Chapter 13
Irreligious, not unspiritual
There are four questions of value in life . . .
What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made?
What is worth living for, and what is worth dying for?
The answer to each is same. Only love.
G. G. Lord Byron.
When Peter Griffin, the main character in Family Guy, gets stuck in a lift with God he strikes up a conversation and asks some burning questions:
Peter: Hey, do Atheists go to Hell?
God: (slightly subdued) No.
Peter: How about people who say they are not religious but they are spiritual?
God: (vehemently this time) Straight to Hell. To the boiler room of Hell. All the way down. Sometimes I pull them out just so they think everything is going to be okay but then I put them right back in.
Peter: Good. Good. That makes me happy.
Now, anyone who knows anything about Family Guy knows that Peter is a very bad man indeed. Or at least he's a character with absolutely no moral content, disturbingly residing in the traditionally patriarchal position, where such a character could, in the real world, do the maximum of emotional and physical damage. Peter’s universe is a kind of Tom and Jerry-style cartoon world where the constant outrages, while including acts of physical violence, tend to be moral or ethical. Spirituality is not really under fire in this programme any more is than everything else to do with contemporary values. The satire here is levelled at those who use the lazy assertion that they are ‘spiritual but not religious’ to give themselves a pseudo-devout aura. Free of the encumbrance of actual concepts they might be called on to defend, they can manufacture a false sense of affinity with the genuinely religious whenever it suits them. It is a just-too-convenient marker of a person who wishes to appear otherworldly but has no intention whatsoever of making a commitment to that.
The writers of Family Guy are right in two ways here. Firstly that the Christian God, if he existed, would certainly despise this position. In the Christian mythos, a committed demonist could also say he was ‘spiritual’ in this sense. Being ‘spiritual’ means nothing more than acknowledging or claiming you have a ‘spirit’ and, by extension, that other ‘spiritual’ things, however nebulous, also exist. God’s interest is really only in a full dedication to the spiritual narrative he promotes. It is also understandable that we ourselves might recoil from this ubiquitous blandness since we suspect it lacks content. But I’m going to suggest that, despite the historical depredations of religions and of lazy modern pseuds, the notion or desire that lies behind it still has value. All humans long for a profound connection to the universe and the experience of transcendence. No religion owns this fundamental desire. Without it they could never sell us their nonsense.
To be genuinely spiritual without being religious might be taken to be a good thing. After all, to claim this is primarily to signal a rejection of all the doctrinal nonsense and historical baggage attached to the religions. This is definitely a very positive step. And if people want to signal this without losing the sense that there is a transcendent aspect to life then I think that’s also a positive thing — certainly an improvement on a full religious commitment.
However, it is also often used as a gateway for people to select and combine any items of religious nonsense they choose. It might even possibly include vague thoughts about the abstract, hands-off God of the Deist. This seems to me to operate as a kind of extramural annex of the vague garden. Here perhaps it is possible that people who are nervous of affiliating themselves with a religious commitment might find things in common with those in the process of disaffiliating themselves from such a thing. In this situation, conversations between the two groups may be polite and understandable only as long as they remain absolutely superficial.
For many believers, the real consolation of their adherence to religion is found in the experiential — the ‘spiritual’ perception they believe it gives them. Here they seem to feel something beyond the normal run of their conscious thought processes. Something that touches their emotions in a way that they find mysterious or hard to grasp. To name this as transcendence or the feeling of the numinous is not to give it too grand a stature though most people of faith would identify it simply with the presence of the Holy Spirit. Whether this is the warm fuzzies felt in worship singing, communal encouragement, affirmation by those one respects or speculating on ‘divine’ messages, we can acknowledge that this feeling may indeed be experienced in some religious gatherings. We may also agree that this speaks to that general human need for a feeling of beyondness, transcendence, or the immanence of something deeply meaningful outside what we can see, and on the edges of sensation.
But in granting this, there is one absolutely crucial thing we must remember: anything that is genuinely good in our religious experience can be found outside the faith. If we had experiences we call ‘spiritual’ in the context of church meetings then we may still have these as we please, given that we set up the right conditions. Most believers I have known though testify to finding their deepest experiences of God not in church but in nature, in the comforts of family, in music and the arts, or even in physical ecstasy. Since even the believers commonly acknowledge that anyone can experience a sublime transcendence in the deep contemplation of these precious but everyday things, the unbeliever is entitled to ask whether or not this is actually all we mean by the ‘spiritual’ experience of divine immanence. If these natural transcendent moments are what is actually signified by the term ‘God’s presence’, then it is time to stop claiming that religious gatherings can offer any special form of access to the experience. Churches may harbour remarkable sentiments of fellowship of course and this also may provoke a certain experience of transcendence but the very fact that this same experience can be had outside specifically religious contexts, in families, friendships and other camaraderies, suggests conclusively that the religious element of this experience is superfluous. At best it is a burdensome accretion; at worst a distorting perversion of the virtue.
It's worth remembering too that for many believers there's not necessarily much ‘spiritual’, in this experiential sense, about religion. It can be a daily grinding discipline of rote or liturgical prayer, scriptural learning or memorisation, and physical religious services and observances that have a very material stultifying effect on the practicalities of everyday life. God himself might be invisible, but to all intents and purposes is a merely material agent in the real world of the fundamentalist disciple. They might in fact be taught to despise what others might call a spiritual approach as mere ‘enthusiasm’, one that is to be avoided since it leads to the exaltation of human experience, and therefore to idolatry. This was much more common in historical Christianity than it is now and certainly finds a home in modern day mainstream Islam.
