Portals to Spirituality

In the face of a question about belief in God, one possible answer, while not trying to make the response sound too cute or cynical, might boil down to “Well first define God . . . . ” followed by “. . . . yes, no, or need more specificity.”

In any event, the whole matter is likely to then be filed away for consideration later, labeled as important but not urgent, even as Pascal’s Wager looms in the background i.e. if God exists and you believe, you gain eternal happiness in heaven; if God exists and you don’t believe, you risk infinite loss like eternal separation from God or hell; if God doesn’t exist, you’ve gained or lost little.

Now in these autumn years with the arrival of Later and Urgent knocking at the door, what’s sometimes heard is a different sort of hedge with the declaration that while one, perhaps not particularly religious, is deeply spiritual.

What does that even mean as we discuss the role that spiritual actually plays in the rational age in our focus article (click: The Spiritual Is Not Weird) i.e. “The spiritual is not weird because it is completely familiar (emphasis added). We become acutely aware of this dimension of reality when struck by a piece of music, moved by a great piece of art, overcome with a love for someone, engrossed in a work of literature, or witnessing profoundly heroic or altruistic action.”

Completely familiar? Tell that to the so-called naturalists with their cause-and-effect concept of the world, you know, the real world: manufactured things, cars, computers, moon rockets, coffee at Starbucks. How to reconcile that world to the one of the immeasurables: poetry, morals, joy, sanity, death. A glimpse into the ineffable strikes the naturalist as a peek into an unenlightened dark age.

Earlier philosophers applied the term dualism to distinguish (and limit) the application of scientific explanation of the world from that of the immaterial, mental, spiritual plane, the two worlds jostling into a sort of metaphysical intimacy.

We caught a glimpse of this in our MM 4/1/24 Awesomeness discussion, featuring the article A Water-Based Religion, an angler’s account of the way that pursuit offered up a meditation, a kind of prayer, a way of concentrating the mind, while at the same time liberating it – less about catching a fish than releasing the fisherman. Participants brought forth their own examples of similar enchantment as they recounted a certain reverie in their pursuits. Maybe that’s one way to describe a portal to spirituality. It’s just hard to define.

Such as in the way of trying to define a smile. The focus article cites a face, a smile, a look as capturing something far more important than anything explainable as a biomechanical process. It goes on to explore whether that something more is a derivative of an inner spirit or the enchantment resides within the smile itself.

The distinction becomes important as the former would suggest some sort of psychological projection is at play while the latter points to the spirit having its own layer of meaning. The author suggests that it is this something more for which we need language that does justice to the richness of such human experience.

Maybe so but it would seem we might be on the cusp of identifying the nature of spirituality itself with the advent of powerful artificial intelligence and robotics. There have been anecdotal reports of people dumping their respective human partners in favor of some emotional AI attachment. Confirmation of such an artificial “ghost in the machine” would suggest the naturalists were right all along and spirituality, maybe even divinity itself, be relegated to some dark age sentiment.

Dark age sentiment or not, Schopenhauer’s answer is that art provides us a release, if only momentary, from the prison we ordinarily inhabit (click: Aesthetic Connection). The philosopher and the artist are both engaged in truth-seeking, activities that go beyond the world of the naturalists in order to penetrate the surface of things and achieve a deeper understanding of the true nature of the world.

Behold this portal to spirituality.