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Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences
Spiritualities: Reference Works
Spirituality in the Modern World: Within Religious Tradition and Beyond 4 volume set by Paul Heelas (Critical Concepts in Religious Studies: Routledge) It would not be an exaggeration to say that during the last century, most especially during and since the 1960s, the language of spirituality has become one of the most significant ways in which the sacred has come to be understood and judged in the West, and, increasingly, elsewhere. Whether it is true that ‘spirituality’ has eclipsed ‘religion’ in Western settings remains debatable. What is incontestable is that the language of spirituality, together with practices (most noticeably spiritual, complementary, and alternative medicine), has become a major feature of the sacred dimensions of contemporary modernity. Equally incontestably, spirituality is a growing force in all those developing countries where its presence is increasingly felt among the cosmopolitan elite, and where spiritual forms of traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine are thriving.
This new four-volume, 1,856 page, Spirituality in the Modern World: Within Religious Tradition and Beyond collection from Routledge provides a coherent compilation of landmark texts which cannot be ignored by those intent on making sense of what is happening to the sacred as spirituality—more exactly what is taken to be spirituality—develops as an increasingly important lingua franca, series of practices, and as a humanistic ethicality.
Excerpt: Spirituality, value-politics/politics of value/s and
religion: CROCUS — the acronym for the modestly entitled
Centre for Rotterdam Cultural Sociology (of the Department
of Sociology of Erasmus University Rotterdam) — is a good
place; to be. Dick Houtman orchestrates activities of the
team in ways which can only be described as exemplary.
Approaching twenty chapters of the volumes have been written
by members of the team, including five which have been
specifically composed for inclusion. Given that one of the
aims of CROCUS is to demonstrate that spirituality deserves
sustained scholarly attention, not least because it
frequently contributes to the cultivation of human-kindness,
a public presence is vital. Marjolein Kooistra of the
University does a first rate job in this regard.
CROCUS is a contemporary manifestation of that great — I
would argue greatest — tradition of cultural studies:
critical cultural studies of ways of life. Critical in two
senses of the word: critical by attending to what matters
for various populations of various ways of life; and
critical in the sense of 'laying out' ways of life to
illuminate their possibilities and defects: their evaluation
in so far as that is deemed desirable. Taking the title
'Erasmus University Rotterdam' as a cue, the tradition can
be conveniently dated back to Erasmus: for him, a way of
life which incorporates folly, in particular as a strategic
tool to advance liberal religious humanism by combating the
'real' follies of cultures, religions, individuals, cliques
of pomp and vanity. Through the Romantics, with Coleridge
(diversity in unity), Shelley (elemental passions), and
Schiller (enchantment as a response to the de-divinization
of the world) coming immediately to mind; then Nietzsche,
Burckhardt; then Durkheim, James, Simmel, Weber; more
recently, the great Frankfurt School, then Abrams, Bellah,
Berlin, Maclntyre, Mosse, Nussbaum, (Charles) Taylor, (Mark
C.) Taylor: the tradition is splendid. It is extraordinarily
helpful in making sense of spirituality, the sacred, the
secular; the perfect and the imperfect.
Nietzsche wrote with passion of what lies beyond both the
sacred of traditional religion (which he loathed) and the
secular (which he loathed even more). A particular rendering
of 'the golden triangle' is in evidence: the apexes of the
sacred of theistic tradition, the secular, and (for
Nietzsche) the apex
occupied by the uber mensch. The particular 'third way'
of the uber mensch aside, the general, albeit absolutely
critical, idea of the golden triangle has been invaluable in
organizing the four volumes: spirituality within religious
tradition (ultimately grounded in the sacred-as-perfect);
spirituality within the secular (the imperfect); and
spirituality within the third 'force' of the transformative
zone (critically grounded in the sacred-as-perfect, without
theism). In a nutshell, spirituality within religious
tradition and, in two different regards, beyond.
Differences there are in the tradition of critical
cultural studies of ways of life. The degree of attention
focused on spirituality and/or religion varies considerably.
So does degree of faith, and in what. Overall, though, this
is the tradition which explores loci of authority;
ethicalities of everyday life; meaningful realities which
sustain, enhance, belief in the worthwhile, purpose in life,
or which fail — and why; and which explores all those other
avenues of 'tactical' inquiry which serve to illuminate what
it is to live within sacred, secular, sacred/secular frames
of reference or sense. And above all, this is the tradition
which explores a great tension: albeit a highly creative
one. On the one hand there is 'form and order', exemplified
by legalistic morality, the regulation-cum-manipulation of
feeling, much traditional religion. On the other, there is
'life and the existential', the vital-ity of life enhanced,
for many, by awareness of human finitude: the sense that
life, which ultimately is the person, has to be lived to the
full, made the most of; experienced as being 'alive% lived
out. Desires, impulses, feelings, conflicting ideals,
values, resistance to culturally proclaimed emotions ensure
that 'life' is antinomian. To live life 'out' requires
freedom. Conflict with 'form and order' is inevitable.
Unless chaos is to ensue, form and order have to invade the
existential. And this is the tension frequently addressed by
spirituality. In disorganized mode, free living 'out' can
all-too-readily damage others. Life has to be of the 'right'
kind. Spirituality can — and does — serve this purpose,
cultivating the experience of spontaneous virtue. In all
likelihood more significantly still, the great theme which
runs through virtually all modes of spirituality — 'only
connect' — serves the enrichment of life. The curses of
alienation, boredom, indifference, agitation, disengagement,
tactical manipulation, dislocation, are tackled. When
experienced as working, spirituality sources engagement, the
sense of belonging to life in the round, the interpersonal,
the intrapersonal of the relationality of movement between
people with the 'we' of the shared 'into' the dissolution of
feeling detached from what so much of the world has to
offer; the expanded life, expanded by being bound up with,
absorbed by quality within and without; the reality of
feelings, sentiments.
Utopian? Even heaven on earth? Well, this is what the
Romantics elegized, Nietzsche in many passages, certainly
James and most certainly Simmel; not to speak of Abrams,
Charles Taylor and Mark Taylor; and not to speak of
countless teachers beyond the Occident. Ontologically valid
or not, the cultural-cum-experiential reality of
spirituality, across the globe, is not exactly bad news:
that is when spirituality is of, for, what it is to be
Coming down to earth, to the chapters which follow, with
well over half the world's population belonging to Christian
or Islamic traditions of religion and/or spirituality, the
volumes tend to be orientated accordingly. Acknowledgements
are due to all those, too numerous to name, who have
provided advice on what could be included. Debt is owed to
all the contributors whose work is included. Apologies are
due to all those whose work — however excellent — has had to
be put to one side for the moment, simply for reasons of
space and coverage. Of contributors, I would like to thank
Stef Aupers of CROCUS for alerting me to key points; Steve
Bruce and Dick Houtman for brimming with bright ideas; and
Steven Tipton — in my estimation the most outstanding of all
interpretative scholars of spirituality since the days of
the grand masters — for having kindly read through the
contents, and for having drawn my attention to a significant
omission: Robert Bellah's 'New Religious Consciousness and
the Crisis in Modernity'. (Readers who might want to consult
this essay can find it in Robert Bellah and Charles Glock (eds),
The New Religious Consciousness. Berkeley: University of
California Press, pp. 333-52, reprinted, with a new
post-scripted final note, in The Robert Bellah Reader 2006,
pp. 265-84.)
Gratitude is also owed to my anthropology teachers of
old, the research group developed around E. E.
Evans-Pritchard, for pressing the significance of comparison
through time and across culture. The predictable answer to a
favoured exam question of the period, 'Social Anthropology:
Comparative or Nothing', was 'comparative'. To explore
spirituality — not least its relation-ship with the secular
world of the imperfect, the finite — the 'nuanced', alone,
is not enough. The 'voice' of the nuanced is not 'loud'
enough.
Acknowledging the work of contributors, most are akin to
trees: most especially, that great tree of the Romantics,
the oak. Rather unfortunately, a. degree of personal
experience tells me, many an oak-person, today, grows in
rather barren surroundings. Contributor-oaks tend to 'grow'
alone: one in one university department; a solitary in
another, a couple (perhaps) in yet an. other. Around the
globe, the absence of surrounding 'trees', in immediate
vicinity, means that work in that most creative of ways —
face-to-face, mood-by-mood, inspiration-countering-sag — is
sadly rather rare. As the study of spintuality comes of age,
it has to be argued that more woods are more than welcome.
Volumes like Mark Cobb, Bruce Rumbold and Christina
Puchalski's (eds) Spirituality in Healthcare (Oxford
University Press, 2012),
An advert running today cleverly affirms, 'The cleaner
you are, the dirtier you get'. That Jewish refugee from
eastern Europe, the magisterial Isaiah Berlin, would
certainly agree. The sting in the tail of spirituality,
which might be helpful to bear in mind whilst perusing the
chapters which follow, is that the search for the perfect,
the self-acknowledged experience of the perfect itself, is
not without danger. (The notion of 'the pure' springs to
mind.) But: as long as the perfect is 'taken' to incorporate
the values (sentiments, dispositions) of humanism, to become
'cleaner', to experience the 'clean' is to become 'truly'
human. But I speak as someone with a Quaker upbringing,
albeit with no utterly veridical experience . . . What I do
know, though, and on the basis of pretty comprehensive
evidence, is that 'spirituality' frequently provides a
wonderfully meaningful stand against stupidities of
institutionalized or ego-dominated power: those forces
exercised to combat personal/ relational-life freedoms of
being, feeling, becoming. Among many other factors, the
electronic revolution, and reforms in the 'name' of enforced
equality in many a country (including India), the 'form and
order' of the contemporary world is extending its control of
'life'. Spirituality, in many of its modes, is a major
vehicle of resistance. The human versus the count; the human
with feelings, not the law with its own accountable
definitions of what count as 'feelings' — like 'unpleasant'
experiences meaning 'harassment'. Life, with all it's
vicissitudes, eruptions of personal-expressive reality,
versus the legislated life which allows no interruption.
Rarely kept private, personal spirituality 'moves'. It need
not even be believed in to be effective. Presence in
literature, for instance, can serve to cue movement: say for
those who read the Romantics or about them (Wordsworth's
'hippy', highly transgressive, commune at Dove Cottage), or,
much more especially, those who read the spiritual, yet
ethical antinomians, of the Orient. With appreciation; with
secular chimes: like arresting peals of church bells for
those who don't really believe.
Readers, hopefully around the globe: above all, the
volumes are intended to serve horizons. Believe in
spirituality or not, it commonly serves to reflect: maybe as
a mirror to reflect on what is wrong with the world; maybe
to act — paradigmatically, at the time of writing, by way of
that Mandela of Burma. Auug San Suu Kyi and her radical 2011
Reith Lecture Series: the reality of the spiritual humanism,
social justice, incorporating rights, civil liberties; the
continued mobilization of the monk-hood in spirit: and more.
On Making Some Sense of Spirituality by Paul Heelas
The preparation of these volumes took me through a time
of some horror, then, increasingly, of excitement. The
horror dawned when I realized that 'making some sense of
spirituality' inevitably required making as much sense as
possible of certain recondite, deeply puzzling themes and
processes, not least those pertaining to the sacred, the
secular, and magic. Themes and processes like these might
have had tortuous histories in scholarship. Nevertheless,
they have to be clarified to make sense of spirituality as
personal, social and cultural. What, if anything, is secular
spirituality, for instance?
Excitement took over when I realized — or at least
thought of myself as appreciating — that progress from the
tortuous to the simple was being made: and this on a global
compass. Whether right or wrong about my emotional
undercurrent, I hope that what follows engages the reader as
much as it exhilarated me during the process of unfolding
the convoluted. The first three chapters of this volume
should be more controversial than a bland introduction.
Incorporation of contemporary theologies in the volumes has
proved profoundly illuminating, contributing to controversy.
It is a sign of the impoverishment of the secular that the
theological 'imagination' has so much to say in connection
with the state of life today. Faith in religion is not
required to explore those ultimate issues best raised by
theologians (and their critics). Neither, of course, is
faith required to explore what spirituality has to offer
value-politics/politics of value — that is, how the sacred,
as meaningful, and so motivational, reality, of a spiritual
variety, might con-tribute to the trans-valuation of values
to bring about a better world.
On running riot
Spirituality has run riot, on a nigh global compass. This
is most visible
The significance acquired by spirituality would appear to
be incontestable. Thinking of the USA, Michele Schlehofer
and co-authors (2008) refer to a survey which finds that
almost 80 per cent of the general American public describe
themselves as spiritual, a percentage higher than the 64 per
cent who describe themselves as religious (p. 413). Michael
Hout and Claude Fischer (2002) draw on another USA survey to
report, 'Most adults —with or without a religious preference
— responded to trouble by thinking of themselves as part of
a larger spiritual force' (p. 175). This kind of thing could
not have existed half a century ago. Even among the
counterculturalists of the 'sixties', the terms spiritual
and spirituality were not common currency.
Language use has certainly changed. With those great
categories of the past, 'the mystic' and 'mystical
experience', fading from use, a relatively recent, rapid and
comprehensive shift from 'mysticism' to 'spirituality' has
occurred in many a country. More recently still, 'religious'
experience is giving way to 'spiritual' experience. Marking
the transition from the language of religion to the language
of spirituality, publications increasingly favour
formulations like 'religious and spiritual experience' or
'religious/spiritual experience' over the old favourite,
'religious experience'. Today, some titles simply refer to
'spirituality' in connection with religious tradition. A
relatively recent publication by Peter Paris, entitled The
Spirituality of African Peoples (1995), contains a chapter
called 'Ancestral Life'. Fifty years ago, this would have
been called 'Ancestor Worship', and would not have appeared
under the designator spirituality.
With an especial eye on the USA, Brian Zinnbauer, Kenneth
Pargament and Allie Scott (1999) report the growth of
'popular interest and psychological research into
spirituality as a distinctive construct' (p. 900) which has
occurred since the 1950s. Almost certainly taking their cue
from developments in popular culture, psychologists, and
those from many other disciplines of inquiry, have
so-to-speak taken spirituality to heart. Whether it is
management or business, education, social work, psychiatry,
psychotherapy, counselling or some other speciality, sectors
of the academy have responded to changes within everyday
life and activities. Volume after volume, article after
article, web-contribution after web-contribution: titles
like 'Spirituality and Psychiatry', 'Spirituality and Social
Work', 'Spirituality and Wellbeing', `Spirituality and
Gardening' (or 'Golf ') amount to a torrent. In the northern
Europe of some two hundred years ago, Christian tradition
was alive and well within the commercial workplace. Today,
spirituality is making inroads. In the northern Europe of
the past, mainstream healthcare developed out of the
Christian tradition. Today, spirituality is well in
evidence. Much the same applies to education. It is no
wonder that the academy has responded accordingly, the
academy — especially in more vocational mode — contributing
to the changes attended to.
In 1911, Kandinsky and Franz Marc wrote, 'A great era has begun: the spiritual "awakening"' (Vol. I, Ch. 26). Other than the more bohemian capitals of Europe, few of the time would have agreed. Even around thirty years ago, when John Naisbett (1982) claimed that spirituality was a growing `megatrend', most would have taken this as an ill-founded exaggeration. Across the globe, few among cosmopolitan upper middle or professional ranks would now dismiss contentions of this kind so lightly. Whether within many a religious tradition, as an 'alternative' beyond tradition, even within the secular itself, it looks as though spirituality has come into its own.
Perhaps because of the riot, perhaps because of the sheer
amount of apparently variegated developments, the academy
has got into something of a tizzy. Time and time again,
scholars struggle to characterize spirituality. Printer ink
flows. Debate — if that is what it is — appears to be
interminable. Perplexity appears to be the order of the day.
Words like 'muddled', 'vague' and 'fuzzy' are used by
scholars. To make matters worse, whether or not the more
general populace would agree scholars tend to think that
those familiar with the language of spirituality are equally
unclear, confused or perplexed. No one, it appears, 'quite'
knows what spirituality is; what the apparent shift to
'spirituality' is all about.
On 'ultimate spirituality'
I do not think for one moment that what is taking place
is elusive, fuzzy or chaotically `buzzy'. To make sense of
spirituality, or rather spiritualities, I begin with a
particular characterization. Ultimate spirituality, as I
think it best designated, is the most elemental of all
spiritualities. It is elemental in that it provides the
ingredients which appear — however modified or diluted —in a
very great deal of how people, across the globe, use the
language of
On the lighthouse
So what is ultimate spirituality? Rather than merely
being an ideal type, it is demonstrably apparent across
cultures, and, fortunately, in a manner easy to grasp.
Ontology is of the sacred. Epistemology is of experience.
With the sacred 'taken' to come into evidence, the
relationship with the sacred involves a profoundly
experiential way of 'knowing'. Whatever the form of the
sacred Which is held to generate experience, those who make
contact take experience,
itself, as the transformative. For those in contact, a
great deal comes to light: the different to make the
difference; the release of power to vitalize; the presence
which motivates; the gnosis (as it might be called) which
transforms worldviews, judgements; the awareness of energy
flows within the body; contact with the flows to 'work' on
them; feelings, to feel differently about the world. So it
is held.
On the sacred
The sacred and the academy: hotly contested; sometimes
rejected; even more frequently employed; yet more frequently
used casually, leaving it up to the reader to make sense of
what the term means. Given the amount of contro-versy and
lack of clarity surrounding the notion, it might be thought
that to refer to the sacred as the ground of ultimate
spirituality is to jump from the frying pan of
'spirituality' into the fire of the 'sacred% from a quagmire
right into a black bog. Fortunately, it is easy to
characterize the sacred of ultimate spirituality. Simply it
is the perfect, utopia itself. Being perfect, the sacred
spells the death of ideals. Ideals do not belong to utopia
(although they can be motivated by experience of it). When
nothing is less than 'ideal', ideals cannot exist. For
believers, to 'know' the sacred is not to experience the
ideal of true love. It is to experience 'true' love itself;
'true' vitality, 'true' health, 'true' freedom or equality;
'true' bliss. For believers, perfect health is beyond
healing. It is to 'know' that which cannot be bettered on
any human scale of things. Easy to characterize; only
'known', though, by way of experience: which means that is
best to turn elsewhere for further comprehension.
Comparison with 'the secular' assists elucidation.
Everyone is familiar enough with it. Virtually everyone,
whether spiritual, religious, or neither, spends the great
bulk of their time within the secular. That is to say, time
is con-sumed within the zone of the imperfect. Thinking of a
school of thought going back to Kant, then, through a long
chain of thought, to Ecclesiastes, Isaiah Berlin (1991)
provides the convincing argument that value clash is
inevitable. More precisely, and this is what he means when
he refers to 'the crooked timber of humanity', to put
together sufficient values to inform a way of life, any way
of life, any culture, inevitably means value-conflict.