This religious approach should not surprise us too much since there's nothing very spiritual going on in the Bible itself. The Bible writers knew enough about the dangers of spirituality to make sure that all of the inducements for good conduct and penalties promised for the bad were about as grossly material as they could possibly make them. One is either going to live a long life in a land flowing with milk and honey or one is going to be put to the sword in the most horribly capricious way, possibly just for living in a place God wants to invade for himself and his people. You might inherit the temples and flocks of the dispossessed for doing God’s will or you may be stoned to death for acting on normal human desires, or be torn apart by bears for unwisely mocking a bald prophet.
The great biblical concept of submission to God is woven out of imagery of the rewards of abundant food and length of life and punishment by terrifying tortuous death, not from any great spiritual insight. The New Jerusalem of the Bible, ‘Heaven’ itself, the promised Holy City of the new kingdom, God’s final solution to the problem of the universe, is depicted as a place of gross earthly riches. Even its walls and gates are made of the things that acquisitive people typically want: gold, pearls, precious jewels and so on. Clearly the writers of these ancient texts could think of nothing more profound to express the nature of oneness with God than the jangly, bright things people adorn themselves with when they’ve got nothing decent to spend their money on. Again in the Christian afterlife we are promised a great mansion to knock about in, a real estate dream, a desirable residence, a property, even our own private space. This is surely one of the most material desires of societies ancient and modern — a room of one’s own.
As Jesus himself says, ‘blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit great spiritual understanding and self-knowledge’. Ah but sorry, of course he doesn’t say that does he? It’s the Earth that they’re going to inherit: the land and all that signifies. This can only mean a material blessing, in this case of land freed from its inconvenient inhabitants by genocide. That is unless the Jehovah’s Witnesses are right and Jesus is actually roasting the meek here by promising them only the Earth while the 144,000 ‘elect’ will inherit a better, heavenly reality. For the JWs, eternal bliss is reserved only for the best of the door knockers. The stupid loser meek can dig in for the long haul. This is a vast shop of nonsense with shelves at many levels.
To avoid this obvious garbage, and the vagueness that infuriates God in Peter’s lift, and to discover real value in the concept, we need to do a little digging around the word ‘spiritual’. In the ancient world, when philosophers debated what it was that made things move, they concluded it was some quality they called anima – usually translated now as ‘soul’. This is where we get the words ‘animal’, ‘animation’ and so on. For Plato, anima was subdivided into the categories of reason, spirit and appetite. These are what we might call intellect, drives and so on. Later, Aristotle wanted there to be different kinds of souls for plants, animals and humans, and called these, in order, the nutritive, the sensitive-locomotive, and the rational. You may see that the main impetus here is to identify the impetus of all activity, from the movements of plants to the vicissitudes of human desire. Until Isaac Newton’s utterly revolutionary explanation of the laws of motion handed the physical universe over to scientists, it was the philosopher’s job to speculate on such matters. It wasn’t quite so illogical as we might think then for ancient people to worship the forests and the mountains and the lakes. The causes of the animation they saw in nature were unknown and mysterious to them. As far as they knew, there were unknown purposes in these animating spirits. Although the act of venerating these materialities may have given form to humankind’s first animist religions, they seem to have encouraged a general respect for the bountiful natural world and its as-yet unmolested ecosystems. Also, their mediating forms of sun, moon, tree, lake and hill had at least the benefit of being real.
Christianity and the other monotheisms sucked the sacred element out of the natural world millennia ago when they reserved the spiritual quality for their one God, and his angels and demons. His spiritual will for the natural world, his ‘plan’, was of course a cipher for whatever pertained to human greed in the physical world. Animals, for instance, were very rarely celebrated in this plan, mainly acting as fuel for its sacrificial machinery or as examples of absolute otherness: the spotless lambs and monstrous leviathans of biblical imagery. The Bible positions humankind as dominators of nature. We are not a part of it but rather share something of the nature of the angels, though ‘a little lower’ in quality. Nature in early Christian thinking was related to the concept of the ‘wilderness’, an exemplary place of danger where the pure one goes to be tempted by Satan, as Jesus did when flying up his impossible mountain to survey all the nations of his flat Earth. Christian saints who ventured out into the arid regions of the earth or immured themselves in some moist island cave were going out into the territory of Satan to fight their imaginary spiritual battles. The cries of vultures, seals and seabirds were their tormenting demons.
This was quite the case until the advent of Romanticism in the 18th century when the place of nature was renegotiated in Western thinking by its philosophers, scientists and artists. Now Nature often went capitalised. It was either measurable and manageable, in the way of Newton and the scientists, or it was an arena of sensation and experience of the beautiful and the sublime, for its writers and poets. For the latter especially it was filled again with an animating spiritual presence. Re-anthropomorphised as a nurturing mother, Nature was one who ‘never did betray / The heart that loved her’, as Wordsworth sang,
'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.
This could easily be, and indeed was, attributed to a kind of religious pantheism which brings us again very close to the animism of the ancients. If God is omnipresent as Christian orthodoxy states, then he is in everything. It is only a small step beyond this in one direction to say that gods are in everything (animism), or in another direction to say that everything is inside one God (panentheism). The idea that he simply is everything though—pantheism—is not a fully theistic position at all but invites a full materialism in which ‘God’ is really just the universe itself and has no spiritual being outside it. This was essentially the position of Einstein, following the philosophical genius of Baruch Spinoza.
