A perennial question I have asked over the years is "how much spirituality do we need?" Is going to a church, synagogue, mosque or temple once every seven days enough? Is the practice of daily prayer enough? How often, to what extent, should we try to engage with God?
Recently, I feel I have intuited an answer that resolves this question for me.
But first, what is spirituality?
I would define it as one's subjective awareness of the numinous (that which evokes a sense of the mystical, sublime, or transcendent; awe-inspiring); being aware of the existence of a metaphysical dimension outside of our material, empirically deductible world; and sensing an ultimate purpose which could be called divine.
This spiritual dimension to life often calls through to us by way of intuition – but only if we are open to it. And we need to be able to distinguish true intuition from wishful thinking. On the other hand, we also need to be able to distinguish true intuition from the negating voice of reductive rationalism, "oh, it's just an illusion".
If you do actively seek the divine, and have had a lifetime of spiritual experiences, no matter how weak in intensity or low in frequency, yet have identified them as such, then you'll know what I am talking about. If you haven't, and seek not God – well, each to their own (normal blogging resumes in April).
So, those who feel a calling – how much spirituality do we need? Last October, while walking in a nearby forest, the answer came to me, unbidden.
"I need enough spirituality with which to inoculate myself against the doubts that reductive materialism tries to cast upon my belief in the primacy of consciousness."
Since childhood, I have had faith, at first of a religious nature. As a teenager, I rejected the baggage of Roman Catholicism while maintaining a belief in a spiritual dimension to life. It waxed and waned as I grew older and busied myself with a career and raising a family, but it was always there in the background, waiting for the moment when it could surface fully.
Currently, the existential questions to do with God, the Cosmos and the true nature of reality are the most important drivers in my life, far more important than material considerations. It is sufficient for me to life in material comfort; I seek not luxury, preferring an ascetic lifestyle that allows me to focus on spiritual questions. And this brings me joy, peace of mind and sense of purpose – to more fully unravel the great mysteries of existence.
I am immured to the blandishments of reductive materialism. All the sceptics, debunkers, atheists and materialists who dismiss the spiritual dimension to human life as being a delusion are basing that idea on the assumption that Science Has All The Answers. Clearly, it hasn't. Human knowledge has moved a long way since the 1920s when physicists believed they were only a handful of equations away from understanding everything. Today, debates at the leading edge of science about the nature of dark energy and dark matter (and indeed dark dimensions), about the cosmological constants and the fine-tuned Universe, indeed, about consciousness itself, suggest that those who try to shout down and shut down discussions of spirituality as 'pseudoscience' and 'woo-woo' are not really following the debates.
And this leads me to suggest that an understanding of our spirituality must be grounded in some kind of understanding of science – in particular, physics, cosmology and biology. Reality is far different to that with which we have contact in our day-to-day lives. Curiosity and observation are important characteristics, tools with which we can help make sense of it all.
So - how much spirituality do we need? The bare minimum is "enough to keep us from slipping into negative thought." More than that, and spirituality does indeed starts to bring joy and purpose to life.
Lent 2024: Day two
The Nature of Reality Pt. I
Lent 2022: Day two
Objective/Subjective, Ego and Consciousness.
Lent 2021: Day two
Your life: a miracle? Or something that just happened?
Lent 2020: Day two
The Physical and the Metaphysical; the Natural and the Supernatural
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