Inevitably, cultures (political, economic, ethnic, etc.) are
tension laden, some sectors (groups, individuals)
emphasizing certain constitutive values at the expense of
others' values, other sectors countering this with the
emphases they favour. Well-known 'cultural contradictions of
capitalism' are not just of capitalism; they are legion,
universal. Cultures are not coherent. One does not have to
believe in Freud to know that the interior life is prone to
thoughts; internal conversations which are not really
conversations at all; a mind of the jarring of distraction;
the half-remembered; the unclear; on occasion, the agitation
of the information flow swamp; the mind having a mind of its
own. Selves are not coherent. One does not have to be a
Nietzsche (2003) to know how easy it is to discredit the
exercise of the noblest of virtues by drawing attention to
the multi-motivational nature of human action to expose the
covert operation of the less-than-noble. Ethicality is not
coherent.
One does not have to be one of the greatest scientists of
the latter half of the last century, Richard Feynman, to
know that science itself is necessarily imperfect. Feynman
(2007) emphasizes 'the uncertainty of science'. (Faster than
the speed of light?) When science ceases to be uncertain, it
comes to a close. Patently, this has not happened.
Scientific truths from the past might continue. However, as
with Newtonian physics, which continues to serve as a plane
of knowledge, truths are qualified by being contextualized.
To be other than metaphysical, science — not least medical —
has to be fallible. The laws of nature might be ultimate or
'perfect' (although Stephen Hawkin is not averse to stating
that 'instability', 'imperfection' is required for the
existence of life). Scientific knowledge about laws is not.
In future vein, one does not have to be a genius to
recognize that if scientific advance means that sensible
limitations of the secular are transgressed time and time
again, the secular will expand to, and strive to go beyond,
its limit: with life as we know it ceasing to exist at some
point along the line.
Perhaps most appositely of all, one does not have to be
one of the most free-ranging neo-Marxist thinkers of the
French intellectual caldera of recent times, the brilliant,
when unleashed, Jean Baudrillard (1994), to agree with his
Nietzschian-inspired lines,
. . . when we speak of the 'end of history', the 'end of
the political', the 'end of the social', the 'end of
ideologies', none of this is true. The worst of it all is
precisely that there will be no end of anything, and all
these things will continue to unfold slowly, tediously,
recurrently, in that hysteresis of everything which, like
nails and hair, continues to grow after death.
Nietzsche's eternal return was (sometimes) taken by
Nietzsche himself as the litmus test of the very best: the
person who welcomed, with open arms, the prospect of living
again. For Baudrillard, the pit of the desolation row of
human finitude entails recurrence past—present—future. Human
genius, it appears, is called for to break the cycle.
Pessimists like Baudrillard retort that vanity — to think of
that which is so excoriated in Ecclesiastes — has
From the perspective of those who believe in the sacred,
and from the perspective of a great many thinkers of secular
persuasion, the secular is the realm of the irredeemably
flawed. Here, the believer and the non-believer join hands.
They might well agree, too, over one of the great themes of
the Book of Genesis, that the afflictions of the secular are
essential for the development of what it is to be human.
Disruption is required for virtues like courage, compassion
or forgiveness to mean anything, to be there to be
cultivated. The vain is required for the virtues of the
humble to develop. Believers and non-believers are also
likely to agree that the secular is incom-patible with the
sacred condition. As the secularist Emile Durkheim (1953)
states, do not know what an ideal and absolute perfection
is' (p. 73). If it is to exist as the perfect (ultimate,
absolute, pure, eternal, infinite), the sacred has to be
other than the dystopic. For the believer, it has to exist
as a 'realm' sui generis (V ol. I, Ch. 16). As the Latin
absolutus signifies, ab- means 'away from', solvere, 'to
loose'. 'To loose' the contingent, the finite, of the
secular, the perfect has to be 'away from' it.
From the secular perspective, the sacred is the realm of
the irredeemably impossible. Georg Simmel, the main
scholarly inspiration behind the notion of ultimate
spirituality (see especially 1971: 378-393), commences one
of his brilliant essays with Nicolaus Cusanus. Introducing
Cusanus as 'the most searching philosopher of the fifteenth
century', Simmel provides his definition of God:
Coincidentia oppositorum — the coincidence of opposites, the
uni-fication of that which has been torn asunder' (1997: 39
[orig. 1904]). From the secular perspective, it is simply
impossible to unite the unique, individuals, as the unitary,
whilst retaining the unique qua unique. It contravenes
logic. For the believer, the sacred is (so-to-speak does)
the logically contradictory. Again from the secular
perspective, 'the crooked timber of humanity' is part and
parcel of human life. The sacred of perfectly 'straight'
humankind is beyond the furthest reaches of the imagination.
Now from the perspective of the sacred, for those who have
experienced what they 'take' to be the sacred, the finitude,
the limitations, the very impossibilities which the secular
condition inevitably reveals, are highlighted.
The 'knowing'
Contact with the sacred, as meaningful reality, is a
matter of the 'knowing', the gnosis of experience. The
sacred is 'known' by virtue of sheer conscious-ness,
awareness, sensation, feeling, apprehension ('grasping' by
way of sensing), intuition, sometimes inner 'seeing' or
'hearing% more cognitively, by virtue of the
experientially-orientated noesis. From the perspective of
ultimate spirituality, the impossibility of the sacred from
the perspective of secular comprehension, imagination, means
that it can only be truly known in terms of its own
experience. Geared up as it is for attending to the secular
realm, human language and reasoning is as imperfect as the
realm attended to.
The epistemology is a form of radical empiricism:
experience, evidence,
experiment. Strict non-believers would call it
preposterous. The way of 'knowing' is via experientially
irrefutable, first-hand, unmediated, absolutely direct
'personal' experience. In a manner of speaking, the
experience of the believer becomes one and the same as the
experience 'taken' to emanate as the sacred. Experience
takes pride of place over all other epistemologies. Other
ways of knowing the sacred — the intermediaries provided by
believing in the propositional beliefs of tradition,
attending to sacred texts, heeding the words of prophets or
messiahs, reading the poetry of the mystics of old — are
sensed, adjudicated 'second hand'. They derive from sources
other than one's own contact. Per se, they cannot be
trusted. With the passing of time, sacred texts might have
been distorted by changes in the meanings of words,
especially if translation is involved. Texts might have been
edited, perhaps to promote particular, ideological,
political, etc., causes. Unless proved true by the
'experimental' test of personal experience of the sacred,
the epistemologies typical of so much religious tradition
and certain spiritual teachings cannot be accepted on trust.
Underpinning all this, words, lan-guages, thought processes
are primarily (many 'experts' of the sacred would say
entirely) calibrated in terms of the meaningful reality of
the secular, suffering accordingly.
As for transmission to others, those who have experienced
ultimate spir-ituality teach by way of 'traditions' of
practice. What they have experienced is too impossible to be
reliably transmitted by way of traditions of statement:
belief, doctrine, and so on. Transmission by way of the
evocation of experience is what matters: through the
practice of yoga, for example; or by experientially-informed
action, expression, expressive arts of the sacred serving to
'point', to evoke. Anyone who has been captivated 'with'
from-the-heart Sufi music—dance—poetry will appreciate how
powerful this kind of evocation can be.
All those psychologists, philosophers, theologians,
sociologists, anthropologists who argue, on socio-cultural
constructivist grounds, that direct unmediated experience of
any meaningful kind is impossible, are actually proving a
point: the sacred, specifically how it expresses itself as
meaningful experience, is impossible for the secular aspect
of `experiencers'.
On zoning spiritualities
Fully-fledged ultimate spirituality of the sacred, looked at in general terms, is one thing. Moving towards the particular, consideration has to be paid to a degree of complexity: variants on the theme of fully-fledged ultimate spirituality; approximations to the elemental of the fully-fledged; and spiritualities which have nothing to do with the sacred. A good way of finding rhyme and reason, hopefully to avoid collapse into the allegedly blooming confusion of disjointed particularity, is to think of spiritualities in terms of
three main zones. Each zone provides a relatively distinctive
context, a 'home' which helps make sense of the spiritualities
associated with it. Here, the three zones are primarily distinguished by
how the sacred/ultimate spirituality is 'taken'.
One zone, of the theistic, primarily revolves around the sacred as
transcendent. In so far as spirituality is concerned, the polar (if you
like the cultural-cum experiential extremity (Heelas, 2001)) is provided
by theistic ultimate spirituality. Variants and approximations to
ultimate spirituality are present.
The second zone, of the transformative, primarily revolves around the
sacred as indwelling. In so far as spirituality is concerned, the polar
is provided by inner-life ultimate spirituality. Variations and
approximations to ultimate spirituality are present.
The third zone, of the secular is epitomized by the die-hard atheist.
In so far as spirituality is concerned, secular spirituality is in
evidence; any form of spirituality to do with sacred, qua sacred, is
absent, ignored, rejected. The polar does not lie with ultimate
spirituality.
The three zones are best conceived as located on the apexes of a
triangle, not along some sort of spectrum which locates theistic
tradition at one end, the secular at the other, with the transformative
in the middle. The spectrum-like conceptualization suffers from creating
the misleading impression that people might have to pass through the
transformative zone if, for example, they give up on the theistic to
become secular. The triangular conceptualization caters for the fact
that, empirically, people move between all zones, in all six directions
(from the secular to the theistic and vice-versa, for example). As
hopefully will become apparent, the 'golden triangle' is truly golden:
for the study of spirituality/religion today.
On the zone of theism
Here, the ultimate locus, the polar, of the sacred lies beyond the
world or the cosmos as a whole; anything which the world or the cosmos
is capable of achieving. Frequently, the radical transcendence of the
sacred is emphasized; the dualistic, 'wholly other' of theologians like
Karl Barth. (See Mark C. Taylor, 2007, for a concise summary.) The
majority of theistic traditions, however, also teach that what exists
beyond, as transcendent, also lies within, as immanent. Whether it is
the belief that the world/ cosmos has been created by the sacred,
thereby containing elements of the creator, or the belief that the
sacred enters this world as, say, the Holy Spirit, the immanent is
generally taken to be ultimately dependent on the transcendent. The zone
as a whole contains a great deal more than spirituality. Components of
theistic tradition — like moral injunctions of sacred texts — need not
be associated with that defining mark of spirituality, the experiential.
On the transformative zone
Here, the ultimate ontology of the sacred primarily lies within the
world or the cosmos as a whole. The sacred is not necessarily dependent
on anything beyond the within of the here and now. In the occident, the
zone really sprang to life with Romanticism. The Romantic trajectory,
the 'classical' period of the later eighteenth well into the nineteenth
century, through to the 'new' Romanticism of today, pulsates as the very
heart of the zone. Romantics like Shelley or the early Schleiermacher
equate the sacred with what lies within. The perfect might dwell within
the person, relationships (emphasized by Georg Simmel's student and
colleague, Martin Buber), nature, the cosmos (Einstein with his 'cosmic
religion'), or some combination of these sources. The zone as a whole
contains more than spirituality. Components of the zone — most
especially to do with the imperfect — are not associated with the
defining mark of spirituality of the sacred, the perfect. In this
broader context, the polar of ultimate spirituality lies with
experiencing the perfect of the sacred of the indwelling. 'Life', 'life
itself', is the most frequently encountered source. In association with
what has been called 'inner-life spirituality', or `spiritualities of
life', the language of the sacred typically includes reference to
'energy', 'life-force', 'power', 'passion' or similar agency.
On the secular zone
Here, ultimate ontology lies with what is known of the world or the
cosmos as a whole, when what is known is imperfect. Exemplified by the
die-hard atheist, the zone extends further to include — for example —
those who suspect that there is something beyond the imperfect. In all
instances, though, commitment remains with what is available within the
secular condition. By definition, the fact that the secular is the realm
of the imperfect means that ultimate spirituality, or anything akin to
it which involves the sacred, is absent. In the context of the secular,
when the language of spirituality is used — most especially the terms
'spirit' and 'spiritual' — it has to be taken to refer to states of
affairs which do not transgress the secular frame of reference. Secular
spirituality is in evidence, when, for example, the term 'spiritual' is
taken to be emblematic of what is best in human and/or natural nature.
On comparing polarities
From the perspective of the polar theist — the believer in
God-on-High — the inner-life spirituality of the transformative zone is
transgressive. With its god' within, inner-life spirituality breaks with
the transcendental theistic God-on-High, existing
over-and-above anything within this world (or any other world); anything
which this world is capable of. And the greater the extent to which
inner-life spirituality is detraditionalized, the greater the extent to
which it lies beyond to transgress theistic tradition. Also from the
perspective of the polar theist, the secular transgresses the perfect of
the sacred simply by virtue of being imperfect. The sacred and the
secular are incompatible.
From the perspective of the polar of the transformative zone,
theistic tradition transgresses (for example) key values of inner-life
spirituality — most especially autonomy — by functioning in terms of the
authority of Godon-High. Again, transgression is in evidence when
tradition teaches that experience has to be mediated by beliefs or that
experience is not essential. The necessity of direct experience of the
sacred is undermined. As for the secular, the imperfect, per se, can
only exclude the perfect.
From the vantage point of the 'exemplary' secularist, the atheist,
the scientist qua scientist, the polarities of the other two zones
transgress the secular. They are perfectly impossible. If ultimate
spirituality should 'somehow' exist as the sacred, it is way beyond the
grasp of secular modes of thought, including science, in tow.
Secularists in general can never know what it is for secular love to be
transformed, as sacred, to be the experience of perfect love.
Secularists of the die-hard atheist variety typically judge that the
sacred can only serve to obscure, mask the realities of life as secular;
can only serve to provide distracting, perhaps demeaning, illusions.
An important point to draw from the comparison is that the polarities
are mutually incompatible. Co-existence is impossible — unless, that is,
contradiction is permitted. To say that poles are incompatible is one
thing. To say that the same applies to zones as a whole is another
matter. To keep things as straightforward as possible, consideration of
the last is left until later.
On the universality of the zones
Although it might appear somewhat counter-intuitive to apply the
three zones to, say, 'medieval' areas of South Asia as they exist past
and present, they are in fact of widespread applicability. Thinking of
the zone of the secular, apart from a very few radical world rejecters,
virtually everyone, everywhere, spends virtually all their waking hours
(even when listening to sermons or preaching) engaging with the
less-then-prefect world of the secular. It is most unlikely that even
people like the Dalai Lama are somehow able to avoid the imperfect, its
consequences; are able to ensure that when they have to be driven, for
example, irritation does not erupt when the car fails on a crucial
journey. In many traditional cultures, the secular zone might not be
known as `secular'; but in some way or another it will be cognized as
the zone where things go wrong; and, if all goes right, will not become
perfect. So long as the sacred-as-perfect is present in the 'higher' or
'deeper' culture of religion/spirituality, it cannot be otherwise.
Second, it is perfectly apparent that the sacred of religion generally
takes theistic or polytheistic forma across cultures. And third, the
transformative zone — perhaps dominated
by sacro-magical practices that are not tethered to
theistic/polytheistic orthodoxy, perhaps dominated by spirit possession
'cults' which, again, deviate from orthodoxy, perhaps dominated by other
non- or counter-unorthodox modes of spirituality — is equally widespread
around the globe.
At the level of cultural structure, the extensiveness of the zones
under consideration cannot be underestimated. In many a culture, zones
are basically the same. Differences, when they are in evidence, owe a
fair amount to differences at the level of language, vocabulary. Without
extensive examination of virtually countless ethnographies of
small-scale societies, regional counter-renderings of dominant cultures,
and so on, it would be foolhardy to claim that the three zones are
comprehensively universal. This notwithstanding, they serve as a solid
basis for comparative, interpretative inquiry: with particular reference
to modes of spirituality.
On fleshing out the zones
It is time to turn to the more concrete.
On spiritualities of, and 'within, theistic tradition
Although theistic (or polytheistic) religion is found the world over,
granted the aim, here, of being as succinct as possible, attention is
focused on the world's largest religion, Christianity. It also happens
to provide the most detailed information on matters to hand.
A 1997 USA survey by Zinnbauer and associates (1999) found that just
2.6 per cent of respondents indicated that 'religiousness and
spirituality are the same concept' (p. 906). At the same time, 74 per
cent identified themselves as both spiritual and religious. It logically
follows that virtually all those who consider themselves to be both
spiritual and religious nevertheless make some sort of distinction
between the two. It is also reasonable to infer that 'spirituality'
complements 'religion' (in the sense of being good for each other) or
co-exists with 'religion' without strife. Drawing on another study
reported by Zinnbauer and associates (1999), 'religiousness' (that is
religious tradition) is widely perceived to be 'a system of organized
beliefs and worship which a person practices' (p. 901). Spirituality, on
the other hand, is widely perceived to involve 'a personal life
principle which animates a transcendent quality of relationship with
God' (p. 901). More generally, religious tradition provides What Georg
Simmel (1971 [orig. 1918]; Vol. IV, Ch. 82) called 'form', with its
content' (pp. 24-5); what William James (1974 [orig. 1902]), at much the
same time, called the 'institutional' (p. 48). Religious tradition is
typified by organization, structure, establishments, doctrines, sacred
texts, propositional beliefs. Significantly, typifications of this
variety do not refer to 'experience'.
Strictly speaking, the most clear-cut home for experiential
spirituality within' theistic tradition lies beyond tradition itself.
What can be thought of as 'direct Godhead spirituality' is precisely
that: unmediated experience. Those spiritual virtuosi — the mystics,
antinomian adherents of ecstatic cults, and the like of yore — have
tended to bypass religious tradition; or have had a decidedly uneasy
relationship with it; have tended to reject pre-ordained beliefs of
tradition in favour of expressing their own experiences of the sacred.
Today, 'mysticism' has spread beyond ecstatic cults or other virtuosi.
Christian `spiritual seekers' constitute a growing constituency. Popular
'mysticism' is abroad. Here, ultimate spirituality, or at least the
aspiration for it, is in evidence: perhaps directly focused on
God-on-High; more probably focused on the 'presence' of the sacred,
emanating from God-on-High, within the person. Akin to many forms of
Buddhism, Tibetan comes to mind, the greater the contact with 'true'
experience, the greater the extent to which the belief-sustained (in
Tibetan Buddhism the 'deities') is sloughed off.
Another manner in which ultimate spirituality operates 'within', but
not always so clearly 'in the way of ' tradition, concerns the Holy
Spirit. Holy Spirituality, as it might be called, can provide a direct,
unmediated relationship with the sacred. When the Holy Spirit comes to
dwell within the person, experiences of the Sacred-on-High per se tend
to fade in favour of experiences of the Holy Spirit; of the Holy Spirit
dwelling within one's life. To the extent to which the Holy Spirit moves
away from the beliefs and doctrines of tradition, that is to say, to the
extent it is detraditionalized, then to that extent it moves towards
becoming an 'autonomous' agency, serving as the source of direct,
immediate, ultimate spirituality (Vol. II, Chs 29-34). The epistemology
is very much the experiential. In the USA, approaching 30 per cent of
the population have had 'born-again experience' (Smith, 2006: 293).