Thanks to the contemplative intellects of true scientists like Newton though, we now know why things move. Our imaginations can afford to range elsewhere. Modern perspectives, insofar as we can call them spiritual, have put the awe and wonder back where it belongs and where it began, in the incredible outpourings of natural phenomena themselves, now divested of the need to add an unnecessary dimension to the causes of their motion. This doesn’t for a second reduce the awe content of the universe, a magnificent volcanic explosion or a supernova in the heavens. Humans now understand the tectonic movement of the Earth’s surface and only the very dullest or most cynical minds around in the 21st century could possibly imagine that a natural disaster like an earthquake resulting from the collisions of continent-sized plates was the result of a god’s anger. Or that it could be accurately aligned with a given society’s failure to persecute homosexual people (for instance).
Notwithstanding the depredations of the ignorant, the concept of spirit does seem still to be useful to us in many ways, and not just for historical reasons. The old idea of us having, or even being, a spirit is related to the concepts of soul, psyche, mind, personality and so on. These useful concepts are intimately interconnected. Each is really an approximation of a thing that, despite our advanced knowledge, humans have not yet properly defined: our consciousness. Even so, we find we can still usefully speak of this phenomenon, though the conversation does not benefit from related religious concepts like sin, salvation, possession or wandering ghosts. We know what we mean when we say that particular sports team, workforce or project has a great ‘team spirit’ (a combination of morale and comradeship perhaps); when a building or institution has a particular ‘spirit’ or feel’ (to mean ‘atmosphere’ or ‘immanent influence’); when a person has a great ‘spirit’ about them (to mean ‘determined, positive willpower’); when an artist gives a ‘spirited performance’ (one full of energetic commitment); when a debate is ‘spirited’ (lively and energetic); when a person has a ‘fighting spirit’ (strong-willed, refusal to surrender); when a traveller is ‘free spirited’ (without emotional encumbrances); or when a beautiful or brilliant person lights up a room with human warmth and we call them a ‘blithe spirit’. The concept is not really something we can do without.
Some Atheists assert that the experiences and feelings that we call spiritual can be accessed, utilised, and possibly even controlled by meditative and contemplative practises that may in themselves be ancient but are nevertheless susceptible to scientific study. In his book The End of Faith, the neuroscientist Sam Harris suggests that some spiritual experiences, especially the ones that produce sensations of oneness and connectedness with all things, are rational and will eventually be neurologically explainable. Harris shows how the conditions of consciousness achievable through meditative practice are now scientifically measurable. In this area, the controlled use of psychedelics is also becoming a fascinating area of research into cognitive states. Expect much more of this to come. The science in these cases is in its late infancy but looks set to become increasingly important to the understanding of consciousness itself.
The primary meditative mechanism suggested is fairly simple to understand and quite difficult to perform with any consistency. It is to perceive your thoughts as they arise and see yourself as separate from them. Harris cites Eastern sources that describe this process in detail to support his thesis that such practice is superior to Christian or Islamic spirituality. Now we may have little argument with this per se but we must be alert to the extent to which the practice remains free of other religious accretions, such as supposedly universal rules, doctrines of superior lives to come, donations to temples, a separate priestly class, or an ‘enlightened’, spiritually elite master race. Any human reaching after heightened awareness of themselves and the universe and increased compassion is to be encouraged, but not if the result is detachment from this the only real world in favour of a hoped-for Nirvana or Utopia. Worse still would be the possibility that we might be persuaded to detach ourselves from the responsible connection with our actions (a technique used by the SS and Japanese zen practitioners in WWII to facilitate horrors).
An illustration offered is as follows. If you liken your consciousness to a pond full of fish, with the fish being your memories, thoughts and feelings, it is easy to think of yourself as the fish. In fact it is better to think that your sense of personhood is actually the water of the pond in which the fish swim. The metaphor of course is limited but it provides us with a picture we can at least to deal with. It is a measurable fact that you consist of something more than just your thoughts, feelings, memories, and so on. This also might be comforting to people who feel that they are bound by distressing or traumatic memories or events of the past. It also provides a meditative space between the real you and the things that you think. If we like, we can identify this space as spiritual.
To take this a step further, it is also possible to demonstrate that the pond itself - your consciousness - is really just a convenient and necessary construction that allows your brain to make sense of myriad sensory stimuli. It does this by filtering out a huge amount of information to provide you with an amount of awareness (and unawareness) that you can cope with and that will be most useful. For evolutionary purposes this means in helping you to survive and breed. For instance, human sight perception is restricted to electromagnetic radiation in the visible wavelengths of about 380 to about 750 nanometres, while our hearing is only effective between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz. Other creatures are not so restricted. Once we know that, however clever and self-aware we might be, even our very consciousnesses are heavily redacted versions of what is really going on inside and around us, we should at the very least have some humility about what it is possible for us to know about the world.
Knowing your restrictions is the first step towards knowing yourself. St Paul was right in saying ‘we see through a glass, darkly’ but wrong to follow this with unfounded claims of heavenly revelation. The glass is indeed dark, because our brains are protecting us from sensory overload. They filter reality into useful nutrients to feed our evolutionary survival. When the brain switches off, or its filter is bypassed by psychedelics, we may well perceive more of the universe, but it must be of less use to us or evolution would have given us that facility in the everyday. It seems the more we see, the less we see. The wider the vision, the less specificity that vision affords. Believers making claims of spiritual perception as knowing the mind of God then, or even more outrageously what that God wants us to do, should take an extremely hard look at themselves and ask whether or not their claims of such specificity are remotely credible. If on the other hand a believer wants to turn this back and say that God himself might well be outside of our limited perception, then they need to explain why such a self-proclaimed self-revealer hasn’t revealed himself in a way that human beings can perceive in any meaningful way in the everyday. True spirituality it seems, if it exists at all, can only exist outside the perceptual boundaries of all these truth-claims.
