I think we have an inbuilt tendency, we humans – and it has grown worse, not better, over recent years – to division and factionalism. “Pick a side!” we shout at anyone who looks like sitting on the fence, or any other reasonable, considered position of balance. I need not point out how this works in politics and society; what concerns me here is how it can mislead us when it comes to spirituality.
Perhaps this is more a semiotic issue than anything else. Words, when it comes to spiritual things, are signs only in the sense we mean when we speak of hints and premonitions as “signs”, not in the sense of street signs, or signs on office doors in a hospital. They are not, by their very nature, precise and prescriptive; it is their very vagueness that allows them to be used at all, for they can do no more than offer us a glimpse into someone else’s experience – a window, if you like, into that which it is to be them.
We risk all manner of missteps when we conflate the term “spirituality” with concepts like religion, or the supernatural; and we risk worse when we consider it intrinsically opposed to science, or to critical thinking. Robert C Solomon writes:
[S]pirituality is coextensive with religion and it is not incompatible with or opposed to science or the scientific outlook. Naturalized spirituality is spirituality without any need for the ‘other‐worldly’. Spirituality is one of the goals, perhaps the ultimate goal, of philosophy.
Spirituality for the Skeptic: the Thoughtful Love of Life
I am coming to see that my sense of myself as “increasingly at variance with institutional religion, Christian, Buddhist or whatever, and increasingly sceptical of its value either in the life of the spirit or in the life of society, [and] my naturally eremitical inclinations seem[ing] to have strengthened…” is not limited to time and circumstance, but is simply where I belong.
We are brought up, certainly here in the West, to see life as intrinsically bound up in progress, or at least development, and that isn’t necessarily so in the spiritual life, despite our continual use of terms like “path” and “practice”. We use them in the unspoken assumption that the path leads somewhere, that we are practising for a performance, or an examination. Even in religious contexts it is often seen as wasteful self-indulgence to sit still when we could be up and out feeding the poor or preaching the good news, or making some other kind of progress in our “walk of faith”. But maybe the point is being missed somewhere.
Contentment has become something of a dirty word, yet a life without it is too often at risk of shallowness and politicisation. Febrile activism and polemical discourse without contemplative roots are no more likely to bring peace to the human heart, or to the human community, than war. We need to sit still. We need those whose path has petered out under the quiet trees, whose practice is no more than an open and wondering heart. There was good sense in the Taoist tradition of the sage who, their public life over, left for a hut on a mountain somewhere. There are good things to be seen from a mountain hut.