Other evidence suggests that a significant percentage of this figure
engage with ultimate Holy Spirituality.
At least in the Occident, it is not simply a matter of emphasis on
experience of the Holy Spirit being associated — in measure — with
commensurate decline in emphasis on beliefs and other features of
tradition. More fundamentally, an ontological shift is indicated: in the
case of the Holy Spirit, from being an emanation of God-on-High to being
a (relatively) autonomous 'God' within. This shift of 'ownership' (among
other things) is part and parcel of the more general process of
Immanentization': the basic process at work re the popularity of
'spirituality' within 'religion' in many an Occidental quarter, and
elsewhere too. Often traced back to the profoundly Romantic-influenced
'early' Schleiermacher (1958 [orig. 1799] ), and first systematically
studied by Simmel (1997), the tendency within Occidental Christianity
has been for the immanent to progressively come into greater focus, at
the expense of the traditional balance of the Godhead being at one and
the same time transcendent and immanent. As indicated by the popularity,
gauged by those ticking the box of a questionnaire which provided an 'I
believe that God is something within each person, rather than something
out there option, in Catholic countries like Portugal (Vol. I, Ch. 23),
the immanent not infrequently takes precedence over the transcendent,
the latter slipping towards the horizon, even dipping over it. The
'ground' is set for experiencing the 'presence' of the sacred: maybe
less the 'presence' generated when the lamp (God-on-High) reflects on
the person as a mirror, but a presence beneath any mirror which might
still be there.
Albeit to varying degrees and ways, features of theistic
traditionalism are dropped. Sometimes, the fabric of tradition becomes
thin indeed. Sometimes tradition is drawn on as a resource, tested by
experience, to serve 'God within'. However, in practice some form or
degree of tradition generally enters the picture. A great many
Occidental Christians — even more so among the considerable numbers of
believers within traditions like Islam — continue to belief in beliefs,
other features of tradition. Traditionally, the very point of tradition
has been to mediate between God-on-High and people of this world.
Traditionally, God-on-High has been considered to be too 'other' for
direct spiritual experience of the sacred — as Godhead — to be available
for anyone other than virtuosi (or renegades). Tradition is required to
sustain revelations of the theistic Godhead, in this world, when they
have happened in the past.
For whatever reasons, beliefs remain important (and, of course, are
thriving in those parts of the world where conservative religion is
waxing). This raises the question: are beliefs, more generally the
'apparatus' of tradition as a whole, compatible with spirituality?
Simmel, and to a lesser extent James, answered in the negative. Beliefs
of a propositional kind, that is beliefs about the nature of the sacred,
are too determinate, too restrictive, too finite, too influenced by the
secular, to cater for the 'formlessness' of spirituality: a
formlessness, a living current which calls for unmediated expression
(Vol. IV, Ch. 82). From the perspective of ultimate spirituality,
belief-mediated spirituality could very well, perhaps certainly, suffer
from being indirect. From this perspective, they are, at best,
approximations to the ultimate variety. Nevertheless, belief-mediated
spirituality is widespread. 'Religion' and 'spirituality' here work in
tandem. 'Experiential belief', as it has aptly been designated (Vol. II,
Ch. 32): in a sense the 'imaginary' of experiences called into play,
beliefs informing the believer about the perfections of the sacred;
believers in beliefs experiencing what beliefs mean: for example the
realm of the perfect known as heaven, or the qualities of Holy
Spirituality. To emphasize the counterpoint, though, believers in
ultimate spirituality object that what is
experienced, via beliefs, can only be akin to the perfect; that beliefs
inevitably involve the imperfections of human cognition, etc.; and, most
importantly of all, by specifying the unspecifiable, are like to mislead
in favour of secular expectations. (Virgins in heaven . . . )
When the otherness of the Godhead is emphasized, when,
correspondingly, believers focus on religious tradition, in particular
ethicality, spirituality tends not to thrive. For those who do not fully
understand the language of tradition, inadequately, not at all when it
comes to intricacies, or who are bored by it, the experiential dimension
is unlikely to be called into play. When beliefs are just 'held' out of
habit, by way of rote (including the roles of ritual), the same applies.
Finally, there are those believers who think of themselves as
spiritual (and religious) whilst not being concerned with the
spirituality of the Holy Spirit or any other mode of sacred theism. It
is likely that people of this bent use the language of spirituality to
incorporate experiences of nature, personal relationships, beauty, and
the like. Among liberal Christians or Sufic Muslims the language of
spirituality can be deployed to affirm humanistic values; to articulate
a sense of being a good person, with depth of integrity; and so on:
arguably more a spirituality of humanism, of caring for others than
anything else. However, so long as humanistic liberals retain some
degree of faith in the sacred of the transcendent, and link their values
accordingly, they are best considered as engaging with the theistic
zone.
On spiritualities of the transformative zone
Here lies the predominant thrust of the teachings of people like the
Dalai Lama, Tagore,
Whether oriental or occidental, the transformative zone largely lies
beyond theistic tradition: the sacred of that 'personal', transcendent
God which typifies theism and/or the tradition associated with it. Of
the 95 per cent of Americans who believe in God, writes Wade Clark Roof
(1999), one-third believe in 'a nonpersonal God, something akin to
"spirit", "ultimate spirit", "God presence", or some other such notion'
(p. 136). As for how the zone lies beyond the secular, it will be
recalled that the sacred-as-perfect is simply impossible from this
perspective.
Taken as a whole, the zone is `transformative' in the sense that it
incorporates gates — say some sort of spirit or life force, inner-life
spirituality, `nature', 'vitality', a non-theistic Higher Power — which
can be resourced by way of the very considerable number of activities
found within the zone (most especially alternative forms of healing, and
meditation) to flow, typically holistically, to and for the end of
metamorphosis (altering, changing, `morphia;', developing or actualizing
the self). What lies within the zone provides opportunities for people
to explore their sense that 'the sacred must surely/definitely exist'.
The zone provides opportunities for going deeper to experience what
(minimally) approaching ultimacy has to offer. The zone provides
opportunities for enlarging, or adding to, human capacities by engaging
in sacred — perfect — 'magic'. As studies of CAM have demonstrated time
and time again, 'knowing' that spirituality is at work is intimately
bound up with experienced transformation of the quality of suffering. As
testified by participants of prosperity spirituality, 'knowing' that
spirituality is at work makes a difference to self-enlargement by way of
'material' acquisition. Matthew Arnold's (1883) rendering of metanoia,
characterized as 'an immense new inward movement for obtaining one's
rule of life', referring to 'a change of the inner man', and aiming at
'restoring the intuition' (p. 178), provides a useful way of capturing
the feel of what much of the transformative zone is about. However
verbose it might be considered, so does Henri Bergson's work on élan
vital.
True, theistic tradition, especially of a more person-focused
variety, often involves the transformative, metanoia. So ideally a more
distinctive term is required to typify what I'm calling the
transformative zone. Unable to think of one, transformative will have to
do for now. At least it directs attention to a theme running right
through the zone.'
Whether transformative sources are taken to lie within the natural
order as a whole, experientially within the person, less frequently
beyond the human as with non-theistic 'Higher Power', the more dedicated
of believers hold they are on the path to transforming what it is to be
alive. Their `aspirational', `inspirational' being is beyond the secular
without the theistic. A famous sentence of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus
Spoke Zarathustra (2003 [orig. 1883-85]) has Zarathustra enjoining,
'Become what you are!' (p. 252). When this is read as an injunction to
'will' the ubermensch (`overman') into actuality, inner latent powers
are called up to expand the very value, scope, of what it is to be
alive; to move towards the infinite (Simmel, 1971: 379-380). In the
spirit of less elitist, individualistic, humanism, to 'know' that one is
a spiritual being, to 'know' that all others are equally sacred, to
'know' that the natural order as a whole belongs to the same dynamic, is
to transform what it is to live with, for and through others: as
natural.
In northern Europe, it looks as though something in the order of half
the adult population is active — in some way or another, to some extent
or another — within the transformative zone. Currently, we simply do not
know percentages for elsewhere in the world, with any clarity whatsoever
for the USA. What we do know, though, is that the Orient, specifically
South Asia, provides outstanding illustrations of the zone as sacred; or
underpinned/ Implicating it. Countless examples could be provided of
teachings, teachers, paths, which break with theistic tradition (Hindu,
Islamic, weakly, even non-traditionalized Buddhism, etc.), not
infrequently with venom. In relatively moderate tone, an impoverished
Baul seeker sings,
Temples and mosques obstruct thy path,
and I fail to hear thy call or to move,
when the teachers and priest angrily crowd around me.
The 'patron saint' of Bangladesh, who epitomizes the liberal
ethicality which permeates the Islam (and the more humanistic NGO
parallel government) of the nation as a whole, is Rabindranath Tagore.
His The Religion of Man (1961; orig. 1931) would no doubt be called The
Spirituality of Humanity today. In the volume he cites the above extract
from a Baul song with great enthusiasm (p. 69). Numerous Sufi 'ways'
have little truck with religious tradition, with theistic sacrality not
infrequently more or less disappearing as well — at times entirely. The
spiritual humanism of Gandhi, and, today, the Dali Lama only on occasion
incorporate a measure of the theistic. Among the more general
population, anthropological research, in particular, has highlighted the
significance of TCAM (traditional complementary and alternative
medicine) in South Asia; of powers emanating from the sacred; of powers
which are primarily sourced by what lies within nature (especially
plants/herbs/earth, and the like) or by the sacred shrines of those who
have realized their spirituality.
In the South Asian sub-continent, truly vast numbers, Hindu, Muslim,
Sikh, Jain, etc., move beyond, more arguably — in cultural context —
transgress their poly/theistic commitments when necessary. Some gather
around gurus (like the hugely popular and influential, late, Sai Baba);
some around shrines (including those of Sufi saints) serving as conduits
of healing (etc.) power from within. One estimate is that two or three
million participated in a Sufi gathering in the Sind a few years ago.
Although adequate statistics are unavailable, it is clear that the
transformative zone, in sacred mode, is flourishing in South Asia: and,
no doubt, in many a similar region of the Orient. Some reject the sacred
of theistic tradition to go within. Many more temporarily 'leave' the
theistic as required. All regard the secular as too limited, too
inadequate, too imperfect to serve all that is called for. If the
secular (and the 'orthodox') was adequate enough, people would not flock
to shrines, etc.) (Vol. I, Ch. 16).
Returning to the Occident, it is doubtful that all that many make
contact with the sacred in the spirit of a Tagore or, going back in time
to the Romantics of the Lake District of England, a Wordsworth. The most
popular figure, of the most popular activities of the transformative
zone — those clustering under the rubric CAM — is Deepak Chopra (2004):
'The one reality is spirit'; `Every cell in your body agrees to work for
the welfare of the whole' (pp. 3, 8). (Oprah Winfrey is vastly more
popular, but has more general concerns.) Many other teachers or
practitioners, too, emphasize the sacred. More generally, though,
experience of the sacred of CAM is relatively subdued, muted, muffled;
or attenuated. Penultimate-sacrality (or the partially so) is in
evidence, perhaps associated with a tentative, hesitant approach held
back by scepticism. It is also clear that many are more attentive to
experienced consequences than on what has given rise to the experiences.
The slogan of pragmatic CAM is that 'what works, works'. When the
language of spirituality is present (as with 'mind—body—spirit'),
reference to the sacred is often dim. With the mark of ultimate
spirituality being experience of the sacred, it approximates to the
ultimate; or, one might say, it is practically sacred.'
What of pragmatic CAM when practices are 'simply' practised for
outcomes, with the sacred not being experientially apparent, with no
allusion to the perfect? Does apparently popular usage of CAM in this
(predominantly) non-sacred mode belong to the transformative zone? Up,
to now I have been working with the idea that the transformative zone
goes beyond the secular in that the sacred — as impossible — is in
evidence. When the sacred is not experientially apparent, perhaps
because of attention being focused on concrete results, another
criterion can be applied to decide whether pragmatic CAM of the kind
under consideration belongs to the transformative zone; whether the
secular is transgressed. By definitional fiat, the meaningful nature of
CAM of this variety entails that neither verification nor falsification
is possible. Phenomena of this variety 'evade science', are
'supra-experimental', `surpass the limits of our knowledge' to bring
Durkheim's formulations to bear (1971: 24). The cause and effect of the
secular is not at work. The energy flow of predominantly non-sacred CAM
is 'protected' from falsification (or verification) by science: simply
by maintaining that what works, works. When it works, that is; and when
it does not, one simply moves on.'
The transformative zone also contains numerous, pretty clear-cut,
ontologies of the less-than-perfect, the imperfect, the non-perfect;
phenomena which do not draw on the sacred; have nothing to do with
ultimate spirituality. So far as I am aware, no one has ever claimed
that paranormal entities, like ghosts, are perfect. It is difficult to
see how someone who says 'there could very well be "something there",
but for the life of me I don't know what it is' is referring to the
sacred. Jinns, the spirits, usually harmful, which live between the
orthodoxy of Islam and the secular of a great deal of, say,
northern/north-eastern Africa, fall well short of the perfect (Vol. IV,
Ch. 87). Going back in time, so are the deities of classical Greece:
those gods' which Martin Nilsson (1964) sees as 'stronger, wiser, more
powerful than men', continuing, tut this is a mere question of degree'
(p. 156). The extra-human (in the sense of above or beyond the human),
the extra-ordinary (above or beyond the ordinary), are widespread: not
secular; probably not aspiring to, probably not entailing the sacred. To
distinguish states of affairs or processes of this variety from the
secular, the criteria of verification and/or falsification are to hand.
When neither can be applied, science — better, the secular — is evaded.
Whether they exist or not, jinns lie beyond the grasp of by so does the
idea that the spirituality of spirit possession is sourced by
jinn-ontology.
It should be emphasized, though, that a great deal of what can be
placed under the rubric 'magic' — in the hands of experts of divination
or the paranormal, in a great deal of CAM — is transgressive in the
fundamental sense of having to do with the perfect. As with a typically
bureaucratic consultation with with an astrologer, with tomes, in India,
the underlying assumption, the unwritten premise, the working
propositional belief, is that the laws operating at the heart of magic
are the perfect incarnate. Pure magic, automatic magic, is widespread.
Here, effect or prediction is believed to follow the cause or the
predictive in ways determined by, flowing from the 'natural' order of
things. It is not that science can deem the magic unworkable. It is that
a perfect order is involved, one deemed to be beyond scientific
knowledge by the very procedures of science itself. The 'knowing' of the
perfect is not the knowing of science or anything else that is secular.
Neither is the knowing of science involved when believers explain why
magic does not work. The exercise of inner-life sacred agency — to heal
terminal disease, for example — goes way beyond what the secularist is
able to determine (for the sacred is taken to be at work); and goes
beyond what the secularist can test (failure to heal, for example, being
attributed to the person losing their faith in the sacred).
Spiritualities within-of the secular zone
In The Next American Spirituality (2000), George Gallup and Timothy
Jones write, 'amazingly, almost a third of those in our survey defined
spirituality with no reference to God or a higher authority' (p. 49).
Explications, by respondents, of what spirituality refers to include:
- `a calmness in my life',
- 'something you can really put your heart into';
- `believing in myself to make the right decisions',
- 'having tension evolve into a whole spirit';
- `the essence of my personal being';
- 'each person having his or her own essence';
- `your relationship to people and living positively';
- `living the life you feel is pleasing';
- `the state of mind that some people have';
- `sensuality and one's senses';
- `living by common sense' (ibid).
Then there are all those expressions used during the course of
everyday life. In ascending order of frequency, probably from 'spirit',
to 'spiritual' to the more experientially substantive `spirituality';
expressions like 'She is in high spirits', 'He is a really spiritual
person', 'the spirituality I felt at the event was overwhelming', 'she
really does believe in her true self'. The language of the sacred, too,
is not infrequently encountered during the everyday. To provide an
illustration close to my own heart, 'The books in my study are
absolutely sacrosanct'.
Oft employed in apparently secular contexts, with a decidedly secular
feel to most of the formulations, it is not surprising that it is
becoming fashionable for academics to write of 'secular spirituality',
with volumes appearing with titles like Spirituality for the Sceptic.
However, the formulations under consideration thus far most definitely
need not entail secular spirituality. Some or many of those who
formulate spirituality as 'a calmness in my life', for example, could be
among the many millions of the USA who practise yoga and feel calm,
including those who experience calmness whilst on their way to the
sacred. Gallup and Jones' respondents might make `no reference to God or
a higher authority'. However, that could include those who are
autonomous, who reject the term God on the grounds of being 'a higher
authority', whilst nevertheless believing in inner-spirituality. When
someone says 'I feel spiritual', she could really be meaning it,
referring to the ultimate spirituality of the theistic zone, for
example. The affirmation, 'I'm spiritual not religious', which has
become something of a cultural cliché, could refer to secular
spirituality, perhaps to affirm 'living the life I feel is really
gratifying'. Alternatively, it could be used by someone active within
the transformative zone, perhaps to affirm opposition to religion. Taken
at face value, Kenneth Pargament's point that 'the term spiritual is
increasingly reserved for the loftier/functional side of life' (see Vol.
I, Ch.10), or Brian Zinnbauer and co-author's (1999) point that 'In
effect, spirituality is credited with embodying the loftier side of life
and the highest in human potential' (p. 902; emphases provided), might
not have anything to do with ultimate spirituality: relatively strictly
speaking, the ultimate — as perfect — is not about the loftier, the
potential of the 'highest' . Alternatively, people on the path to the
ultimate could be involved.
Although secular spirituality cannot simply be 'read off' from
expressions like 'He is a really spiritual person' or words like
'loftier', it surely must be easy to find confirmatory evidence of
secular usage. One can find out whether people use expressions of the
kind under consideration to refer to secular states of affairs; one can
ascertain whether people who say they are spiritual people are in fact
secular. One can ascertain whether 'true self' means being `true' as
perfect (and therefore sacred) or whether it refers to the integrity,
the depth of conscience, which has been acquired from, and cultivated
within the secular condition. One can tease out whether someone who says
somebody else is 'spiritual' serves as a way of emphasizing that the
other is 'deep', centred', 'profound'; living her life in line with her
innermost values.
But is it so easy? Consider, for example, people who have deep,
powerful, moving, heartfelt, out-of-the-ordinary experiences —
aesthetic, feeling-full, loving, of the soul — which are associated with
`spirituality'; those who talk of the must of 'going deeper' to find . .
. ; or of 'doing my very best to align myself with my true self'. Then
see what happens when one attempts elucidation by way of discussion.