Though the spiritual experiences of our religious pasts may still be valuable, the structures and systems of belief that form their familiar accretions are now toxic to us. Even moderate religious activity is now threatening the survival of the human race. As much as Harris advocates a spirituality outside faith, the critical perspective that he also offers is focused on the geopolitical dimension of apocalyptic faith — principally for Harris the Islamic kind with its opposition to liberal democracy and human rights. Alongside the serious threats coming from Islam, Christianity currently flirts with the apocalyptic in the support some crazed believers give to extremist Jewish settlers in Palestine who believe that by finally occupying the whole land they will hasten the coming of the messiah. Their Christian collaborators meanwhile believe that the same thing will hasten the end of the world itself, which is something they long for. At the time of writing, these sentiments are being exercised in ever-more extremities of terrorism and genocide in that holiest land. What such fanaticism offers cannot be accurately described as spirituality. Rather it wants an essentially physical experience, the conquest of land, the subjugation of infidels, messianic ecstasy, the return of Christ or the Twelfth Imam, or to be Raptured up into the heavens to meet Jesus, all of which are irrefutably material responses to the world. Real spirituality is only accessible when such things are relinquished, not because they are physical but because they impose conceptual limits on an experience that should be free of boundaries and completely natural. Spirituality as we are defining it involves the experience of transcendence. By its very definition, transcendence can be bound by no such physical limits.
The feeling experience of transcendence may well involve some degree of the dissolution of the self in a larger whole. Many human experiences offer this. You might remember the feeling of being in a crowd of people with similar accents at a great football match, or in an audience watching a fantastic band, orchestra or opera and loving the same music at the same time, riding its euphoria and human tragedies together. You might recall being a part of a large celebration, a mass political movement or a reenactment of an historical event that allowed you to lose yourself in the sense of the whole. The options for transcending the immediate by dissolving oneself in a mass of other humans are endless and the experience can be overwhelmingly beautiful and certainly what we can call spiritual. We must only beware of one thing for our own safety: at no point should we trust any person, event or organising principle that asks us to switch off our minds or relinquish our precious sense of personal responsibility. These are all we have to guard us against those who want us to remain as children or act as sheep in order that they might dominate our moral selves, weaken our resistance to indoctrination and drain our bank accounts.
Whatever our perspective of the ‘spiritual’, it is undeniable that humans crave a sense of meaning in life and have often applied this term to that search. So to find out what we are really talking about when we are talking about the spiritual, let’s dig a little deeper in and orient ourselves in the historical field of language. On this brief excursion we will find odd things lurking: the dead concepts that can hang around in a language, glossed over by a sheen of time, cloaked with the respectability of antiquity. As we dabble just a little in the mysteries of etymology – the study of the historical roots of words and the development of their meanings – we can hope to find clues to which concepts might be useful to us, which ones are sheeted dei ex machina, and which are just the janitor in disguise. Words are like little exotic animals, each with their own ecosystems of related meaning and concepts that shift over time. A quick survey of the field in which a word lives, its defining contexts, can give us a better sense of the meaning of any term. This is especially important with a word like ‘spirituality’, which is by its nature elusive, nebulous and subjective.
The everyday modern meaning of the word ‘spiritual’ is ‘that relating to the human spirit or soul’ and, by this definition, also that which is ‘opposed to material things’. This comes into English primarily from the Latin spiritus which relates to the ‘breath, breathing, wind or air’, all things once equated with the idea of spirit. This Latin term may originally have been an onomatopoeic word that mimics the sound of a breath, and it is from this that we get our words ‘respiration’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘aspiration’. Focusing on the importance of the breath in human physiology, it is easy to see how ancient societies came to think of it as synonymous with life – deny it to a person for just a few minutes and death surely follows – and from there to regard it as sacred. Of this wind vast edifices have been built.
The use of the word ‘spirit’ in English derives mainly from passages in the Latin Vulgate Bible of 382 CE, where the translator, Jerome of Stridon, uses the word spiritus in place of the Greek pneuma and the Hebrew ruah, both including the sense of ‘breath’. In passing, we might notice that the word ‘Vulgate’ has the same root as the word ‘vulgar’ and the version was compiled to try to get the older scriptures into what later translators would call a language ‘understanded of the people’. In this case, that meant primarily the clergy, who were only very rarely versed in the ancient languages and some of whom were barely versed in their own. This was a step in the right direction, but many scholars regard the Vulgate in an even worse light than the ‘Good News’ versions of the 1980s, both of which often bastardise concepts apparently dear to the original writers. Here, the word Jerome translated spiritus lost something essential from the original languages, something that may be crucial to us on our journey: a sense of the physicality and embodiment contained in the two earlier terms.
To breathe is a life-giving, yet fully physical act. By the mid-13th century, the English word ‘spirit’ had gained senses of ‘life, the animating or vital principle in man and animals’ and of ‘inspiration’ and the ‘breath of life’. From there it came to denote ‘life’ itself. A hundred years later it had also come to designate ‘character, disposition; way of thinking and feeling, state of mind; source of a human desire.’ The use of ‘spirit’ for a ‘supernatural immaterial creature; angel, demon; apparition, or invisible corporeal being of an airy nature’ is also attested from this time. By the late 14th century, the word came to be identified further with ‘divine substance, divine mind, divine power, God’ including ‘Christ’ and ‘the Holy Ghost’ and by extension from this to the idea of ‘the soul as the seat of morality’.
