"Notes on Spirituality"

[yallerdawg]

Source: Tikkun Magazine, by Dave Hood

For some, spirituality means feeling a sense of awe, wonder, or pleasant emotion when experiencing beauty, such as a mountain or water fall.

For others, spirituality means to transcend the “self” and experience the sacred. When we experience something spiritual, we move beyond “the sense of self,” and feel an expansion of consciousness. For instance, prayer, meditation, contemplating beauty, enable us beyond the self-focused ego.

For some, spirituality means embracing a particular set of beliefs or a set of values. Many spiritual people believe in social justice, being kind and compassionate to others, helping those in need, ending the suffering of humanity. In the West, many spiritual people believe in God or the divine.

For many, spirituality is a journey. It is a yearning and searching for meaning and purpose in life. A desire to find answers to life that can seem to have only existential meaning. Many believe that we are born, we live, we suffer, we grow old, we die, and then there is nothing. Embracing spiritual beliefs and practises is a remedy for existential angst.

For most, spirituality means carrying out one or more spiritual practices, such as prayer, meditation, contemplation, reading of spiritual wisdom, living mindfully in the present moment, avoiding conflict and living in peace, observing the beauty in the ordinary, reading the sacred in life, becoming aware of the shadow, our alter ego, and coping with it.

Read it all at: http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/notes-on-spirituality

[guillaumeb]

1. Recommended.

This:

What is spirituality? Spirituality is not religion. You can be spiritual without embracing a particular faith, such as Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. Some people are religious, but lack spirituality. Others are spiritual but don’t belong to a particular religious group or institution.

Very well written.

[yallerdawg]

2. From "Psychology Today."

Spirituality means something different to everyone. For some, it's about participating in organized religion: going to a church, synagogue, mosque, and so on. For others, it's more personal—some people get in touch with their spiritual side through private prayer, yoga, meditation, quiet reflection, or even long walks.

Research shows that even skeptics can't stifle the sense that there is something greater than the concrete world we see. As the brain processes sensory experiences, we naturally look for patterns and then seek out meaning in those patterns. And the phenomenon known as "cognitive dissonance" shows that once we believe in something, we will try to explain away anything that conflicts with it.

Humans can't help but ask big questions—the instinct seems wired in our minds.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/spirituality

[guillaumeb]

3. It does seem hard wired. At least for the past 300,000 years.

One the other hand, we have the totally fictional Mr. Spock.

I prefer the historical model to the other.

[yallerdawg]

6. 'Star Trek's' creator Gene Roddenberry envisioned something like this.

Freud defined the human psyche as consisting of three parts:

McCoy -- the Id, which represented emotional and instinctual desires;

Spock -- the Superego, which represented the logical and intellectual reasoning (or rules and social conventions, which is how Freud actually used the term);

Kirk -- the Ego, which reconciled the Id and Superego.

Without all these parts, we are incomplete.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FreudianTrio

[guillaumeb]

7. Very interesting concept.

Thank you.

[Cartoonist]

4. No god needed

I can agree with that.

[guillaumeb]

5. We agreed on this point.

I never claimed that a deity was needed to live a spiritual life. But as a theist, I believe that the Creator is reflected in all of creation.

[Bretton Garcia]

10. God's will is well expressed in malaria and cancer and chiggers.

[yallerdawg]

11. Yes...

it's definitely no Eden, is it?

[guillaumeb]

12. Yet another iteration of that nonsense argument.

But if you feel that you have made a point, I understand.

[yallerdawg]

8. Just as "Democracy is the road to socialism"...

"Spirituality is the path to faith."

[guillaumeb]

13. Oh no!!!!

And if spirituality has been a part of humanity for the past 300,000 years or so, what is the most logical conclusion?

[Igel]

9. It's a word I don't use.

Can't use.

I lack a meaning for it but am left with a connotation. There seem to be so many obviously deeply obviously divergent meanings, and most of the time in any given context they can be readily swapped in or out with absolutely no effect on coherence.

I suspect that most of the time the listener has a different meaning in mind from what the speaker intends. Except there's no easy, non-intrusive way to actually confirm this. They can talk about spirituality at length and only after 20 minutes realize maybe they have fundamentally, even radically, different meanings in mind.