Relatively ad hoc inquiry, carried out by myself, research students and
many others, over the years, comes up with the same kind of responses
time and time again. The responses show that many simply don't know if
their experiences are `really' spiritual, could be spiritual, or
'really' refer to something secular. Although I don't know of anything
like systematic research on the matter, the same would almost certainly
apply if one were to talk with people about what they mean by
expressions like 'bringing out the very best in human nature' (with its
Rousseauian undertones, a favourite among certain educationalists),
'true self', or 'natural healing'.
Not surprisingly, most people do not attempt the kind of analytic
determination which those studying spirituality might be looking for.
Many simply don't know, exactly or less-than-exactly, what they have in
mind when they use the language of spirituality. It could very well
involve unexamined feeling. Those who speak of 'natural healing' might
very well simply find it irrelevant to pore over what 'natural' means:
natural, as in the way the body operates to heal surface wounds, natural
in the sense of a 'subtle energy' which heals; or both. Those who have
experiences of the kind reported by David Hay (Vol. I, Ch. 22), calling
them spiritual or religious, might very well think it rather silly,
beside the point to think through whether this is a way of emphasizing
the quality of the experience, perhaps its unusual or 'out-standing'
nature, or a way of expressing a glimpse of the perfect, the ultimate.'
The anti-life sentiment of Wordsworth's famous lines come to mind:
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things:- We murder to dissect.
None of these considerations rule out the identification of
relatively clear cut cases of secular spirituality in toto. The litmus
test for distinguishing secular spirituality from sacred modes, namely
that the former has to entail, affirm or strongly imply the
less-than-perfect (like 'best'), can sometimes work wonders. The person
who says, `I'm a spiritual person', I'm a really good person', 'like
everyone else, I'm imperfect', and who flatly denies that she believes
in spirituality, provides a relatively clear cut example. (`Relatively'
because inconsistency could be at work.) Robert Solomon, insightful
philosopher of emotions, relationality and life-values, and author of
Spirituality for the Sceptic (2002), considers spirituality as 'the
thoughtful love of life', the 'grand' passions and thoughts involved
being of a secular order (p. 6). Even here, though, the tone of the book
makes you wonder whether it is as secular as might have been intended.
In the years prior to his much-to-be lamented death, I think it is fair
to say that Solomon was passionately, albeit `sceptically' reflecting on
what lies beyond the secular pure and simple.
Contrary to what some have argued, differences of language use, and
context, of terms like 'spirituality' and 'sacred' cannot be more or
less ignored.
Unless the perfect is experienced, sensed, `inkled' during a football
match — a degree or quality of experience being a favoured instance of
alleged implicit religion or spirituality — it is 'merely' a sacred
event, or a magical moment of time, in some secular sense or another;
maybe pointing to the sacred for those so inclined; maybe even being the
perfect of a match for those who can 'see' this within the failures of
any game itself. The great team, the great footballer as the perfect
incarnate: then the foul.
On continua and continuities
After all this talk of zones, it might be concluded that nothing
extends partially, or entirely, across the board: from the sacred of the
theist to the secular. And certainly from the perspectives of ultimate
theistic spirituality (most obviously of God-on-High), ultimate
non-theistic spirituality (most obviously of inner-life spirituality),
and the secular (arguably the die-hard atheist; maybe more generally)
there are three distinct poles. Hence disputes between them: currently
being most prominently generated by the new atheists.
Would that things were as simple! There is more to the matter of
making sense of spirituality than three mutually exclusive,
differentiated poles. For although the polar of each zone 'stands
alone', other incumbents ensure that determinate lines of demarcation
are/can be de-differentiated. Most clearly, although the transformative
and theistic poles are mutually exclusive, the two zones also flow into
one another; merge; overlap.
There are a couple of ways of exploring the above. One concerns the
notion of the continuum; the other, the 'perennial' of the continuity.
On continua
For the sake of clarity, a dictionary definition of 'continuum' runs,
'A continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly
different from one another, although the extremes are quite distinct'.
(The notion of `spectrum' is much the same, as when a rainbow is
referred to as 'a continuum of colour'.) Consider this in connection
with what happens between the two poles of the transformative and the
theistic. A 'continuous sequence' runs between the two. Since 'adjacent
elements are not perceptibly different from one another', there is no
single point of differentiation, indeed, no determinate point at all.
The two poles remain mutually exclusive; a continuum (more precisely,
various continua) stretches rather like a complex bridge, grounded at
each end in the clearly mutually exclusive, meeting in the middle in
various ways.
To complement/adjust the language/conceptualization of zones with
continua is not to do away with zones. Rather like two sides of a
bridge, each grounded in opposite sides of the bank, zones exist. At the
same time, the adjacent elements (`bricks') which move out from each
polar side (`banks') meet in the middle in various ways: to flow into
one another (if 'cement' is used), to merge (if 'cables' are wrapped
together) or to overlap (with 'logs' placed accordingly). Continua are
composed of incumbents of zones, run through the zones, and, around the
peripheries of zones, erode determinate boundaries between sides.
Continua are made up of what can be thought of as 'items'. Items
include what people maintain to be the case (`beliefs that', 'beliefs
in' apprehensions, senses, notions, etc.), the degree of certitude
people hold things to be the case (certainty, likelihood, probability,
etc.), what people experience to be the case (experience of something
out there, in here, nowhere in particular). Together with items 'within'
consciousness, items also include all that is formulated within culture:
in books, sacred texts, music, in the media, and so on. Then there are
items found within congregations (an emphasis on God as transcendent, or
on God as immanent) or activities (contemplating nature to experience
the sacred within, channelling, to find a 'higher' spirit guide, etc.).
Items are rarely found in already organized continua (like, for example,
initiatory stages in Scientology). Nevertheless, continua are not
difficult to find. It is relatively easy for the scholar to organize
items found scattered through culture into continua: say of books
ranging from God-on-High to books ranging from `God'-within, and all
that is sequentially in-between. In everyday life, it is also pretty
clear that people, intent on change, progressively work out progressive
continua. Consider the Christian who gradually moves from items
emphasizing God-on-High, to items drawing attention to the value of
emphasizing the immanence of the God-on-High, to items facilitating this
emphasis, to items signposting the value of dropping the God-on-High in
favour of what can really emphasize the within: yoga. When continua
operate like this, one item signalling another, they can be thought of
as fairly embedded in the culture, as routes or avenues. Probably more
frequently, though, those who work out progressively unfolding continua,
for the sake of relatively gradual change, do so fairly
individualistically.
Whatever, the important thing is that the greater the extent to which
continua are followed through, from any one pole, the greater the
likelihood of some kind of amalgamation with whatever other pole is in
sight. In the Occident, the impetus in favour of the immanent within
religious tradition means that numerous 'Christians' have moved a long
way towards the polar of the inner-life spirituality of the
transformative zone. A broad continuum runs from the theistic of the
transcendent, to the theistic of the more immanent, to the more
immanentized within 'Christianity', to the pantheistic (God-is/ in-all),
to the depths of the self beyond the 'ego' or 'lower self'; ultimately,
perhaps, to the monistic, where everything 'real' is taken to be sacred.
Having come to thinking of themselves as spiritual seekers, Catholics,
who might well have stopped taking Mass, take up tai chi or
eastern-grounded meditation emphasizing God-in/as-Creation.
With the next chapter in mind, the operation of continua has two main
consequences. First, at some point along continua operating 'out of the
poles of, say, the theistic and transformative zones, differences become
a matter of degree; of emphasis; evaporating when the two orientations
of continua merge. This means that it is not possible to arrive at a
determinate count of zones. And second, continua can make it relatively
easy for people intent on change. Whether drawing on relatively
well-established routes, or finding their own, or both, people are able
to draw on pretty well-established (cultural, etc.) resources. They do
not have to make things up on the hoof. It is not so difficult to cross
the zonal 'bridge'. There are plenty of resources, within religion
tradition, to shift to the more immanentized of the Godhead of
tradition; to the more detraditionalized of the traditional. Just change
congregations. There are plenty of resources to move on to that
sacrality of the transformative zone which leaves tradition behind. Take
up tai chi (as well). In the process, God shifts towards that
`god'-human equality, identification, of inner-life spirituality; the
location of `god'-as-the person then completes the shift by ruling out
'God-person' inequality. From the other direction, that is from the main
polarity of the transformative zone, inner-life spirituality believers
decide to incorporate 'external' spirit authorities to assist them,
moving on to a personal, 'theistic' God as friend, partner, assistant,
then, perhaps, to more fully-fledged incorporation of the theistic.
Again, the 'bridge' is crossed. For those who want to move, in either
direction, there are plenty of things ahead of them, many quite
long-established; most with cultural credibility, legitimacy. Prompted
by occasion, desire to explore, experiment, people can readily move
'forward' or backward. People can readily hold similar-but-different
'positions' at the same time. (The implications for counting are
considerable: there is no one 'position' to count.)
Overall, re the above, a true continuum is at work. The extremes are
quite distinct. The God-on-High of strong tradition is not the same as
the 'god' within of the transformative zone. Die-hard theists draw a
strict boundary between their tradition and what lies beyond it. The
keynote is separation. At the same time, there is a sequence running
between, linking up, the two distinctive poles. Gradual gradation:
change is more imperceptible than perceptible. Unless imposed
arbitrarily, a determinate boundary between the poles cannot be drawn.
The continua exist within each of the two zones. Continua run from each
pole, to merge into one another; to really cross the `bridge' with
regard to their respective directions. What makes continua yet more
substantial, it is worth noting, is that something akin to
Wittgenstein's notion of 'family resemblances' is in evidence. For
instance, people drop the values of being obedient to, and dependent on,
God-on-High, retaining faith in the transcendent-cum-immanent and the
duty of being kind to others; then the transcendent fades in
significance, the immanent waxes, and the value of being kind to others
undergoes transformational shift to become yet more inner-directed. As
people move with the passage of time, overlaps so-to-speak overlap
over/with overlaps.
It is one thing to talk about continua between the sacred and the
sacred. It is quite another when what I'll call the great divide is at
issue. This is the divide between the secular and the sacred; the
either-or, the incompatibility of the imperfect and the perfect. When
the secular comes to an end, for the perfect to commence, it looks as
though continua, too, come to a close. It looks as though conversion is
required to 'jump over' the barrier between the secular and the
transformative or the theistic.
One argument is that continua continue, albeit in what can be
considered as the transgressive mode of the by-pass. Whereas there is a
certain rationality, rhyme and reason, about continua (and therefore
movement) between the theistic and transformative zones, the same does
not apply here. In connection with the former, the sacred intersects
with the sacred; theistic sacrality includes the rhyme and reason
factor, re continua with the transformative zone, of being immanent as
well as transcendent.
With the either-or in mind, for some people reason is circumvented,
circled around. To consider this in connection with continua (and
associated people flow) from the secular 'into' the transformative zone,
relative to the small number of die-hard secularists, in many an
Occidental nation, many more are 'optimistic agnostics' (or that way
inclined, with a let us wait and see' attitude); and some are moved to
become 'exploratory agnostics'. Transgressing the canons of the polar
secularist, optimistic/exploratory so-called 'agnostics' include those
who exemplify this outlook: those who yearn for 'something more'. This
is not necessarily sacred in self-understanding. It could be something
`above', 'deeper than', or the 'MORE' than, as William James (1974
[orig. 1902]) put it, than the limitations — that is finitude — of the
secular condition. These are those who cannot leave their secularity
behind, whose yearning, imagination, inchoate 'faith in' nevertheless
impels, moves, an aspect of their being into the transformative zone;
or, probably less frequently, the theistic.
For some people, by-passes circumvent reason; provide continua in
face of the either-or logic. The yearn highlights the matter. From
within the secular frame of reference, yearning for the beyond, the
other than the finite, can be all-consuming. It can consume the
significance of a great deal of what one is as a secular being. By
'using up' the significance of a great deal of the secular, it
diminishes the value of the secular: thereby fuelling itself. From the
frame of reference of what is being yearned for, the yearn can be
equally all-consuming. One can become absorbed by the effort of arriving
at that which one is intent on being consumed by — perhaps the perfect.
And on occasion, the yearn 'works': either partially or entirely, it
propels the person to convincing, or partially convincing experiences,
awareness of `the other side'.
It might be said that the humanities, the arts, the literature, the
poetry, the music way back into the nineteenth-century owe a
considerable amount of urgency, inspiration to the theme of 'the yearn'.
Wittgenstein wrote, 'The description of a wish is, eo ipso, the
description of its fulfilment' (cited by Arrington and Addis, 2001: 17).
Although Wittgenstein seems to accord considerable capacity,
significance, to the powers of the imagination, fuelled as the
expression of the wish, transportative efficacy is in evidence. By way
of representation' of the wish, to draw on another term used by
Wittgenstein in this context of use, the wish 'takes' those with intense
desire into 'new' territory. ('New' has to be in quotation marks because
those concerned might well have already been there) A more illuminating
illustration, almost certainly, is provided by the great North American
poet Wallace Stevens. Unable to fully believe in the sacred, whilst
irresistibly impelled towards it, Stevens created the sacred within the
imaginative power, the creative and, more significantly, absorption
force of 'his' poetry. Classical Romanticism might have been integral to
Stevens' being, fuelling the impulsion. When shifting `out' of his
career (running a top echelon financial service), 'spirituality-as
imagination-or more' tended to soar, sometimes taking a `proto', 'as if'
mode. In his outstanding works, Stevens draws strongly on the capacity
of the sheer power of the poetic imagination: to effect what a Romantic
precursor, Coleridge, drew on to actualize the 'willing' suspension of `dis'-belief,
to move 'on' to what he 'believed' in, but could not 'truly' experience.
The wish, hope, yearning, 'faith' for and of the imagination is in
something (see Taylor, 2002: 26). The transportative modes of going
beyond explored by Theodore Ziolkowski in his Modes of Faith (2007): the
'in' of art, journeys to the Occident; the 'in' seen in the powerful
mythopoesis, mytho-narrative trends of the last centuries, rejecting
that secular history which is 'hostile and dangerous for life' (Ziolkowski,
p. 147, citing Nietzsche); and, among other things, utopian
idealization. Regarding a recent publication about Le Corbusier, the
author, Flora Samuel (2010), dwells on Corbusier's effort to design
'architectural promenades', relatively encapsulated journeys serving as
initiatory routes into the power of harmonious unity. Another 'believer'
in unable to 'truly' actualize: among countless others of the cultural
ilk.
It is easy to think that the history of the yearn is tantamount to
the history of cultural elites: those sophisticates who have lost faith
in religious tradition, in what the finitudes of the secular have to
offer, who have the skills, time, money, to reflect on, and get
tormented by, the purpose of life. I am far from convinced that this is
entirely the case. It is quite apparent that we do not know how many
today, within the populace at large, believe in the yearn, are consumed
by the yearn (with the secular being consumed in commensurate manner),
and with sacred spirituality (or something akin to it) being consumed in
the manner of 'taking over'. We do not know the extent to which yearning
— intense desire, urgently justified expectation, powerful perhaps need
— moves far enough beyond to partially, or more comprehensively,
transgress the secular. It would be rash to deny, though, that during
periods, or occasions, of life, yearning is activated, perhaps
fulfilled. filled. We certainly know that existential issues, most
obviously raised by serious longer-term illness, tend to generate
reflection on the 'more' of life and the yearning for fulfilment. We
know that hallucinogens and the like, during the 'sixties', frequently
served to encapsulate the 'promised' within
the contents of a capsule (sometimes, 'cocoon' is a better
descriptor). The vehicle of the trip could certainly transport people
into other realms. That the transportative was encapsulated — as 'the
trip' — meant that the threat of critical reality was diminished. The
trip could plough on. We also know that numerous vehicles are operative
within the popular culture of the Occident today. The `make'-believe
'in', or the 'creative'-believe 'in' of the momentum of the yearning of
the half-plus-believer: maybe the computer `cyberian', who strives to
realize belief in 'the more', the perfect, by way of acts of creation,
inspiration, extension, 'othering' (to use an ugly word) — the 'make
this happen', the happening; the enclosure of the
imagination-as-reality.
Aims, imagined realities, obviously integral to yearns, are at work.
So are experiences. Often, continua from the secular to the beyond
involve existentially driven 'states of mind', music, mind-altering
substances, the work of spiritual healers (say in hospices), film,
walking in glorious circumstances, and so on. And continua of this
variety, encapsulating the person from the critical voice of 'you are
secular', meet their 'end point' with the veracity of experience. What
might have begun as moving to the reality of the 'as if' becomes the
reality of whatever experience of the beyond has to 'say'. In the
instance of Bertrand Russell (1975), who is returned to in the next
chapter, the utterly convincing experience of what lies within 'the
union of love' (p. 9) — the spiritual experience of today. In the case
of other mortals, the encapsulated 'opens out', dissolves, when the
experience of (say) `the music' moves beyond secular significance; comes
to 'the end' in this regard. Experiences taken to be of beauty:
powerful; any sort of critical voice replaced with the 'cultural value'
of beauty; beauty on a continuum to 'the beyond'. High percentages of
people, in many countries of the Occident, have had the experience (or
experiences): maybe not taken to be of permanent `ultimate' significance
afterwards, but likely to be reactivated when existential loss (for
example) comes into evidence. Clear-cut lines of demarcation are eroded.
The boundary between the secular and the beyond is dissolved by what
transgresses the former.
Similar encapsulations, cocoons, internally-`referential' paths, are,
of course, used across the world: albeit not so much to move from the
secular to the beyond as to enhance the significance of the beyond. For
the highly influential anthropologist, Clifford Geertz (1996), who draws
on those rites de passage which move participants out of the secular,
rituals isolates the beyond from the ordinary (the secular),
encapsulating the beyond to affirm it. Geertz wrote before the language
of spirituality became popular within the academy. The modes of
experience elucidated by many a ritual would be spiritual in today's
parlance.
Continua-cum-experiences of the kind under discussion can readily be
dismissed by so-called masters of suspicion. The likes of Freud take the
easy path of pointing to psychologically-driven illusion, mere
fulfilment of the wish. The 'as if' as the 'if only'. Given the
existential pressure frequently in evidence, a facile dismissal, one
which ignores the value of what is sought, accomplished to some degree
or another.
A rather different way of moving from the secular to the beyond
involves what boils down to the continua (and continuities) of
socialization. A great, albeit sadly neglected volume of Hans
Vaihinger's is titled The Philosophy of As If' (1925). The volume is a
paean for the sheer significance of the `as if'. The 'as if'; the yearn
as 'if only' to begin with. However, the volume also instances the 'as
if' as true; that is, as reality. Here, Vaihinger provides examples
which undermine his own title. Rather than people living their lives `as
if' they were free, for instance, they simply, that is quite
contentedly, without question, live 'free': and this in face of whatever
knowledge they might hold pertaining to life-as-determined.
Extrapolating to spirituality, the argument is that many of those in the
Occident, today, have been socialized into thinking of themselves as
spiritual. Among the young, of many a primary school of Britain,
experiential 'tasting' of wonder, harmony with nature, reflection on
'depth', including the significance of spiritual values, provides a
background. Youth culture can provide a 'sort of'-confirmatory of the
more extraordinary, tinged with the 'as if' of youth scepticism.