So far, we may be able to see from which historical periods our concepts of the spiritual derive their qualities, and their roots in the physical. But we are still only in the 14th century and other things are also wandering about in the shadows, haunting this increasingly elevated concept. The sense of ‘spirit’ meaning a ‘ghost’, specifically a ‘disembodied soul of a person’ imagined as wandering among the living or haunting them, also comes in the late 14th century and returns the word to other related prehistoric root words. In Old English for instance, the word ‘gast’ meant ‘breath; good or bad spirit, angel, demon’, and also just ‘person’. This came from the more ancient Paleo-Indo-European (PIE) word-root ‘gheis’, that was used to form words involving excitement, amazement, or fear. Most Indo-European words for ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ also refer to supposed supernatural apparitions, as do the Greek ‘phantasma’, the French ‘spectre’, or the Polish ‘widmo’ which derives from the Old Church Slavonic ‘videti’ meaning ‘to see’. Other related concepts are the French ‘revenant’, literally meaning ‘returning’, and the Old Norse ‘aptr-ganga’, the ‘back-comer.’ Spookily enough, the associated Breton word ‘bugelnoz’ means ‘night-child’.
Interestingly related to all of this are the historical senses of the term ‘freedom of spirit’ originally meaning ‘freedom of choice’ (from the 1580s) that includes the senses of ‘animation’ and ‘vitality’, and by 1600 includes ‘frame of mind in which something is done’ and ‘mettle, vigour of mind, courage.’ The secular sense of the spirit as the ‘essential principle of something’ begins in the increasingly sceptical and scientifically literate era dating from the 1680s onwards. Through all of this, we can see how the concept shifts about but it is perhaps these latter senses, speaking of freedom, animation, vitality and the animating frames of mind associated also with courage, that seem to make most sense for modern thinkers.
Now let’s take a deep breath and broaden the context with words cognitively related to ‘spirit’ and see how these relate to the concept we are developing. We can start with ‘immaterial’ whose etymological roots are found in ‘matter’ and ‘mother’ to mean something like ‘unmothered’. ‘Psyche’ is an animating principle in close relation to the body. ‘Incorporeal’ derives from the root ‘kwrep’ (PIE) as meaning ‘body, form, appearance’, with the ‘in-’ prefix negating those. ‘Intangible’ negates its root ‘tag’, meaning ‘to touch, handle’ so designating the untouchable. ‘Other-worldly’ and ‘unworldly’ inflect a root from the Old English ‘woruld’, that describes ‘human existence, the affairs of life, the human race, mankind, humanity’. This came from the Proto-Germanic ‘weraldi’ , a compound of ‘wer’, simply meaning ‘man’ (a root still found in the word ‘werewolf’ – the man-wolf) plus ‘ald’ meaning ‘age’. ‘Ethereal’ comes from the 1510s and refers to ‘the highest regions of the atmosphere’ with the sense of ‘light and airy’ arriving in the 1590s. The figurative meaning of ‘ethereal’ to mean ‘spirit-like, immaterial’ dates from the 1640s. Its roots are in the late 14th century from ‘ether’ – the ‘upper regions of space’ from Old French ‘ether’ and Latin ‘aether’, meaning ‘the upper pure, bright air; sky, firmament’. These seem to be derived from the Greek ‘aithēr’ meaning ‘the upper air; bright, purer air; the sky’ (opposed to ‘aēr’ – ‘the lower air’), and coming in turn from ‘aithein’ meaning ‘to burn, shine’ from PIE ‘aidh’, ‘to burn’. ‘Transcendent’ enters the language around the mid-15th century from Latin transcendentem to mean ‘surmounting, rising above’. ‘Mystical’ comes from the Latin mysticus, ‘of secret rites’ and denotes something of spiritual significance from the 1520s onwards. ‘Numinous’ is a curious one, dating from the 1640s and coming from the Latin numen indicating ‘divine approval expressed by nodding the head’, from nuere ‘to nod’. ‘Metaphysical’ meanwhile originates with the medieval Latin metaphysica to mean ‘abstract, speculative, apart from ordinary or practical modes of thought’ or ‘the science of the inward and essential nature of things’ and enters English around the 1560s.
As we can see from the above list, the vast weight of the network of terms to describe the concept we are handling display a healthy element of materiality. They describe breathing, wind, air, sky, space, firmament, life, character, disposition, ways of thinking and feeling, states of mind or sources of desire. They speak of appearance, animation, vitality, determination, mettle, vigour, courage, and the animating principles of the body. Where terms related to the spiritual negate physical things, they posit nothing much beyond it, describing unmothered, unbodied, unformed, or untouchable states, the abstract and the speculative. The nearest we get to action is the nodding god of the numinous, offering this as a sign of divine assent, presumably, to whatever your desires were before you sought it – the permanent yes genie of your needs.
On the other side of the spiritual balance are all the terms related to the walking dead, disembodied souls, good or bad spirits, angels, demons, supernatural apparitions, immaterial creatures, and airy, invisible, yet somehow still corporeal, beings. It’s interesting that the common word ‘ghost’ came from words simply denoting excitement, amazement and fear. This is a deep etymological record of how such disembodied spirits were anthropomorphically reverse-engineered from feelings excited by some physical experience, rather than the other way around. Then, within this extensive field of terminology and ideas surrounding the topic, we have an almost marginal sense of the spiritual as has since been related to divine substance, mind, or power, specifically to God, Christ and the Holy Ghost, and out of which emerges the idea of the eternal soul.
