heart of academia. Exceedingly advanced... many scientific theories are extremely-elaborated theories of an occult phenomenon, that are far far more complex than they need to be because they are denying a few simplifying assumptions that are accepted in occultism. Psychology is a good example: we're down to the neuron level and we still can't talk holistically about mind—but we can speak word patterns which evoke strangely precise and mechanical models of mind which are highly detailed—like a microscope made out of square-logic theory."

Patty suggested you couldn't find 'God' via science in the conspiracy thread the other day, but to me it all seems to overlap.

 

[pattycakes_]

But like, what is God?

 

[craner]

 

[Corpsey]

Half expected Haddaway

 

[kumar]

i have been in quite good spirits recently.

 

[kumar]

A common sense sounds quite spiritual to me.

Version, how does it make you feel that those experiences you described didnt have a “mystical and ineffable” flavour. i mean obviously we would probably all quite like to be able to experience the giddying highs of playing 4d chess with tiamat in a velvet robe at all times but that might be an unrealistic expectation. naturally its difficult to step too far outside your cultural conditioning to get a good sense of this but the many grubby disney-fying hands that have passed down our impressions of what spiritual experience consists have probably left lots of us feeling inadequate. that feeling of a lack of “mystical and ineffable” experience is very useful, amongst other things, in getting people to pay you a grand for a weekend retreat, for instance.

one thing i would be curious to find out is whether many problematic old anthropologists factored in the possibility of piss taking or ironic detachment when studying the spiritual practices of certain indigenous cultures. maybe there would have been lots of people who had a similarly mundane appreciation of “interconnectedness”, who had more of a sarcastic relationship with the spirits. Sincerity might not be the best mode for communicating with them.