Whatever the exact form of socialization, the possibility, the
likelihood, for some the certainty of the 'beyond' enters the normal
fabric of life (Heelas and Seel, 2003). This is rather like acquiring
belief in freedom, what serves as the ground of freedom, 'mind' or a
close cognate: as part of the culture; simply accepted. This probably
contrasts with the older, too old to have experienced the kind of
socialization which has just been sketched, of the age when it is more
likely that spirituality is 'realized', by way of experience, when
cultural and personal circumstances, 'call' for it, than it is for
spirituality to have been primed by the cultural earlier on in life:
(see Vol. I, Ch. 22, on the extent of self-attested spiritual/religious
experiences).
Overall, among those of the Occident who consider themselves to be
spiritual, there are those who have by-passed the either-or of the
secular-sacred by way of a supra-rational 'capsule' and associated
experiences. There are those who have been socialized into spirituality
from an earlier age, perhaps going through an 'as if' phase of
unthinking acceptance. And there are those who 'realize' spirituality,
perhaps under existential stress, probably in connection with
experience, when older. In the USA, where socialization at an earlier
age by way of religion is more significant than in most of the Occident,
continua are present incorporating the subjectivized, the therapeutic
for many teenagers (Heelas, 2007: 71-72; Smith, 2005; Smith and Snell,
2009).
To add to the case against the comprehensiveness, 'finitude', of the
boundary between the secular and sacred, the 'degrees of certitude
factor' deserves emphasis. From the secular, the gradual gradation
towards sacred spirituality: from not very likely', to `so long as it
means something', to 'that experience has virtually convinced me',
through to certitude. There are the countless testimonies of people
oscillating around the secular-cum-sacred-cum-secular, moving from the
former to the latter when occasions like 'feeling alone' demand, or vice
versa when occasions of the 'feeling fulfilled with the everyday'
variety are dominant. Here lies convincing evidence of
`certitude-mobility'; of movement back and forth along the continuum of
non-belief — belief in the beyond, quite possibly the spiritual of the
perfect. The finitude of the boundary is also undermined by virtue of
the fact that many believers in the sacred acknowledge doubt, sometimes
acclaim it as a crucial constitutive of true belief. Doubt is doubt,
across much of the board. Intersecting with this, a continuum linked
with science is increasingly widespread: the continuum from science as
the known, to how little is known even about what science `knows', the
'my goodness, last week science said don't eat that, this week .. . to
the (Einsteinian) 'the more science knows, the more clear the extent of
the unknown', to the (even more Einsteinian), wonder . . . (Thinking of
the continuum linked with schools, it would be valuable to learn more
about the extent of 'wonder-teaching' across the globe.)
On continuities underpinning the continua
The relatively uninterrupted is enhanced by virtue of continuities. A
dictionary definition of continuity runs, 'an uninterrupted succession
or flow'. Underpinning continua, as the lowest — most fundamental —
common denominator, there are major continuities; culturally powerful
modes which, if not quite of 'the same' are similar enough to help
sustain the relatively uninterrupted. Running through a great deal of
what is going on in the zones, convincing evidence of continuity is
provided by the fact that a/the basic dynamic of spirituality, sacred or
not, is much the same right around the triangle of the three zones.
Whether theistic, inner-life or secular, spirituality involves moving
beyond the less-than-perfect to experiencing the more profound, the more
significant, the soul music. The going within to come out, the going
higher to come out: ontology, ontological geography aside, the same
imperatives are at work. Go closer. Make contact. Furthermore, pretty
well all modes of spirituality, including much of the secular, share the
theme of subjecting the secular to critique. This is clear enough with
regard to the theistic and the transformation. The point almost
certainly applies to secular spirituality: as when calling someone a
spiritual person marks her out as exemplary, thereby (in)-directly
drawing attention to the failures of others.
Another pronounced characteristic which runs across a great deal of
the triangular board concerns inclusivization: noticeably
`world'-incorporating humanism. This typifies more liberal forms of
theism. This is widespread within spiritualities of life, including a
great deal of CAM. This is apparent within the secular zone, most
especially among those who use the language of spirituality to refer to
the highest of the values of the (humanistic) human. Another continuity
of note involves that running between the 'natural' of the laws of
nature of the secular and the 'natural' of the laws of nature posited by
a great deal of the theistic and transformative. Bearing in mind that
the uncertainty (or revocability) of science entails that investigation
can never conclusively demonstrate that laws of nature are perfect in
and of themselves, the fact remains that most secularists, perhaps if
prompted a wee bit, would probably concur that the laws of nature are
somehow perfect, ultimate. Secularists thereby join hands with theistic
or transformative naturalism. Albeit limited to what runs through the
theistic zone and much of the transformative, additional evidence of
continuity is provided by the fact that the sacred itself,
over-and-above differences, is held in common: as the truly worthwhile;
as the ultimate of what 'spirituality' is 'really' about.
Right across the triangular board, the elementary notion of the truly
worthwhile as the perfect is normally present. This is obvious enough
with regard to much of the transformative and theistic. As for the
secular, it very much looks as though the language of secular
spirituality is most frequently deployed in connection with high
quality, culturally and individually valued, virtues and commensurate
experiences — concerning humans, nature and the extra-ordinary — with
intimations of the perfect; maybe the longing, the yearn. Again right
across the triangular board, there is the elemental factor of
'experience'. What has come to be known as the experience economy,
epitomized by the purchase of experiences within consumer culture, goes
together with the 'new' experiential empiricism: the test of experience
to ascertain what is right or wrong, whether the commodity, the
relationship, the truth. There is the quality control of the secular
consumer by way of the significance of the purchased experience; the
significance of experience, the test of experience by the 'researcher'
of the transformative; the more-orless identical within the ranks of the
internalized religionist, etc.
Expressivism
In a passage which, I think, best captures what expressivism is
basically about, Edward Shils (1981) writes of the belief, corresponding
to a feeling, that within each human being there is an individuality,
lying in potentiality, which seeks an occasion for realization but is
held in the toils of the rules, beliefs, and roles which society
imposes. . . . [Writers] suggest that the real state of the self is very
different from the acquired baggage which institutions like families,
schools and universities impose. To be "true to oneself", means, they
imply, discovering what is contained in the uncontaminated self, the
self which has been freed from the encumbrance of accumulated knowledge,
norms, and ideals handed down by previous generations. (pp. 10-11; my
emphases)
Does this characterization of the expressivist mode or aspect of
self-understanding refer to the secular, the sacred, both, or neither in
particular? It certainly appears that reference to 'the uncontaminated
self' implies the purity of the perfect; the sacred; a Rousseauian
pre-social self of 'the natural goodness of man' (Melzer, 1990). If this
interpretation is correct, then great swathes of the populace at large —
up to fifty per cent of the populace of certain western countries
according to surveys — count as belonging to the transformative zone.
However, many expressivistically-inclined, perhaps the majority, do not
appear to think of themselves as sacred beings. Does this mean that they
are secularists? I am doubtful. The most likely explanation is that a
great many simply don't know, don't care to reflect upon, don't feel
able to make any progress in determining, the ontological nature of this
`uncontaminated, true self' of theirs. Probably owing a great deal to
the sheer mysteriousness of the matter, they don't determine whether it
is something to do with the best of human 'nature', whether it is the
best of the cultural, whether it is some kind of proto-sacrality, or
whether it is (somehow) sacred. Ontology, ontological foundations or
sources, is shrouded beyond determinate thought. To the extent this
applies, expressivism is non-ontological. Bearing in mind that the
secular-sacred distinction is ultimately of an ontological nature, many
an expressivist neither belongs to the secular, per se, nor the sacred
per se. In effect the great divide is bypassed; ignored.
On the one hand expressivism resonates powerfully with secular
spirituality, indeed, could be a manifestation of that secular
spirituality which emphasizes the very best. On the other hand,
expressivism resonates powerfully with sacred spirituality, again, could
be a manifestation of that sacred spirituality which involves
experiences of the perfect. A continuum can run between the more
secularly-orientated and the more sacrally-inclined modes of
expressivism. However, teasing out the continuum is far from easy;
systematic determination impossible. This is not simply a matter of
indeterminancy. Arguably more fundamentally, it is also due to the fact
that expressivism, of all shades of orientation, is underpinned by the
same continuities. The same basic, 'perennial' experiential assumptions
or dynamics, including 'the deeper the better', 'expressivity matters',
'connect through the deeper as/and the expressive'; and the fundamental
Rousseauian assumption of human nature as fundamentally good, with
'latent' potential to be unlocked; with capacities and capabilities to
be 'cultivated' (the term implying that there is something already there
to cultivate). Overall, the presence of continua and the continuities
contribute to circumventing the 'great divide' separating the beyond
from the secular. A roundabout.
On reflection
Overall, the zoning-with-continua-with-continuities scheme I'm
working with certainly includes breaks, namely those between the secular
and the sacred, those between the distinctive, mutually exclusive polar
amplifications of the zones: the die-hard atheist, the ultimate
spiritualities of the transformative and the theistic. At the same time,
continua, underpinned as they are by deeper 'perennial' continuities,
can provide the relatively seamless: without clear-cut lines of
demarcation. It is easy enough, for example, for people to draw upon,
overlap, the 'planks' of 'theistic-akin' and the 'inner-life-akin' to
address life. What really matters is that zones are most certainly not
watertight, self-contained entities. Having draw out certain rhyme and
reason, most especially in terms of continua, things can be brought to
bear on change; and the matter of numerical significance.
On generators of change In an illuminating passage, of 1917, Simmel wrote,
In our present context the essential fact is the existence of large
social groups who, in pursuit of their religious needs, are turning away
from Christianity. . . . the widespread rejection of any fixed form of
religious life is in keeping with our general cultural situation. Thus
supra-denominational mysticism has far the strongest appeal to these
groups. For the religious soul hopes to find here direct spontaneous
fulfilment, whether in standing naked and alone, as it were, before its
God, without the mediation of dogma in any shape or form, or in
rejecting the very idea of God as a petrifaction and an obstacle, and in
feeling that the true religion of the soul can only be its own inmost
metaphysical life not moulded by any forms of faith whatever. (1976:
258-259 [orig. 1917])
As well as showing a major continuum at work, involving the sacred of
theism and autonomous spirituality, the passage indicates that movement
from Occidental theism to the transformative is nothing new. Credence is
lent to this point by another of the great scholars of the early
twentieth century, William James. He would probably have called his
Varieties of Religious Experience (1974 [orig. 1902]) the Varieties of
Spiritual Experience if he were alive today. It provides a wealth of
material demonstrating the extent to which spirituality was in evidence
during the nineteenth century, for example, including what was in effect
beyond religious tradition.
The points made by Simmel, James and many others writing at much the
same time, including Durkheim, are hardly unexpected: not, that is, when
one bears in mind that a great deal of the transformative zone cum
immanentization within Christianity was set in motion by the Romantic
movement of its 'classical' spell during the later eighteenth century
well into the nineteenth. Comprehensive explanations of change in the
Occident have to attend to what has taken place over time, minimally
back to Romanticism. This is not all. Comprehensive explanations would
also have to take into account the much longer standing of the
transformative zone elsewhere in the world. Culturally speaking, the
transformative zone of South Asia is ancient: poly/ theistic religion,
the imperfections of the secular, with the impoverished and others
turning to transformative resources of many modes of Sufism, magic,
etc., as and when occasion demands. It goes without saying that the
structural conditions, the socio-economic environment of pre-modern
South Asia, differ widely from the industrializing modernity facing the
classical Romantics and their successors. To provide a really
comprehensive explanation, differences of this kind would have to be
taken into account.
On Bertrand Russell's momentum to break through to the other side
Needless to say, change requires momentum, motivation. Desire: the
role played by `macro'-factors like economic suffering included, nothing
much happens unless passion is operative. An illustration is provided by
a testimony of Bertrand Russell's. The author of Why I Am Not a
Christian (1957), an alleged maestro of the atheist stance, Russell came
to realize experience of the beyond. Impelled by the failures of
religious tradition and the limitations of the secular, Russell's
longstanding yearn moves into the 'believing in' of what we now know as
spirituality: 'the union of love', a union taken to be of an ethical,
experiential significance pointing towards, existing as, a union beyond
love in secular mode. Russell the spiritual humanist, which, probably,
was an undercurrent for most of his life: one which emerged from his
positivistic period (anything worth knowing is scientifically,
quantifiably, logically the case) to yearning, to where yearns led him:
not just hesitantly into the transformative zone, but, it appears, to
become of it. As the 'Prologue, - 'What I have Lived for' — of his
autobiography indicates, without passion', the finitude, imperfection of
the secular would not have been surmounted; the barrier raised by being
secular would not have dissolved.
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my
life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable
pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds,
have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean
of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy — ecstasy so
great that I would often have sacrificed the rest of life for a few
hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves
loneliness — that terrible loneliness in which one shivering
consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable
lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love
I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven
that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I have sought, and
though it might seem too good for human life, this is what — at last — I
have found.
Having written of his mystical quest for knowledge — 'I have tried to
apprehend the Pythagorean power by which numbers hold sway above the
flux' — and of his passion to alleviate the poverty, pain, loneliness
which makes 'a mockery of what human life should be' — Russell concludes
with the lines, This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and
would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me. (p. 9)
Maybe not eternal recurrence, but Nietzsche's great test to identify
those who found a true point to life is in evidence: recurrence. It is
justified to refer to Russell's non-secular, non-theistic experience of
redemption. His yearning long pointed to this; ultimately, though,
experience 'strikes', strikes through the critical secular mind to
transform what his life has meant to him. Hyperbole? Doubtful.
On the 'afflictions of the worthwhile' thesis
Motivating factors of the kind referred to by Russell are legion.
There is only opportunity, here, to say something about what is probably
the 'grand' explanatory approach. It is what I will call the afflictions
of the worthwhile thesis. The basic idea is straightforward. The highly
plausible assumption is that people, across cultures, seek to live a
worthwhile life. Life with a point to it certainly need not involve the
'worthy' life, the life of moral substance, pride, the righteous of the
just. More broadly and significantly, the worthwhile is the vital life,
the life of being alive with fulfilment. Another equally highly
plausible assumption is that afflictions, impoverishment of the
worthwhile, normally generate, motivate responses: change, anything from
taking up substance 'abuse' to religious conversion. It is also highly
plausible to hold that the worthwhile is bound up with the perfect.
Maybe 'the perfect' means things like a worthwhile, 'perfect' game of
tennis: competition is required; distressful states of mind too. From
the perspective of the sacred, this is not `truly' perfect. More
fundamentally than this kind of 'best of all possible worlds' scenario,
it is most unlikely that the inhabitants of any culture fail to think of
the perfect as tantamount to the truly worthwhile. After all, the
sacred-as-perfect is universally abroad to guide the human imagination
(if that is what it is).
Of the changes which the afflictions of the, worthwhile thesis can
help elucidate, I now dwell on the popularity of the transformative zone
in the Occident, specifically the growth of spiritualities of life and
the closely allied development of immanentized theism.' I am convinced,
however, that the thesis is applicable elsewhere, not least South Asia.
The thesis is composed of variants.
The afflictions of the worthwhile thesis has three variants. One, the
cultural failure thesis, applies to those who judge, or find, religion
to be a failure. Whether it is God-on-High theistic sacrality, the
beliefs, certain key values and dynamics of being dependent on the High
of theism, or the institutional arrangements of tradition, religion does
not work. At the same time, the thesis applies to those (including
people who know religion to have failed) who judge much of the secular
to have failed (as well). Imperfections can be felt acutely. The
limitations of the secular, in particular the inability of the secular
to provide 'the perfect', the 'truly' worthwhile, to realize many of its
own ideals, mean that whilst the zone might be relatively satisfactory
for the necessities of everyday life, it invariably fails to provide
anything of ultimate significance; and, for many, probably the majority,
is not `up' to all that much.
Most radically, and almost certainly bearing on relatively few,
cultural failure takes the form of systemic cultural collapse: the
second variant of the thesis. As anyone who has taken the works of Camus
to heart will appreciate, perhaps despairingly, volumes like The Myth of
Sisyphus (1955) convince that it is far from easy to live with what, for
Camus, is 'the absurdity of existence'; that absurdity revealed after
twofold experience of failure. Camus (himself), one of the greatest of
all positive-Stoics of belief in the 'I will', adopted a
far-from-despairing philosophy of life: Pindar's 'O my soul, do not
aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible'.)
The failure/collapse of motivations are not limited to those
afflictions of the worthwhile generated when something which is
worthwhile is undermined or disintegrates. Afflictions-cum-motivations
can also be generated by the worthwhile itself: for example, when what
is already worthwhile generates desire for something more worthwhile
still, ad infinitum, basically a dynamic of high expectations;
expectations which are never met; expectations which generate
afflictions, like thwarted desire or envy; expectations which generate
action. The third point, to reactivate something from the previous
essay, is that motivations can be enabled. To varying degrees and in
various ways, continua and contiguities can serve to facilitate
motivation. The Romantics faced the challenging, difficult task of
carving out their own routes, their own third ways, to serve 'against
the current' of Enlightenment dominated modernity (Berlin, 1997), and,
by and large, 'against' Occidental religious tradition. Today, life for
most of those moving into the transformative zone is significantly
easier. In considerable measure due to momentum generated by the
classical Romantics (sometimes assisted by knowledge of the Orient),
their `installations', works of poetry-cum-art-cum-philosophy of life,
signposts, stepping stones, the zone is now available. Continua
developed in the spirit of Romanticism enable people today to 'flow'
relatively easily. The person moving from Christian tradition towards
inner-life spirituality has plenty of established activities to move
through progressively (if that is what they want): activities, like
those provided by 'Catholic' monasteries and nunneries, converted from
their traditional roles to become meditation, contemplative spiritual
'orders' within.
On cultural failure/collapse in action
As Charles Taylor makes abundantly clear, most especially in A
Secular Age (2007), the classical Romantic Movement primarily developed
out of the sense of twofold failure/collapse and the imperative that
then had to be addressed. Largely not concerned about attempting to
restore religion as a viable source of the worthwhile, unable to do
anything about the progressive destruction of the (in any case
inevitably limited) worthwhile of the secular by mechanization,
urbanization, massification and the like, the Romantics circumvented
failures, dialectically, by finding and securing a third path. Many of
the Romantics themselves, then those who were influenced by them, found
the worthwhile, the inspirational, the 'point' of life through the
sacrality (much of today's 'spirituality') of and in nature, within the
person, within the relationship, flowing out as the 'third force' (as
strong river currents are called in the north of England) of creative
agency.