We can see from this brief linguistic overview that the nature of the spiritual has meant many different interconnected things over the course of Western history, but is rooted in the material and the experiential. To reduce this to the tightly-defined set of propositions contained within any of the theisms is to do it a deep injustice. For most of us reading this book, the religious context has probably been our main ground of spiritual experience. For us to leap beyond those boundaries we need to rediscover some of the other useful material senses in which spirituality has best served humankind in the past.
It is a good thing for people to grasp at what is beyond their reach. It can also be good for humans beings to fantasise about that goal as they reach out for it. Robert Browning says ‘Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for? Though the goal may seem or actually be unreachable, it must however be a real thing. Without this, voluntarily placing the value of your life in the midst of a reached-for fantasy can destroy its spiritual potential. When we invest the worth of our whole lives, and even also those of our families, in a religious project with unreal and unrealistic goals, one that requires the application of all our energies, there arises a natural desire for security that causes us to seek ever-greater certainty. In that way, we know that what starts off as good faith ends up as its opposite: an illusionary assurance in the qualities of the unknown which is detrimental to our accessing the multiple possibilities and opportunities of the real world. In the same way, the quality of the spiritual journeys of those staying within the faiths is restricted by the ever-shrinking territory available for their travel.
In church, when people ‘spiritualise’ concepts or situations, they often do so because they don't understand them, because they're trying to control them, or for both of these reasons at once. This leads to a conception of the spiritual which indicates something merely inaccessible or unspeakable. Something to be guarded about because it is not properly understood by those who claim to be our guides in that sphere. In stark contrast to this, we need to keep in mind that the unlimited universe is the field of our spiritual exploration, in all of its possible manifestations. Only in this way can we hope to find our spiritual selves, in the best-negotiated meanings of that word. We do this in reaching after the transcendence of ever-greater understanding the universe; in the arts of beauty and dread that we use to express our lived experiences; in exploring the deepest possible connection with nature in the body; in the subtle mechanisms of the best of our relationships. These very human spiritual experiences have been around since long before there was such a thing as religion, since before the word ‘spirit’ had accreted its restrictive superstitions, the night-children of our dreams, that made us think it was something fearful, exclusive or unreachable.
In finding a spiritual path as atheists, we may wish to explore this fundamental truth: that the spiritual is physical. Wherever you think spirit is located on the spectrum from totally imaginary to material essence, it is apparent that it is primarily experienced in the manifest mechanisms of mind and body, the intellect, the will and the emotions. In this way we may return to its early sense of relationship with the breath that is found in the original Latin spiritus, the Greek pneuma and the Hebrew ruah. We speak of things taking our breath away when they are so wonderful as to make us momentarily forget to function. We need to look for and be sensitive to those breathtaking moments and experiences in life that lead to inspiration and fire our aspirations. Actively seek them out and savour them. This doesn't have to mean taking a gap-year out to backpack through Tibet (though it might). It can be found if we cultivate a sense of the wonder at a beautiful conversational communication between friends, or a revelatory understanding of a new concept in science, history, or technology. It can be found in creating art we are proud of, writing a poem, a blog, or a book. It can be experienced in those moments where we really live, those well-earned golden days of leisure, the proudest moments of parenthood, the revelations of the depths of human love and commitment, or even the painful epiphanies of human frailty. In all of these we need to create a space of reflection and in a sense commune with the moment in which we are living, being aware of that living in the rhythms of our bodies. Every one of us can afford at those points to pause for ten breaths and practise this spiritual awareness in celebration of our own existence, here and now, on a fragile planet, for just a few revolutions of its nearby star.
Breathing is a physical function - the lungs expand to create a vacuum - but at the same time it is almost always unconscious until mentioned. There is no doubt that this life-giving, body-shaping and consciousness-altering function of drawing something invisible into the body and mysteriously using it to stay alive inspired those early connections between breath and the sacred. If we take a breath, we could mention all the arts of speaking, singing and playing instruments that depend directly on this essential physical function. To reclaim these things as spiritual is to resurrect them to a new beauty. Things once lost to mere religion can be recovered, and what seemed a death rattle in the throat of human aspiration can be transformed into artistic and technological wonders.
In the past, when we have broken the power of the faiths that constrict our knowledge and experiences, human intuition and expression has leapt energetically forward to inspire generations. Think of the explosion of knowledge that has taken place since we struggled free of theocratic restrictions on what should be known in the 18th and 19th centuries. Or of the massive advances in the power and scope of popular music throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, once the original blues escaped the strictures imposed by the churches and great traditions were melded in the musical expression of love and pain and all that is human.
As mentioned, some of the ancient practices of breathing and reflection centred on the breath also have measurable beneficial effects. On what makes life worth living, the ancients were not always wrong. Age-old breathing practices like tummo, sudarshan kriya and pranayama can have demonstrably beneficial effects on the body. Tummo breathing combines visualisation techniques and muscle contractions and has been shown to be able to increase body temperature significantly while sudarshan kriya breathing can increase lactation in women and pranayama can enhance lung function. The link between breathing and emotion is well documented in various psycho-physiological experiments where different breathing patterns are shown to relate to arousal of emotions such as joy, sadness, fear and anger. The corollary of this is that the manipulation of breathing patterns is also able to produce these emotional states. All of this is scientifically verifiable.[i] Breathing and reflection then are good places to start looking for a fresh spiritual experience, one that significantly bests the god-bothering routines of the more recent past.
Also, for modern Christians especially, a significant element of what they call spirituality may be simply the feeling of being a hero in their own story. Part of this conception is derived from a feeling of being part of a larger spiritual purpose: the holy war between God and the Devil, with the theatre of struggle being the human heart, soul or spirit. On a more practical, everyday, operative level, the idea that God has a spiritual purpose for our lives can also be a tasty massage for the ego. For anyone whose ego has been a little, or a lot, battered by life, this idea can be very soothing and gratifying. For myself, as a young person undergoing a long period of unemployment, this sense of purpose and connection was a powerful element in my own original conception of the divine.
