Academia.edu suggests to me, judging by what papers I upload to them, a hundred titles for other people’s work, of which maybe one will be relevant to my line of thought. That’s not a slam, but it does present a bit of a sorting problem. Today came one that is quite useful. Here’s a link in case you want to read it for yourself, and then I’ll follow with how I want to use the ideas.
This paper by Boaz Huss first wants to suggest that the intellectual division that was made in Europe some centuries back, in order to make room for science and the cultural change that it brought, is now past usefulness. Due to “religionization” on one side and “secularization” on the other, both approaches have solidified and fossilized to the point of preventing the current changes. Now they must make room for something Boaz is calling “spiritual” but even this is a term becoming something that it wasn’t before, responding to currents in the culture, responding to new discoveries made possible by previously unimagined technology. The division that once made progress possible, has now become a hindrance.
The forces for change are globalization, a growing awareness of how various humans can be, and the realization that what worked for Europe in past years is not at all universal and may not apply to the “religions” of other cultures. This is particularly true of places that are still mostly inhabited by indigenous people who have long histories.
Part of the realization comes from Asia, part from thinkers like Felix Adler, and even from the thinking of the AA movement. Some of it is what people have been calling “New Age,” emerging out of humanism and therapy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_but_not_religious
The question then becomes what to call this growing body of thought. Some just call it “Spiritual but Not Religious,” a phrase that has become a title and can be googled to get a list of named groups. What religion they are “not” is ambiguous, but people seem to want to evade hierarchies and dogmas that have made trouble, mostly the three Abramic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Muslim. That is, moving away from tribal-style communities.
Pressed to define a new spiritualism, Huss wants to divide the spirit from the flesh, which is not quite the same dividing the mind from the body. His speciality is Jewish mysticism. Especially prominent in this field is the study of the Kabbalah, “the ancient Jewish tradition of mystical interpretation of the Bible, first transmitted orally and using esoteric methods (including ciphers). It reached the height of its influence in the later Middle Ages and remains significant in Hasidism.” This presses him to address the division between the religious and the secular and why it isn't universal.
I am more attracted to the Embodiment movement, which wants to make the body and brain a whole instrument that produces felt meaning, reuniting the “gut” and the head.
"Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism. "
The point of view does not contradict the “spiritual” values identified by Huss of a modern “inner awareness and personal integration, search for the inner and authentic self, pursuit of individual self, sense of wholeness and harmony with nature.” These are ends interwoven with ends in the lives of persons.
That last value, the environmental value of harmony with nature, is a clue to what I find important, which comes from ecology and community, which is a kind of human ecology. I frame these values as the radical inclusion and unity of existence (not just life) and the integration of all things into sustained progress. Huss looks to the individual while I look to what has been called “continuousness” and connection as in the codes of DNA that weave through all living species, borrowing from each other, preying on each other, enlarging each other, and sustaining reproduction.
Part of the justification for this is to escape the capitalist commodification of people seeking “enlightenment” for the sake of superiority and safety, the same way they pursue wealth. As Jeremy Carrete and Richard King are quoted, Spirituality becomes “a powerful commodity in the global marketplace — a cultural addiction that reflects orthodox politics, curbs self-expression and colonizes Eastern beliefs.” It reduces mysticism to magic, workshops, and “systems” that promise inevitable success.
Huss suggests another definition from Wouter Hanegraff: “What religion has always provided: the possibility of ritually maintaining contact with a more general meta-empirical framework of meaning.” This is a definition I can run with, particularly that “ritually” word which has come to mean for me a sort of poetic, habitual, reiterated key to the felt meaning kept in the unconscious body. I also like the idea of the “meta-empirical” which I’ll have to think about and the framework of meaning, which I take to be about beliefs before they get hardened into enforceable dogma (“believing”) and also about the world-paradigm formed by each infant as it begins to walk and talk.
Hanegraff is a professor of Hermetic Philosophy, which I thought was about it being sealed tight, but turns out to have developed from a guy named Hermes. It’s so close to being woo-woo, that I’ve always turned away, but maybe it’s also very close to Transcendentalism which is a kind of felt heresy from the Unitarian objection to the illogical idea of the Trinity. Now I’m on ground I know better, though I have to push to include Whitman, a bit of a heretic when it comes to Transcendentalists and more of a Universalist than a Unitarian, which takes us back to Jesus and love. If anyone was ever spiritual but not religious, it was Walt Whitman!
All this winding in and out of concepts and history is native to scholars of comparative religion, but rarely conscious to ordinary citizens and never preached from pulpits, which tend to try to stay safe by maintaining what is familiar. After centuries of trying to force every newfound “religion” into the template of the Christianity of an invading culture that wants to justify itself, it’s hard to think about what the original felt meaning of life must have been, particularly since the ecosystem where it was developed might be quite different from that in the newly contacted place. So far, the Christians and their need for self-justification has separated the people from the very environment that supplies their food and shelter, destroying their vital connection to life.
The saving grace has been the reliance on family as the most sacred source of belief. I’ll look at that in the next post.
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