No one has formulated the cultural failure account better than that
cultural historian, socio-cultural critic, existential philosopher,
Romantic-leaning (and counter-leaning) Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(2003 [orig. 1883-85]) is the great condemnation of both religion and
the secular. Nietzsche is far better on condemnation than one of his two
main rivals - all three keeping an eye on one another - within the
cultural climate of the time, Tolstoy, whom Nietzsche read, and who was
probably equally tortured by failures of the worthwhile. (The other
outstanding rival was Dostoevsky, who probed the emotionalities of
varieties of religion rather than condemning more fulsomely.) Tolstoy
tended to dwell on the inadequacies and harmful effects of certain
religious tradition; Nietzsche attacked the secular even more fiercely
than Christianity. (Nietzsche's nigh desperate striving for the perfect,
his `religious' yearning, which is bound up with the elitist strand of
his thought, is seen in the fact that his own words of wisdom, in Thus
Spoke, are uttered by Zarathustra.) Nietzsche and Tolstoy entered the
transformative zone: the former with the Ubermensch (the `overman'), the
latter, at least for periods of his life, with a 'mystical',
oft-profoundly internalized, 'Christianity' merged with love of the
simplicity of the land and those who cultivate themselveswith-the-soil
to bring everything fully to life; in harmony. Moving on in time, Simmel
counts as one of all those, including Thomas Mann, Hardy, and Simmel's
close friend Max Weber, deeply influenced by Nietzsche. Simmel's
solution to the afflictions of the secular and religious tradition was a
mode of immanentized 'Christianity', merging with 'the truth' of
relationships between beings, the truth itself lying with life itself.
His 'solution' belongs to the flow from the theistic tradition to the
transformative zone. Max Weber's solution? Stoicism, qualified by
yearning, and not infrequently associated with mental distress.
What Charles Taylor (1991) graphically calls 'the massive subjective
turn of modern culture' is integral to the cultural failures account (p.
26). The turn is driven by the sense - experienced by many but not
everybody - that cultural-cum-institutional arrangements of established
orders are alienating, estranging, divorced, hollow-yet-repressive;
generate a sense of anomie - that is, of worthlessness, if not worse -
which combines with a sense of being subjected by the
counter-productive, stupid, anti-life'. Depending on their gravity, and
other factors, afflictions like these 'drive' people to `go within': to
seek out what more or less has to be taken to be as the source of the
best possible worthwhile of life: developing, expanding, enhancing the
quality of their states of being, perhaps incorporating the depths of
nature and the cosmic as well; then creating their own meaningful
realities through acts of expression - within relationships, 'ways' of
life, music, creative reinterpretation of literature, vocations (like
working with emotionally agitated children) which permit at least a
degree of creative expression. In face of twofold failure, where else is
there to go other than 'within', then `without'?
To avoid going over the top with this argument, it is important to
note that the massive turn need not drive people to plumb their depths
'beyond', or their relational depths, for significance. Considerable
numbers, probably, do not go this far. For them, subjectivized
ingredients of a basically secular form, say, the notions of 'growing at
work', 'the learning organization', or the `becoming (myself)' by way of
subjective wellbeing cultural provisions like the aesthetic commercial
provisions of music or arts festivals, etc., seem to cater for the turn
within: without necessarily going all that far in that direction.
The subjectivization-cum-humanization thesis is also integral to the
cultural failures thesis. This is the idea that if people are to be
engaged with anything to do with the sacred, however tenuously, they are
much more likely to engage with modes which, being of the inner, are
perfectly 'positioned', capacitated, for catering for the cultivation
and expression of that subjective-life which the 'massive turn' has
brought into some value/value-potential prominence. This is the thesis
that if people are to be engaged with anything to do with the sacred,
they are much more likely to engage with modes which, being of the
inner, are perfectly positioned for catering for the humanism of so much
of the 'massive turn' itself: the values of life, freedom and equality.
In support of this thesis, an ever-mounting body of evidence
demonstrates that few of those 'leading' the turn or carried along with
it — the expressivists of Occidental culture and elsewhere — are
attracted by anything of significance, especially of more ultimate
significance, which attempts to regulate, discipline, direct,
subjective-life: management by people, by religious tradition, by the
theistic God Head of Authority.
On the 'action' of the `sixties'
The Frankfurt School, together with more recent incarnations like
Foucault, lives on.
The complex of processes under consideration is perfectly exemplified
by the counter-cultural `sixties'-cum-earlier seventies (which, of
course, people like Foucault were privy to): an excellent example of
explanatory processes at work. Peter Berger and his co-authors of The
Homeless Mind (1974) provide a useful, albeit derivative, application of
the cultural collapse thesis to explain the eruption of the
transformative zone of the time. On the one hand, massive perceived
failures of 'straight' society, including oppression (`the policeman in
my head'; Vietnam); on the other, the failure of religion
(discrimination, out of touch). The outcome: existential homelessness.
The response: the third way of 'going within'. The significance: a sense
of purpose, most obviously when what lies within 'comes out' as
'politics of (cultural) experience'; as action.
`Fuck the system'; 'fuck religion'; 'go for' the inner experience of
music, intimate relationality, drugs of the kind that that great muse of
the sixties, Aldous Huxley, with his 'foresight' took during his life
and when he was dying. The yearn, for as the music of the sixties (in a
broad sense of the term) so effectively expresses, the counter-culture,
like that of Romanticism, was dominated by intense desire for the
perfect within experience. Songs of Jackson Browne, like 'Late for the
Sky', the 'taking it to the limit' were powerful.
More ultimately, to 'take it': to see what happens when inner-life
moves on, beyond life in the here-and-now: in continuity, with so-called
death. For a few, 'till death do us part' to 'death we unify'. Regarding
the role of a related, albeit oft-neglected factor, one which certainly
contributed to the upsurge of the transformative zone of the sixties,
the zone was one of a profound, deeply felt humanism. The humanism was
embedded in the subjective turn. The more intimately the values,
sentiments, dispositions and so on of the humanism were experienced as
bound up with oneself, within oneself, within others (as far away as
North Vietnam), the more the humanism was experienced as resonating with
the sacred, the greater the extent to which it rebelled against,
countered hierarchical, anti-democratic, 'top-down' inequality of the
kind generated, for example, by God-on-High. With force, perhaps to
liberate for…
Where I disagree with the 'homeless mind' account of Berger and his
co-authors is that the humanism of the period — and other factors,
including the exploration of consciousness by way of games, fun, travel,
play, relationality, all the activities of the cultic milieu so well
encapsulated by a ground-breaking essay of Colin Campbell's (1972), the
active search for the perfect — meant that the period was not as
'formless' as all that.' Whatever generated the twofold cultural
collapse, it was virtually instantaneous. Relatively formless, whilst
dynamic, 'form' nevertheless rapidly became widespread: the form of
constant sex (or looking for it); of being stoned (sometimes a rolling
one); repeatedly using tarot; regularly drawing on the litany of the
transformative zone, found in room after room, of Carlos Castaneda,
`popular' works on the Sufi way, and so on. Existentialists like Camus
were on the cultural reading list, more to reflect on what had been
avoided — the pits — than to serve to express the homeless condition. As
the top priority, purpose of life issues mattered; hedonists included.
Life-wrenching, stretching, idealism was bound up with 'serious'
experiential experimentation. No wonder that spirituality began to riot.
No wonder that Talcott Parsons (1978) — not a man to be carried away
with things — wrote of 'the expressive revolution'; wrote of 'its
exclusive emphasis on pure expressiveness and pure love' (p. 320;
emphases provided).
On 'action' within Christianity
The collapse thesis helps explain why fewer than expected
(relatively) disillusioned Christians jump straight from tradition into
the secular. Towards the beginning of the last century, Simmel
frequently explored ways in which great swathes of Christian tradition
were becoming internalized. In effect, was drawing attention to the
reversal of the dynamic which his neo-Romantic predecessor, Ludwig
Feuerbach, so emphasized: not Feuerbach's construction of religious
tradition by way of the externalization, or projection, of psychological
states of being, but the reverse process of introjection,
subjectivization of tradition.'
Today, liberal Christians — in particular — often stop attending
church precisely because their autonomy is threatened by what are
perceived to be restrictive or harmful features of what is left of
tradition (for example values which run counter to egalitarian
principles to do with the position of women). Perhaps in tandem with
this, people stop attending church because they realize that what is
'symbolized', like 'depths of consciousness', is best catered for
elsewhere. With so many liberal forms of Christianity perceived as not
being up to the job of facilitating encounter with the 'depths' within,
activities are sought which are better suited to the task. Attendees are
primed to leave to take up Orient-based practices, for example.
Whether generated by the secular turn among Christians, serving to
reveal the implausibility of beliefs, whether generated by reaction to
discriminatory, freedom-sapping hierarchy and intolerable moralizing,
cultural failure within tradition takes place. For those who want to
remain with the theistic, but who have lost faith in, become
disillusioned by, much of tradition, (relatively) immanentized modes of
the sacred are to hand. Detraditionalization of the theistic Godhead,
devaluation of religion within religion, means that 'religion' beyond
religion is in evidence. To varying degrees, and in various ways,
authority is internalized: becomes that 'spirituality', as it is quite
likely called, left when religion has been (relatively) comprehensively
left behind; has undergone internal collapse. The subjectivization
thesis at work within tradition.
The combination of sustained belief in the sacred and rejection of a
great deal of tradition, together with laid down, etc., continua and
continuities with the transformative zone (the sacred, the humanism, the
experiential, relative absence of propositional beliefs), goes a very
long way in explaining why the transformative zone attracts many: not
the secular. The zone is there; it 'beckons'. Within liberal forms of
the Christianity of the Occident, within many a congregation, where the
shift is from propositional beliefs grounded in theistic tradition to
symbols expressing what lies within, spiritual humanism could well be in
evidence. The beckon: those 'Christians' committed to the sacred,
committed to the values of humanism, including the freedom and equality
components of their liberal ethicality which can urge them out of, say,
their congregation. Disillusioned with much of tradition, there are also
those Christians who continue to believe in God-on-High but can adopt
non-theistic belief in 'a Higher Power'. Whatever the specifics, the
secular is clearly not for those intent on sustaining the sacred,
spirituality, sacred humanism: all the more so in that their faith in
the perfect of the sacred continues to serve to highlight the
imperfections of the secular. The catch phrase, to characterize many,
is, `driven out of religion, with the sacred'. With no other realistic
options open to them, progression towards, into the transformative zone
is perfectly natural.
On 'the erosion of the personal worthwhile' thesis
The third variant of the afflictions of the worthwhile thesis has to
do with erosion of personal culture. Rather than attention being focused
on failure/ collapse of the two major public cultures of the worthwhile,
religious tradition and the secular, attention is focused on afflictions
pertaining to the cultures people acquire, develop, construct at work,
at home, among friends and relatives, among others during leisure
activities, and so on; the most personal of personal cultures, one's
'own' culture of the self, the culture of health and fitness; personal
hygiene, habits, wellbeing routines, and the like. The worthwhile can be
found in any of these aspects of personal culture; and in many more.
Fragility comes into evidence when the worthwhile is undermined by
episodes like illness. To the extent to which people are unable to find
the worthwhile within their personal lives, the worthwhile shifts
towards the worthless. It has to be stressed that afflictions of the
worthwhile within personal culture might be generated by the
vicissitudes of personal culture itself; or by these in tandem with
broader cultural (and social) afflictions/ exemplifications. The latter
can intensify the former, and vice versa.
On critical reflection
Generally speaking, it is not at all easy to criticize the cultural
failure/ collapse/erosion theses. Unusually, in the social sciences,
they are almost certainly true. Among numerous considerations, their
credibility is enhanced by the fact that there is no need to call in
ideas of the 'spiritual vacuum waiting to be filled', 'spiritual needs'
(implying the existence of some kind of spirituality hungry for
fulfilment), 'basic anthropological, human condition, requirements'
variety to explain why some, probably many, cannot at all easily live
with a sense of twofold failure. In the Occident (and, naturally,
elsewhere) everybody from a very early age knows about heaven or its
equivalent. It belongs to the culture. Experienced
failure/collapse/erosion of the secular and religious tradition; plus
heaven as a constant reminder of the perfect helping throw the
imperfections of the secular into stark relief; plus that supposed
secular heaven, namely consumer culture in its more flamboyant guise,
constantly proclaiming perfection or the perfect itself: small wonder
that the promises of the transformative exercise appeal.
Really interesting matters are raised by relationships between, on
the one hand, culture failure/collapse, and, on the other, erosion of
personal culture. On the first hand, it is highly likely that (relative)
loss of faith in the secular and failure of religious tradition has a
considerable amount to do with the popularity of the transformative. It
is highly plausible, that the extra- ordinary growth of CAM of the
Occident (Vol. III, Ch. 61) owes a great deal to loss of faith in
Christianity and its healing facilities, conterminously faith in the
ability of mainstream medicine to heal in a 'whole person', wholesome
'way'. Or consider the growth of transformative zone activities within
the world of mainstream business. At least in countries like the UK and
Holland, Christianity as a source of the worthwhile at work more or less
disappeared from the workplace over one hundred years ago. As famously
portrayed by Weber (1985; orig. 1904-5), the 'iron cage' of the
workplace was emerging in its raw, dispiriting, horror most especially
during that great epoch of rationalized regulation, in many a country of
the Occident, the nineteenth-century. On this account, the worthwhile at
work has long been eroded. During and since the 1960s transformative
zone activities have entered, or complemented, the workplace with the
aim of countering anti-humanism; restoring a sense of the worthwhile,
the purposive. Or consider humanism. Frequently embedded in workplace
spiritualities, almost invariably embedded in CAM, those spiritualities
found in educational contexts and elsewhere, the values, sentiments,
dispositions of spiritual humanism have come to serve as a 'grounded
canopy' within the transformative zone. With many having lost faith in
those more liberal forms of Christianity which humanism grew up with in
Occidental settings, and with many not exactly enraptured by what they
experience as the aridly legalistic, the oppressiveness of enforced
human rights, etc. of the secular zone, spiritual humanism appeals.
Transposed from the legalistic, and from moralistic theistic settings,
the appeal is that the values, sentiments and dispositions of the
ethicality are experienced as coming from within; as authentic
expressions of, say, being considerate with (not so much Tor') those
less fortunate than oneself. The obligatory is in effect transformed
into the desirable. Free expression takes the place of the erosion of
freedom. Ideally.
On the second hand, it is also highly likely that erosion of personal
culture has a considerable amount to do with the popularity of the
transformative. The person who engages with CAM, today, is not likely to
be Nietzschian. The back ache is much more likely to play a motivational
role than existential concerns about loss of purpose in life.
The strategic advantages of focusing on grand cultural themes to do
with the worthwhile, and the strategic advantages of focusing on the
worthwhile in connection with personal culture, have to be combined. In
any case, existential themes, typically generated by the grand (or not
so grand!), enter into personal culture. Those engaged with holistic
(mind-body-spirit) practices of northern Europe (in particular) have
normally experienced a certain loss, cultural failure of the worthwhile
for a fairly long time. Predominantly, these are people who have lost
faith in religion (if they ever had it) as the source of the worthwhile,
and are disillusioned with the nature and scope of the secular. A fair
amount of evidence supports these components of the failure thesis. Of
particular note, it is highly likely that the majority are expressivists:
which means that they have been, and continue to be, dissatisfied with
what they consider to be the 'raw' secularity of the mainstream. And, of
course, the very fact that they frequently have turned to ,alternative'
spiritual practices indicates that they have been looking for something
over-and-above that which they do not have (much/enough) faith in. At
the same time, and this is a critical point, factors belonging to their
personal cultures are almost certainly at work: precipitating action.
Feeling below spirits' by virtue of the illness of a close friend, for
instance.
On afflictions in action: holistic practices and the totum pro parte fallacy
Experiences of cultural failure, collapse, erosion are widespread.
Expressivists are numerically significant, but only a relatively small
number of people engage with transformative zone practices of an
inner-life variety. It is virtually certain that large numbers live with
afflictions of the worthwhile, without engaging with the practices of
the transformative. To counter the totum pro parte fallacy — that the
general (here a large number of people) cannot itself adequately
describe or explain the specific (here far fewer people) — it is
necessary to spell out the conditions (or factors) that apply to the
specific (the smallish number engaged with practices); not to the
general as a whole. The general might provide the necessary conditions;
the requirement is for the necessary and sufficient. Put somewhat
differently, it is necessary to explain why not all those encompassed by
the general enter the specific. The critical thing is to cut the number
of those affected by afflictions of the worthwhile down to size to
explain a particular: to ascertain what it is about them, and not
others; what it is that distinguishes them from others who do not engage
with holistic practices. Then, and only then, is it possible to arrive
at a clear idea of the bearing of what they are, their motivations, re
their engagement. This is a formidable undertaking, one which might
never arrive at determinate conclusion: not just because of complexity,
but also, it can be mentioned, by virtue of the fact that this is not
the kind of thing which social science can do.
Thinking of the specifications (conditions, factors) which have been
suggested, and thinking of other, including new, possibilities, it is
easy to arrive at a large number: say around 30, many more if
combinations of conditions are added. (I am including religion,
spirituality and expressivism here because they bear on the general
'afflictions' thesis: by cutting its applicability down to more
appropriate size; etc.) Some of the most obvious possibilities include:
- the values factor (the afflictions thesis being narrowed down to those with post-materialist leaning, valuing 'depth', self-cultivation and self-expression, namely expressivists);
- the humanism factor (the thesis narrowed to those of the general populace who are the most committed to humanism);
- the age factor (the thesis being narrowed down to apply to
people of a certain age range, or ranges);
- the spiritual or religious outlook or adherence factor (for
example presence or absence of theism serving to narrow things
down);
- the health factor (for example the thesis being narrowed down by
virtue of the possibility, in England and Wales the actuality, that
GP's play a major role in referring/treating 'patients' by way of
(potentially or actually) spiritual CAM;
- the gender factor (narrowing things down to take into account
what looks to be the greater popularity of practices among women
than men);
- the family circumstances factor;
- the quality and nature of relationships factor;
- the (paid) occupational factor;
- the prosperity factor;
- the subjective wellbeing culture factor;
- the relaxation factor;
- life-balance factors to do with paid work - home work - leisure
time -relational time;
- the anti-ageing factor;
- the maintenance or cultivation of appealing looks or beauty
factor;
- the loneliness factor;
- the retirement factor, including early retirement;
- the downsizing factor;
- the activist/rebelliousness factor (commitment to do something
about dehumanizing, oppressive effects within the workplace, for
example);
- the 'reactivation of the liberation, the expressive freedom, the
playfulness, the fun of folly of the sixties' factor;
- the `reductio ad absurdum' factor: not Camus's 'absurd' but, in
the hands of Beats, Yippies and their descendents, to reveal the
absurdity of pomp and circumstance, contributing to their (hoped
for) collapse in much the same manner as Erasmus's Praise of Folly
was aimed at performing).
- And so on and so on, all the time bearing in mind that most if
not all of these factors, required to specify the application and
operation of the cultural collapse thesis, can be subdivided. Help!