To put it another way, the Christian worldview holds that within the unfolding history of humankind there is a hidden spiritual story which only they have access to and which contains their own. This is based on St Paul’s fantastical claim that believers ‘wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’ The interpretation of this larger story of course varies from believer to believer and ranges from concerns at the macro level of global geopolitics down to the microworkings of human relationships, habits and desires. In this case, ‘spirituality’ might involve forcing the interpretation of circumstances to conform to certain doctrinal standards, spiritual weights and measures, and then presenting these as proof of the doctrine.
The obvious example is the driver who says to his carload ‘if God wants us to get to this meeting / the game / the funeral, then he'll find us a parking space’. A parking space is then found, and the idea confirms itself. This is plainly what we call confirmation bias in its rawest and grossest form, but because it confirms the belief that God cares about every little action and genuinely has a purpose for us in the dull activities of our everyday lives it is enormously compelling to the person of faith.
Any more or less self-aware believer will already feel a slight sense of shame at the obvious arrogance and self-centeredness of this claim that a universe-god has a plan for we little individual Earthmen. But this is also doubly problematic within Christian thinking since it is coupled with the debilitating idea that we are unable to achieve goodness in the mind of God. The best of our deeds and intentions are unclean to him. The distressing cognitive dissonance that this produces is one element of the Christian mindset out of which it is a great relief to grow. But we still need to acknowledge that the combination of child-like surrender and trust in the benign outworking of that supposed plan can go a long way towards helping some people get out of bed in the mornings.
Growing out of this form of thinking involves a joyful trashing of any shameful constructs like this found still to be lurking in our mental lives. Accepting the randomness of the movements of traffic around the city means that we also avoid having to puzzle out the why question and figure out what the story is if a parking spot does not immediately make itself available. Or on a more macro level if the G7 do not ratify the agreement on climate change we might have been praying for. On the other hand, if the universe is not really all about us and our experiences, then we are free simply to live and to make the best of the things that come to us without having to squeeze them into the pseudo-spiritual frame we have made from our extrapolations of an Iron Age wish-fulfilment story.
When we realise that our original spiritual understanding of the world does not fit with the facts of real life, of course some important questions arise: Where then do we find our sense of purpose? Where will we find our place in the story of a demythologised universe? And how then are we supposed to find a parking space?
As we have seen, changing how we understand the word does not mean abandoning spirituality altogether. If we are going to move to an authentically Atheist expression of spirituality we do need to abandon the idea of the spirit as a personal entity, something that can be lost or transferred or some essence that is going to be able to wander about as a coherent whole after we have died. An idea of spirituality based on the concept of the spirit that we saw earlier in the word histories of our language does not fit with what we know about the universe and is not going to be useful to us.
Beyond the boundaries of what we know about the universe however are many unknown things and some of these have to do with the nature of consciousness, the connection between emotions and mental and physical well-being, or the links between what we think, our ideologies and how we exist in the world. In these areas and many more we may exercise disciplines that deal with the transcendent, or what we might properly term spiritual: music, physical activities, philosophical debates, appreciation and practice of the visual arts, the envisioning of beneficial political ideas, the joys of family life, sexual relationships, the deep appreciation of friendships and comradeships, the immense intellectual pleasures of understanding the history of the world and the cosmos, and the great satisfactions of scientific experiment and breakthroughs. This list is not exhaustive.
My own experience suggests you might find immense spiritual solace in taking on the discipline of a physical art like aikido, jiujitsu, judo, kung fu or yoga. For me, aikido helps me to feel in harmony with the forces of the universe, and to accept the passage of life and death. A new physical art can be started at any level of fitness and stage of life. Just find the right teacher and a class that suits you and relax into a fresh expression of spirituality. Also, new relationships can offer fresh vistas on the world, and the good pleasures of the flesh, that may lead to interesting self-knowledge, satisfaction or challenge. The life of the mind can be stimulated by learning a new language or expanding one’s knowledge of areas of understanding that we found dull in school or just sidelined for lack of need.
Lacking knowledge of science, I used those ‘science for dummies’ books to get me started and then expanded on knowledge from there. Marcus Chown’s Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You: A Guide to the Universe was a particular favourite (I stuck it in the loo and read it three or four times to start getting a grip of the ideas). This outlines two of the most revolutionary theories ever conceived: quantum mechanics, dealing with atomic and sub-atomic scales and Einstein's relativity, dealing with the nature of the universe. At the quantum level some truly astonishing things happen and at the other end of the scale the understanding of stars and space is awesome and mind-expanding. As we touch their transcendent elements, these induce a sense of wonder superior by far to the religious kind and work entirely without the hypothesis of God.
Whatever your interest, many universities offer free courses on all kinds of topics, and as long as we are discerning about our sources there are sites like YouTube where we can access vast fields of knowledge. Just dealing with the history of ideas can stretch the capacities of the mind in ways that you didn't even know you had capacities. In all of these places, we may find a plethora of rich understandings of our spiritual life. The extent to which this forms a story of some kind will depend on what we choose as our orienting practices.