With so many ideas abroad, it is dead easy to speculate; to come up
with apparently convincing arguments based on notions which one happens
to favour. Unfortunately, virtually all of the attempts thus far, to
explain, for example, the so-called 'gender puzzle' (why more women than
men apparently enter into holistic practices, and what it is that
distinguishes the women who engage in them from all those who do not)
are akin to what that most distinguished of all British anthropologists,
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, liked to call 'just so stories'. Sadly, the
arguments which have been put forward to explain the so-designated
'puzzle' (and I include some of my own in this category) have transpired
to be premature. Although the situation is now beginning to change, the
evidence to base, falsify or confirm explanations to simply not been to
hand.
To illustrate, the most obvious way of cutting the afflictions of the
worthwhile thesis down to size, to acquire purchase on the more specific
(and to test the thesis itself), is to see if those suffering from
particular afflictions are more likely to engage with holistic
activities than others. I am convinced that there is some truth to this
(see below on the Kendal Project), but not exactly on the most solid of
grounds. Another obvious way is to argue that expressivists among the
general population - those who value developing and living out of their
profoundest values, sentiments, dispositions, intentions, desires,
intimations, and so on - are more likely to enter into healing or growth
mind-body-spirituality holistic practices than others. And that
expressivists engaging with practices have no faith in religion and
relatively little in the secular mainstream (especially 'iron cage'
phenomena). And that more women engage because women tend to be more
expressivistic than men in the population at large. And that women tend
to experience afflictions of the worthwhile more than men. Although
there is a fair amount of relatively ad hoc, circumstantial evidence to
support these lines of argumentation, along with certain broad
statistics, it is not certain that more women than men are expressivists;
it is not even certain that a disproportionate number of the more
expressivistic populate the practices of the inner-life spirituality
territory of the transformative zone, including CAM.
Another way of narrowing down the afflictions thesis is to argue that
particular spiritual or religious outlooks, apprehensions, feelings
prompt people to turn to transformative practices. Unfortunately, the
information is not to hand to establish, with any certitude, whether
this is the case; or what the relationship might be between spiritual or
religious outlooks, or none, and senses of the worthwhile. Neither do we
know, with any certitude whatsoever, whether religious-cum-spiritual
outlooks are gendered; and if so, in what proportion. Neither do we have
a clear picture of how many of those entering practices are Christians,
or ex-Christians seeking to cultivate that immanentized sacrality which
they have retained in face of loss of faith in tradition. Nor, for that
matter, do we have a clear idea of the extent of transformative
zone-like tendencies within theistic territory (Vol. I, Chs 23, 24
5i-25iii). To briefly mention another way of cutting the afflictions
thesis down to size, the argument could be that there is a connection
between utilitarian individualists of a certain kind - perhaps those who
are desperate for self-promotion via material acquisition, whose sense
of the worthwhile is never satisfied - and those pursuing prosperity
spirituality. The requisite information is not to hand, though.
The gender puzzle' is important. If it is indeed the case that more
women than men are active within the holistic practices of the
transformative, to tackle this is to tackle the fact that the popularity
of the transformative of the Occident (although not the Orient) is
gendered in favour of women. But it is not altogether clear that the
puzzle is really so much of a puzzle. Research to date has tended to
focus on self-designated, holistic, mind-body-spirit practices, run by
spiritual practitioners in distinct settings like holistic centres.
Here, there is something like an 80:20 ratio in favour of women. On a
broader compass, though, it is highly likely that this ratio becomes
more even. CAM research, which includes less obviously spiritual
practices, indicates a more evenly distributed ratio. This is probably
the case in that growth 'arena' of the Occident, hospices. Management
and business trainings, which incorporate spiritual practices, typically
attract more men than women. Sportspeople and fire fighters, for
instance, practice acupuncture or yoga. Few fire fighters are women.
Defined pretty strictly (run by explicitly spiritual practitioners,
etc.), the 80:20 ratio might stand. The price to pay is the neglect of
what lies beyond the definitional line. True, 'spirituality' might be
less obvious; for some - even many - more or less absent beyond the
line. Nevertheless, spirituality lying beyond the line cannot be
ignored. Body focused, whilst holistic forms of CAM, with CAM research
indicating that men are much more in evidence here, are typically
spiritual in that the perfect of the life-force is drawn upon:
`non'-experiential sacrality, with the working assumption, sometimes the
`believe in', that 'the true' of nature comes to work. The puzzle could
be, probably is, something of an artefact of an artificial definition.
Attempts to explain the so-called 'gender puzzle' might very well have
to be seriously qualified, could even be vitiated, by the paucity of the
evidence; most especially to do with whether there is a significant
puzzle to explain in the first place.
The challenge of applying the afflictions of the worthwhile thesis to
explain specifics (let alone exploring the role of complementary or
alternative explanations), exacerbated by the fact that everyone is
multi-motivational, by there being so many conditions or specifications
to consider, means that progress is going to be exceedingly challenging.
The most significant attempts to date involve CAM research. It is not
without relevance that the research has got bogged down in complexity,
inconsistent, sometimes contradictory, findings. As Karl Popper argued
all those years ago in The Poverty of Historicism (1962 [orig. 1957] ),
with his critique of totalitarian social determinism/ engineering, and
as Peter Winch (1963) has argued in his cogent critique of explanatory
(as opposed to interpretative) social science in general, social science
has its limitations. Determinate, especially generalizable, explanations
are unlikely; the indicative possible.
Having scoured all the material obtained from the various research
strategies of the Kendal Project - including brief open-ended
questionnaire responses -a considerable number of times, and having
taken cognate material into account (including replications/partial
replications), my own indicative interpretation is that the growth of
more explicitly spiritual transformative practices is largely in the
hands of expressivistically inclined women, likely to have been
spiritual before active involvement; women with a profound sense of
relationality as the, or a primary worthwhile of life; who appreciate
the sheer value of living out of themselves with, for, and through
others 'for' themselves as much as others; women whose relationality is
most in play when wellbeing, including relatively serious health
problems, is at issue - the wellbeing of elderly parents, their
children, themselves, and, perhaps less obviously, all that surrounds
them. Above all, it seems, women believe in the humanism of humanity,
with their 'own' being 'depending' on this for themselves and all that
matters 'around'. (See Google, Kendal Project, details.)
It is virtually inconceivable that the cultural collapse thesis
applies. Those engaged with holistic practices in Kendal and environs
are not Nietzsche-akin; not counter-cultural hippies; not suffering from
the worthlessness of anomie/alienation.
However, the very fact that participants are probably largely of
expressivistic orientation suggests their discontent with much of the
secular, and few have religion to turn to. Erosion of the worthwhile is
in evidence, most clearly with their personal culture. For once (!)
there is pretty good evidence: these are people who are concerned about
the corrosive effects of ageing (grandparents and the like) on the
worthwhile of family life; the corrosive effects of illness, more
generally, and on highly valued relationships, including husbands or
wives. My very strong impression is that these are predominantly those
who are seeking to buttress, enhance their great worthwhile, the
expressive humanism of their lives, as much as possible in the face of
threats or dire circumstances: including 'personal collapse' when a
husband dies; including the corrosive effect that caring too much or too
little for others (and, in measure, oneself) can have on close
relationships. My very strong impression - informed by pretty good
evidence - is that much engagement with holistic activities is bound up
with those personal circumstances, such as ageing or caring inadequately
or in the 'wrong' kind of way, which heighten a sense that life is not
as worthwhile as it could (more psychologically) or should (perhaps more
politically) be.
This is one rather tentative interpretation of basically one project,
though. What makes the indicative somewhat more conclusive concerns all
the various forms of evidence showing that certain dynamics are not, or
rarely, at work. The generalization mounted that `women's issues' (like
being childless, pregnancy, giving birth, menopause) are an important
factor is unlikely to apply to more than a few in the Occident; although
are hugely more important in the territory of TCAM. The idea put forward
that some kind of second wave feminism is at feminism is at work,
practices serving to deal with, even compensate for abuse' by male
others and the like, is simply not borne out as any sort of general
claim. Neither is the related idea that female `identity' is at issue: a
rather extraordinary explanatory idea in that the whole point of most
spiritual activities (including many in the theistic zone) is to
liberate selves front the identity formations integral to those orders
of things which do not work; which generate disease': the sociocultural
order of rules, presentation
of self, the restrictive of 'The Identity' and all the self-esteemed egoism which goes with it, worse, the calculative, tactical manipulation of `I-dentities'. Whether female or male, spiritual practitioners would in the main concur with Isaiah Berlin: due to value conflict, identities at the public level are fragile enough; `deeper', which is what spiritual practitioners encourage, putative identities collapse into a Heraclitus-akin flux of incessant flow, hopefully homing in on the relational.
The fall of the public person; public ascription.
Equally, and in intimate tandem, those largely cultural 'artefacts'
or constructions, known as 'emotions' in the Occident, are frequently
regulatory routines or scripts, bound up with, serving, the delimited
identities of productive, especially consumptive capitalism — the
acquisitive individualism of this particular mode. Small wonder that
spiritual practitioners of the transformative zone, and of internalized
modes of spirituality within tradition, tend to allocate such 'emotions'
to the lower self, as something to be liberated from.'
I like to think that the kind of research carried out during the
Kendal Project shows that progress can be made, and to put it mildly, it
is rather significant that best possible efforts are made to make sense
of what is happening in the Occident; much more importantly among the
more cosmopolitan opinion formers, decision makers, cultural creatives,
educationalists, etc., of places like Istanbul or Islamabad. It would be
good to explore the theme, across cultures, of transformative zone
practices and knowings' combining `the best' of the theistic zone,
namely the sacred, and 'the best' of the secular, namely humanism: a
powerful package of the worthwhile. To learn more about how this 'best
of both worlds' ensemble works, whether it is growing, and how growth
could be stimulated, could/would/should be valuable re global concerns.
On immunology
As hopefully apparent, the 'afflictions of the worthwhile' approach
is credible, and is of wide applicability. The yearn: that response to
the rhetorical question, 'Is this it?', namely 'This cannot be it, there
must be something more'. If the secular was as worthwhile as some of the
thinkers of the Enlightenment supposed, it is doubtful that so many
'great minds', including Einstein's and Bertrand Russell's, would have
yearned as they did; let alone many a 'lesser mind'. Teased out or
amended in various ways, to attend to particular instances of change,
the afflictions approach has very consider: able explanatory power.
However, and thinking of Stephen Hawkin's 'vain claim — in dual sense —
to have found a general theory of everything, it would be equally silly
to assume that cultural collapse/failure/erosion is all there is to the
matter of change.
This is not the place to explore other factors, possibilities. One,
though, cannot be ignored in toto — the immunity thesis. The appeal of
detraditionalized, internalized 'theism', the appeal of the spirituality
of the transformative zone, ,Wes a considerable amount to being
'protected' from the rational, the scientistic. Immunity: from the
shrill criticisms of the new atheists; from those, more generally, who
attempt to invalidate what is dawning/developing, to be 'believed in'.
It is perfectly clear that the new atheists and others have had a
field day ridiculing those propositional beliefs so abundant in strongly
traditionalized religion. The beliefs can be shown to fail the test of
reason (that is to be incoherent); when they pertain to earthly matters,
they can allegedly be demonstrated to fail the test of science, to be
demonstrated false. Richard Dawkins (2006) feels able to write,
The dictionary supplied by Microsoft Word defines a delusion as `a
persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory
evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder'. The first
part of this captures religious faith perfectly. (p. 28; emphases added)
The field of the day disappears, though, when there are few if any
propositional beliefs in evidence, those which might be present being
relatively non-essential. If the sacred ontology of ultimate
spirituality (or anything akin to it) exists, as of course believers
believe, it is entirely beyond the rational comprehension or knowledge
of anyone, let alone the new atheists. Furthermore, the recurrent theme
that the sacred, or anything approaching it, can only be 'finally
known', is by far the best 'known', by way of experience, serves as an
immunizing injection. Experience of this kind is not open to public
inspection, the kind of inspection required by science or more
commonplace knowledge (confirmation/falsification).
Wittgenstein-arguments in favour of 'the public' of experience for
experience to be experience notwithstanding, most people feel that their
experiences are inner, 'theirs and theirs alone' to be with: and so
immune from impervious with regard to, what others might think they are
feeling.
Herder's famous 'I am not here to think, but to be, feel, live!'
(Berlin, 1980) is safe. So too are those whose 'savage religion', as
Oxford anthropologist Robert Marett (1929) puts it, 'is something not so
much thought out as danced out' (p.xxxi): an appreciation which applies
with arguably more significance to many many Occidental spiritual
practices today, in particular the pragmatic `what works, works' through
action (sometimes dancing) variety. Here, with the non-ontological in
any ultimate sense more-or-less absent, the 'great divide' is not
present. If anything, the psychology of desire is itself ontological.
Furthermore, the thrust frequently lies with accepting, as
experienced, the outcomes: believing in them without
explicit ontology. Here lies much of magic, those fairly
instrumentalized practices which William James (1974) called 'the
supernatural', aiming to make a difference to the world and which would
therefore appear to be open to verification or falsification. Ample
immunological devices are present, though, of the kind, 'Your prosperity
spirituality has failed you; the reason is that you were not properly in
touch with your true self'. All very similar to Evans-Prichard's (1937)
influential account of the immunology of Azande magic.
In connection with immanentized 'Christianity' and transformative
inner-life spirituality in particular, the (relative) absence of
propositional beliefs of a 'hard-to believe in'-'easy-to-criticize'
variety, the sense that 'true' experience belongs to a different plane
than critical reason, the sense of plausibility which — in large measure
— comes from the convincing (even partially convincing) 'reality' of
experience, the continua and continuities which exist with the more
familiar of the secular, and so on: it is relatively easy to be some
sort of a believer today. Even those embedded in the secular, yearning
for the beyond, can be assisted: cushioned from their own 'critical,
rational, secular voice' by the (relatively) 'encapsulated'; the
absorptive force of the yearn, the if only, the only if. Overall, it
would be very hard to deny that the immunological helps explain the
popularity of spirituality. The experiential of spirituality, which
means that the secular has nothing hard to 'bite' into, to gobble up, is
rather a significant factor.'
On change of fashion
I began the first chapter, 'On making some sense of spirituality',
with observations suggesting that spirituality has run riot; that the
shift from religion to spirituality is widespread. It has been widely
canvassed that the transformative zone has grown in numerical
significance. Claims of this kind now have to be scrutinized, not least
because of their bearing on matters of explanation; more exactly, on
what has to be explained. For there is a radical objection to the very
idea of rioting. There has not been a 'real' shift to spirituality at
all. What has been under way is merely a shift of language use. More
bluntly still, fashion has changed. The language of religion has become
unfashionable; that of spirituality popular. Underneath, everything is
much the same. The rather remarkable longitudinal changes in connection
with experience, reported by David Hay (Vol. I, Ch. 22), is largely due
to it having become a 'done thing' to use the language of spirituality,
not least in the contexts referred to by Hay. If the radical objection
is valid to any significant extent, explanations of change will have to
shift their focus, minimally to incorporate cultural-linguistic
explanations of changes of fashion.
Those involved with religious organizations, including small groups,
make use of what the language of spirituality has to offer: the fresh,
hopefully unencumbered with the trappings of the past including
out-of-date or implausible beliefs. The language of spirituality — most
especially all those references or allusions so frequently made to the
perennialist theme of the sole spirituality at the heart of all
traditions — is drawn upon to serve ecumenical purposes. Educational
circles in many a country (including those like Pakistan) draw on the
language to avoid giving offence in multicultural schools, and those
which are 'mono', aiming to incorporate the 'multi'. In subjective
wellbeing culture, promotional material for spas, health and beauty
products capitalize on the popularity of the language to attract
customers. The language of spirituality has flowed through culture to
signal promise, hope, expectation, vitality, the new, being harmoniously
at home with oneself. It takes its place alongside, often within, all
those adverts which promise , the perfect': even when 'the perfect' is
not on any plausible agenda whatsoever. From the perspective of the
believer, 'casual' spirituality, of a secular nature, titillates.
Naturally enough, just to refer to, or imply, that a wellbeing product
is spiritual need not entail that that is how it is experienced. But the
growth of subjective wellbeing culture, by way of mind-body-spirit spas
for example, helps explain the popularity of the term. So too does the
fact that 'spirituality', unlike 'mysticism', is non-elitist. The
language of spirituality is suited for populism. In addition, it is
reasonable to argue that the language has become more popular within
religion because it serves to express complementary experiential
alternatives to strong tradition (Vol. I, Ch. 13); or to indicate a
measure of opposition.
Reflecting on that immortal question, 'What is in a name?', it would
be rash in the extreme to deny that fashion has played a role in the
riot; to deny that much of the riot is 'really' just a re-labelling of
much the same. At the same time, it would be equally unwise to reduce
all the rioting to the world of fashion. A critical consideration, with
an eye on the Occident, is that it is virtually certain that more people
have moved beyond theistic Christianity than have joined the ranks of
the secularists. It follows that the transformative zone, where
spirituality probably has its main home in most countries of the
Occident, has grown in numerical significance (Heelas, 2002). However,
this does not rule out the possibility of casual, basically secular
language use among those who apparently draw on the zone. It is
necessary to show that something additional is meant by the language:
namely that it is used in connection with spiritual experience;
ultimately, of the perfect itself.
As things stand, the relative crudity and incontestable limitations
of questionnaire surveys means that it is impossible to rule out
findings being contaminated' by participant responses motivated by
fashion. However, even as things stand today sophisticated analysis of
the most informative can do a considerable amount to minimize
contamination.
Minimally, aim is to show that use of the language of
spirituality in questionnaire returns, attested, for example, the
ticking the box 'I think of myself as a spiritual person', is associated
with one ticks, say 'I believe in the God within' and `I believe in my
true self'. Established, clusters of the 'spiritual person plus God
within plus true self' variety are pretty convincingly indicative of
inner-life spirituality. Add I to this evidence that those concerned use
the language of the perfect, and in connection with practices like yoga,
it is fair to say that the presence of heart-felt 'believe in'
inner-life spirituality is virtually incontestable.
Looking to the future, the drawbacks of questionnaires can be
alleviated, at least somewhat, with more sophisticated questionnaire
design and analysis. Combined with more sophisticated locality study
research (for example visiting all relevant practices in a determinate
area, including those taking place in hospices, schools and the like)
and other research methods (like street or park surveys), it is pretty
certain that a much clearer picture of what lies beyond 'mere' language
use of fashion will emerge. Already, there is enough evidence, from a
variety of sources, to conclude that 'real change' has taken place: most
especially during and since the countercultural sixties. That there are
now far more 'stand alone' practices like tai chi than there were in,
say, 1970, is fairly indicative in itself. At least in northern Europe,
it is now apparent that the great majority of those participating in
mindbody-spirit activities, run by spiritual practitioners, believe in
'energy or life force which flows through all that lives'; a force
which, minimally, approximates to the perfect of the sacred. Finally, to
address the really tricky question, `Are more people having spiritual
experiences than, say, in 1970?', it has to acknowledged that the
question does not permit conclusive answer. Spiritual experiences, their
presence or absence as experiences, is not open to academic inquiry.