On a much wider level there is a bigger picture we can feel part of that most Christian worldviews exclude: the great progress that the human race has made in recent centuries. For some, the term ‘Enlightenment’ has become a twisted metaphor because they see its social and technological outworking resulting in the dire totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century and beyond. This is irrefutable in the same respect as the child’s argument that the cause of the aeroplane being flown into the skyscraper is the aeroplane. If there were no aeroplanes that certainly could not happen, true. Leaving its critics aside for now, we can focus on celebrating its many achievements: its ideals of reason, human rights and the astonishing achievements of its scientific method. These have led to very many measurable benefits and much human flourishing. Its medical tech alone means that you probably know fifty living people who would be dead under pre-Enlightenment medical competencies. I would and so would most of my family. Pinker’s Enlightenment Now acknowledges the daunting problems facing humankind with the climate crisis and so on but also simply and clearly documents the progress humans have made since the Enlightenment, giving global evidence that life-length, health, safety, peace, prosperity and knowledge have been rising over the last three centuries at unprecedented levels. Despite their obvious remnants filling our news cycles, we have made huge advances against authoritarianism, tribalism and magical thinking and as a result of all of this we are demonstrably living freer and happier lives. If you’ve become disillusioned by the idea of human progress, you might like to try to rediscover your place in this big idea to give you a sense of larger purpose. Ask yourself how you might contribute to the project of greater human flourishing. Find your own place. Don’t wait to be called; you’d be waiting a long time.
Following this material logic, we might want to conclude that everything has a spiritual dimension and is of transcendent importance. What we may be reaching for here is the sense of wonder that is best encountered in raw nature. There’s a real skill in connecting with nature and feeling fully part of it without becoming a pagan and starting the whole stupid cycle all over again. The Romantic poets were the masters at speculating on the edges of religion about the nature of Nature itself and are well worth reading as guides to that purpose. Wordsworth is the best of the bunch at this. T. E. Hulme later described Romanticism as ‘spilt religion’. Unfortunately, Wordsworth later developed the inclination to gather it all up again and became pretty orthodox in due course. Still, I would recommend the early versions of his ‘Lines above Tintern Abbey’ and ‘The Prelude’ for their sense of emotional connection to nature. Shelley is the best Atheist among the Romantics and his poetry also draws on a sense of the spiritual that some favour. Look at ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘Hymn to intellectual beauty’. Byron meanwhile strikes a nice balance when he talks about escaping from the person he was before and learning to ‘mingle with the Universe, and feel / What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal’. He declares that,
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more.
These are not just idle sentiments. They suggest experiences and feelings to reach for as factors that can feed us in our deepest beings. Sensing the beauty and sublimity in nature far supersedes the things that happen in church and the fact that many Christians will tell you the same thing says a lot about the value of their religious meetings. In our post-Romantic world, nature is our real father and mother and it’s there that we can find actual sustenance, the ‘living water’ of spirituality that the scriptures tried to mark as their own territory. After the obvious failure of the religious worldview to cohere, we are now free to experience our world’s raw nature without the covering musk of outdated perceptions.
It was this kind of understanding of nature that in more recent times inspired the green revolution and forced governments to start to attempt to save the planet. With their own ingenuity and determination humans can save the world and themselves from physical and moral destruction. The community may need healing, but its pathology is in its own history, and cannot be cured by an capricious imaginary divine force. More and more, we see those of faith who do want to concern themselves with that illusory force arbitrarily denying plain fact, and history, in an effort to promote their own sense of ‘spiritual’ wellbeing or destiny, to the direct detriment of all others. Religions worldwide are the best and final proof of God’s imaginary status, despite the contributions of a few well-meaning individuals. They have sucked up and monopolised many good people into their own partisan causes, and, discounting any real hope in this world, have denied them to the world of politics, leaving this to others less morally driven. They then go out to ‘serve to poor’ and to attempt to plug the gaps of injustice they themselves have left by disengaging from the responsible running of societies. This has been a disaster for all concerned and has perhaps led to what we now have – a politics of lying that depends on manufactured ignorance and magical thinking about the nature of authority, and which has developed into a new authoritarianism that, despite contradicting the core principles of morality, has come to seem the logical choice for 80% of White Evangelicals in the USA. This is proof again that religion leads to a lack of personal responsibility, the demise of values like honour and the reestablishment of political despotism in the place of true spiritual connection to the needs of the planet and its humans.
If spirituality means anything it means the opposite of this: the continuous improvement of the human being through the mind, the body, the emotions, and any other means that you find useful. Christianity is singularly useless at this process. As many pastors will tell you, once a person is ‘saved’ and guaranteed his or her place in heaven there is little or no incentive to change for the better at all. What then happens is a process of conforming to the meagre prejudices of an ancient world that knew virtually nothing of the real nature of the universe, not to mention of the real composition of human beings. It is worth remembering that the average nine-year old in an educated country has a far more sophisticated understanding of themselves, of the universe and of their place in it than anybody that ever instigated, formulated or canonised religious experiences, and this includes the more recent religions and cults like the ridiculous Mormonism of the 19th century and the Scientology of the 20th.
These systems are simply out of date and, like anything that you might find in the food cupboard, this makes them dangerous for human consumption. In the end it is only wise to look for spirituality outside of the superannuated systems, to take the wide universe as your field of interest and to be excited by the prospect of discovering aspects of yourself currently at the edges of your understanding, or slightly beyond it, that you can assimilate into your process of becoming ever more authentically aligned with your maximum human potential. The first step towards being on this track is to shed the presumptions of the old systems once and for all, and to start afresh, delivering yourself like a newly experiencing infant into a world of interesting possibilities. We’ll take this significant step next.
[i] Pierre Philippot, Gaëtane Chapelle & Sylvie Blairy, ‘Respiratory feedback in the generation of emotion’, Cognition and Emotion, Volume 16, 2002, Issue 5,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02699930143000392