What can be said, though, is that the indicative — an increase in the
number of those who apparently believe in experiences taken to be
fairly, highly, or ultimately significant, worthwhile — points to real
change. (Vol. I, Ch. 22)
On counting
Discussion so far has tended to remain at the cultural level. Little
has been said about the numbers of those adhering, or otherwise engaged
with, whatever it is that has appealed to or struck them. It is high
time to turn to the matter of the numerical significance of various
modes of spirituality. This is far easier said than done. To move
through everyday life is to encounter any number of possibilities. So
much is aspectual: for example, the theme of spiritual humanism being an
aspect of the theme of healing CAM/TCAM. So much is a matter of degree:
for example of epistemologies, from the inkling to the firm
propositional belief; or again, degrees with regard to certitude, from
the 'possibly, but very unlikely' through to the definitely. So much is
qualitative, like the difference between 'true', sacred-laden, love and
secular love. So much is indeterminate: for example with regard to
ontological geography. So much changes with personal circumstances:
people talking about, say, the value of theistic prayer on one occasion,
inner-focused meditation on another. (Tolstoy was probably the classic
longer-term oscillator of the Occident; many today, I am convinced,
oscillate whilst completing questionnaires or being interviewed.) So
much is incoherent or contradictory: from the perspective of human
knowledge, and from the perspective of those who experience 'it',
conceptualization of the sacred is always incoherent, contradictory. So
much is some combination or another of all of the proceeding; and more.
It is not just that there is a lot which could be counted. It is not
just that the above raises obvious challenges, like counting qualities.
In addition (and perhaps not surprisingly), numerical evidence is
relatively scant; not infrequently absent; and, when present,
inconclusive, open to conflicting interpretations, or actually
contradictory. In the Occident, tools of inquiry —most obviously general
population survey questionnaires — have lagged behind the times. By and
large, questionnaires remain fixated on religion. Spirituality focused
questions have become more evident during the last couple of decades,
but in general remain the back seat partner. To ask an obvious question,
to what extent is theistic spirituality associated with the oft-reported
finding that significant numbers believe in a 'Higher Power'? As
indicated by claims made in a recent article by Michele Schlehofer and
co-authors (2008), the answer is that we do not really know. On the one
hand, the authors report that 'Higher Power' takes its place alongside
'God, Christ, Holy, Holy Ghost, Divine, the Church' to 'explicitly'
refer to 'theistic concept[s] of the sacred' (p. 415). On the other,
'High Power' takes its place alongside 'transcendental reality, ground
of being, nature, inner-self, emotions' to be counted as spirituality of
a 'non-theistic' variety (pp. 415, 411). To ask another obvious
question, how many of those within the orbit of immanentized
Christianity, or other theistic traditions, have internalized the sacred
to the extent of developing the transformative zone 'within' the Church
(etc.) itself? (Vol. I, Chs 23, 24, 25i-25iii). Again, the answer is
that we still don't really know. To ask yet another obvious question,
and one of great significance, how many people have some sort of
inner-life, natural 'holistic revelation', during their life-span
(including periods of terminal illness)? A rather considerable number:
but this really is a guess-estimate.
The major challenge for 'the counter' is raised by the existence of
continua (and underpinning continuities). Thinking of the broad
continuum from emphasizing God-on-High to the 'god' within, where,
exactly, does one draw the line in order to count believers belonging to
the theistic zone and believers within the transformative? In his attack
on positivistic social science, that is the kind of social science which
apes the physical sciences, the great Weberian, Wittgensteinian
philosopher of the study of culture, Peter Winch (163) argues the case
against single points of demarcation. One of his key examples is much
more mundane than the afore-mentioned continuum. It concerns making
a heap:
By how many degrees does one need to reduce the temperature of a
bucket of water for it to freeze? — The answer to that has to be settled
experimentally. How many grains of wheat does one have to add together
before one has a heap? — This cannot be settled by experiment because
the criteria by which we distinguish a heap from a non-heap are vague in
comparison with those by which we distinguish water from ice: there is
no sharp dividing line. (p. 73; emphases provided)
His second example, designed to illustrate a related point, concerns
life and non-life. The extract which follows continues directly from the
extract above.
Neither, as Acton [the author of The Illusion of an Epoch (1955)]
mentions, is there any sharp dividing line between what is and what is
not alive: but that does not make the difference between life and
non-life 'merely one of degree'. Acton says that 'the point at which we
draw the line is one that we have to choose, not one that the facts
press upon us in unmistakable fashion'. [As the paragraph continues,
`But though there may be a choice in borderline cases, there is not in
others: it is not for me or anyone else to decide whether I, as I write
these words, am alive or not'.] (ibid; emphases provided)
Although Winch's arguments, separated out above, differ in
significant regards, components can be combined. Making a heap provides
the way in. Assuming that one's aim is to understand what counts as
'heaps' in terms of cultural meaning and use — which is certainly the
case for the Weberian/ Wittgensteinian Winch — one has to respect the
assessments of those who use the language of heaps. Assessments are
relative to cultural, personal, mood, etc., context. They are a matter
of perspective. Given Winch's point that 'the criteria by which we
distinguish a heap from a non-heap are vague', it is virtually
inconceivable that assessments — even by one person — will result in
some sort of single, definitive answer. Unless, that is, 'choice' is
brought to bear from the outside. This is where the second half of the
extract from Winch, above, comes into play. We can indeed 'choose' —
that is determine — what counts as a heap, a big heap, a small heap,
etc.: when `heaping' is mechanized, for instance. But — and this is the
crucial point — this determination is not based on what 'the facts press
upon us in unmistakable fashion'. The process of ascertaining the size
of heaps according to (say) cross-cultural criteria, is overridden by
objective measures of the (say, agri-business) expert.
Applying the argument to the continuum from emphasizing God-on-High,
to the immanent within religious tradition, to the 'god' within, how
many grains' of the immanent with religious tradition (for example) have
to be 'piled up' before a person should/can/must be
'counted' to count as belonging to the inner-life spirituality of the
transformative zone? Who is to say — participants? Or those 'experts'
known as social scientists? Putative 'borderline' cases,
that is, everyday folk, are unlikely to have attended to the matter, at
least in ways which could help the social scientist. Many would object
to pigeon-holing. More fundamentally, the continuum is a matter of
degree. Two believers on similar places of the continuum, the meaningful
reality of one veering towards the theistic, the meaningful reality of
the other veering towards the inner-life: other than the expert imposing
a point of demarcation, which would render the similarity apart, who can
possibly adjudicate that a line allocates one believer as theistic, not
the other? There is no one point. And if points in the plural are taken
into account by the counter, points become too countless to count. In
addition, other believers, like religious traditionalists, will
certainly have their points of view. To count?
Again, where are determinate lines to be drawn between God-on-High as
the 'lamp', with the self as the 'mirror' illuminated by the presence of
the `light' of the theistic Godhead; the 'lamp's' presence entering more
deeply into the soul of the recipient; the 'lamp' fuelling what lies
deep inside, bursting into flame as an autonomous 'light within' in the
mode of inner-life spirituality? Who is to make the decision? How can
objective grounds for line-demarcation/counting-allocation exist when
all is a matter of 'degree', `extent to which', 'amount of emphasis',
'the relatively', perhaps the '50/50'? How on earth does 'the counter'
justify applying lines of demarcation to count? With no 'facts [that]
press upon us in unmistakable fashion', there is no one single,
reliable, point of demarcation; or any number of points. With no neutral
stance — like counting church attendance, when all counters should agree
on the number of bodies within the service — to permit common ground,
agreement, judgements are perspectival, relative to points of view:
arbitrary, misleading, colonizing if imposed by the outside expert.
Three more illustrations, with cognate points, really ram home the
Winchian argument. Commencing with Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is
Within You (2006), what lies within appears to receive considerably more
attention than the theistic. If it can be argued that the theistic is of
'passing' reference, perhaps included for political or security reasons,
the Tolstoy of this volume is probably best thought of as entering the
transformative zone. However, to argue this is very much a matter of
interpretation. Bearing in mind how often Tolstoy oscillated from one
life philosophy to another to another, the most careful historical
investigation cannot settle the matter. To draw a line `in' The Kingdom
of God, to pigeon-hole the Tolstoy of this volume, is not only silly; it
is to mislead. To allocate Tolstoy to the transformative zone, for
example, does not do justice to other aspects, sometimes contradictory
features, of his incoherent life-philosophy. Or again, does it make
sense to decide on the degree to which the younger people studied by
Christian Smith (2005) have to have adopted ideas of God as a 'cosmic
therapist' before they II can be counted as belonging to the
transformative zone? Not only is this probably practically impossible.
With no neutral stance to make a decision, any decision has to be a
matter of perspective. Worse, it is unnatural to allocate one younger
person to one side of the line, another to the other, when they only
differ very slightly. Much the same applies to 'the yearner', a figure
introduced in the previous essay. The stronger the yearning, the more
likely it is that those who yearn 'out of the secular', but cannot leave
it, are of 'two halves'. They are as secular as non-secular/beyond the
secular. It is highly likely that at some time or another of anybody's
life yearning is pressing. The high percentages in northern Europe and
elsewhere, who are recorded as believing that 'there must be something
there', or questionnaire formulations to this effect, surely include
many who treat 'must' as the cry of their wish: with all that that
entails. To allocate those of two halves, two orientations, on an
either-or basis, would be to ignore one half or the other. To try to get
round the 'neither one zone nor the other but both' by establishing
which way people are predominately orientated: the research mind of the
counter presumably boggles.
Difficulties with counting are raised by the shift from belief in
propositional beliefs to faith in experience; what Robert Wuthnow (2008)
refers to as 'from creeds to experience' (p. 367); what, a longish time
ago, Evelyn Underhill (1995; orig. 1926) referred to in connection with
'all whose religious interests [which] have passed from the sphere of
notion to the sphere of experience' (p. 7). By virtue of their
determinate nature (I believe that x is the case, for example that Jesus
is the Son of God'), propositional beliefs would seem to be relatively
easy to count. (`Relatively' is the name of the game, though: try
establishing the number of 'real', 'believe in' believers, whatever this
means.) If believed propositional beliefs can be ascertained, to specify
that x refers to y, they can be used to count different kinds of
ontology: say the belief that God is on High. Believed to be the Word of
God (or equivalent), propositional beliefs — in faith — are taken to
achieve the miraculous. The incomprehensibility, ineffability of the
sacred-as-perfect, in a manner of speaking, is dealt with. The more
pronounced the shift to experience, the less pronounced the miracle of
the propositional. In tune with traditional mystics, it is highly likely
that many contemporary spiritual believers 'realize', to some extent or
another, that the imperfect — namely human language geared up for
tackling the secular — cannot comprehend the perfect; at least not in
any reliable manner.
Frequently, the turn to experience is the turn to the `vague'; the
turn away from those 'facts [that] press upon us in unmistakable
fashion'. Spiritual believers who 'know' that the sacred exists; who are
uncertain about where it exists; who change their 'beliefs' (better,
gnosis, interpretations, thoughts, notions) from time-to-time; who
provide those incompatible responses which questionnaire returns and
interview material attest. Spiritual seekers, practicing on the way to
the sacred, who have not yet had more than an experiential glimpse, are
likely to be more uncertain about where the sacred exists and its
qualities. Then there are those whose experiences are epistemologically
:weak', the 'as if' quality of experience generated, say, by ethereal
music, which does not enable 'the experiencer' to 'know' what experience
is 'actually' about. There are also those who are simply not concerned
about the location of the source, or sources, of their experiences. What
matters for them is the outpouring of experience itself, not where it
comes from; experience as the consequences for their lives and those
around them. Geographical matters are irrelevant. In the spirit of
Wittgenstein, who focused so much of his attention on practices, forms
or ways of life as part of his endeavours to recast inner states as
public events, those whose spirituality is of pragmatic mode dwell on
practices, the experiences they are taken to 'reveal', the experienced
consequences. With ultimate ontology, in the sense of where the
experiences come from, being more or less irrelevant, the mode of
spirituality under consideration is non-ontological. To draw an analogy,
it is not necessary to know the geographical source (or sources) of the
Nile to benefit from the water — by way of practising irrigation — when
one lives downstream. Pragmatic spirituality and the energy flow of CAM:
how is it possible to allocate CAM activities to either the
transformative zone, or the theistic, when participants do not care
about the location of the source of the flow?
Ontological indeterminacy, even the self-confirmed non-ontological,
does not discredit the very idea of zoning (the heartland of God without
versus the heartland of `God'-within, for instance). There are more than
enough people who believe in, hold beliefs about, have determinate
experiences of, the theistic Godhead, or who believe in, and have
determinate experiences of, inner-life spirituality, to ensure that this
is not the case. And it is clear that enough believe that the secular is
all that there is for this zone to stand secure. This said, ontological
indeterminacy/self-avowed non-ontology almost certainly undermines
determinate counting. Is the 'flicker' experience, rather inchoately
expressed to the researcher, sufficiently theistic to be allocated,
counted, accordingly? (Perhaps another zone is required, the
indeterminate.)
Overall, it is transparent that difficulties with counting are
legion, to the extent that provision of 'exact' counts is to mislead.
Exact counts require exact line drawing; the bottom line, so often, is
that this cannot be done without murdering to dissect. To apply a little
'hard' science to those prestigious journals which aim for hard science
(spirituality included), quantitative assessment demonstrates
contradictory results. Publications (and I probably have to include
myself in this category) attest to lack of consensus over
drawing/attributing/imposing, interpreting lines of demarcation. The
more hard and fast the more artificial ...
It is important to have at least some idea of the extent to which
theistic spirituality (for instance) has grown (or not) in, say, the
Occident. Although so much is uncountable to varying degrees, this
should not mean that the researcher is unaccountable: content to
relinquish responsibility. Public policy requires data, in connection
with things like education, CAM, (TCAM elsewhere), palliative and
terminal health care. The academy requires data if explanations of
change (for instance) are to be tested. For these and other reasons, it
is surely not a good idea to roll over in face of postmodernistic
anti-counters. We can only do what we can do, with the most helpful will
in the world.'
Drawing to a close, I most certainly do not want to leave the
impression, any impression whatsoever, that the transformative zone of
the Occident is replete with people continually beavering away at the
transformative. It would be singularly unwise to assert that large
numbers of people demonstrably adhere to particular spiritualities, to
be counted accordingly. We simply do not know how many people engage
with different things at once. We do not have anything bar 'individual
case' material — and not all that much of that — to determine
(oft-variegated) engagement over the life-long. Based on varieties of
evidence, it is highly probable that systematic study of the life-long
would show that a considerable number of people turn to transformative
spiritualities at those fairly sporadic occasions when
life-is-at-demand; when the worthwhile of life is under particular
threat: when the family home empties out; sometimes, when in a hospice.
However, more systematic evidence is awaited. So, too, is evidence
regarding the closely related point, extent of engagement. 'The deeper
the better': maybe — but how deep does a person actually have to go into
spiritual astrology to be counted as engaging with some kind of ultimate
spirituality? How 'significantly' does a person have to apply prosperity
spirituality to count? Currently, it would be really unwise to treat
spiritualities of the transformative zone, in any widespread sense, as
actually serving the process of life transformation: rather than being
more akin to possibilities (or entertainments, life style options,
etc.), to be tasted, tested, and tentatively explored. The secular
weighs heavily on many, holding them back: voicing suspicion,
reservation, distraction — especially in connection with the discipline,
dedication, normally required to practise for the sacred.
Simmel (1997 [orig. 1911]) writes, 'as far as modern man is
concerned, the concept of God has passed through so much heterogeneous
historical content and so many possibilities of interpretation that all
that remains is a feeling that cannot be fixed in any precise form' (p.
45; emphases provided). For those who yearn, momentum can be instilled
by their sense that 'the more must surely exist. There are those whose
wish-instilled yearning translates into actually believing without
beliefs, characterized, by Simmel (1997), as `the person' who 'simply
believes, so to speak' (p. 45), the person engaging in 'the odd illogic
of asserting the existence of a thing while at the same time not being
at all capable of stating what it actually is' (ibid). Then one can
think of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities (1997): that
co-existence of believing and not-believing so characteristic of `yearners';
that co-existence which nevertheless goes further than the 'the
different must surely exist'; that believing in' without ontology. The
yearner cannot be demarcated 'secular'. The yearner could equally be
`spiritual'; more so or less so.
Spiritual sources as resources: the very term 'resources', in the
plural, alone suffices to indicate the number of options for `resourcers';
the number of combinations with other resources; the number of
co-existences; the sheer variegation of what counters are faced with
counting.
On Some Significant Themes by Paul Heelas
On allocation
The basic scheme of the volumes is provided by the thyme of
spirituality within and beyond poly/theistic tradition. Owing to the
practicalities of organizing entries for four separate volumes, the
'set' is more zoned than I would like. Allocations of entries to
volumes, most especially the second and third, can readily give the
impression of pigeon-holing; what the leading British social
anthropologist Edmund Leach used to call butterfly collecting. Certain
allocations can appear rather arbitrary. Why should a particular entry,
say on Sufi spirituality, appear in the second volume, when another, not
all that dissimilar, appears in the third? I can only plead that the
four volume format has not provided the scope to do justice to the
argument that (relatively) across-the-board continua and continuities
have to be taken seriously.
The first sub-section of the first volume, 'Perennial spirituality
within and beyond religious tradition', draws attention to a radial
rendering of the theme of continuity. Insofar as religion and
spirituality are concerned, the idea is that the same, or much the same,
sacrality lies at the heart of all religiospiritual teaching of
significance; lies beyond their differences. English émigré, living for
a considerable period in California, Aldous Huxley wrote one of the
great classics, The Perennial Philosophy; a volume which ranges east and
west, and which today would probably be published as The Perennial
Spirituality. Foremost literary critic, Harold Bloom, speculates — and I
think that this is the appropriate word — on the theme of 'gnostic'
(inner-life) spirituality lying as the soul of 'American Religion',
emerging in alternative territory with the counter-cultural sixties.'
The other three authors in this section are M. H. Abrams, the most
incisive of all on Romanticism, Mark Taylor, whose volume on art,
architecture and what he calls 'religion' is brilliant, and Georg Simmel,
whose essays on so-called 'religion' raise and address all the key
issues which are still being grappled with today, including the
relationship between differentiated religious traditions and more
universalistic spirituality. Abrams dwells on the perennial within the
Romantic trajectory of the Occident, elsewhere in Natural
Supernaturalism tracing this back to the neo-Platonists and forward to
the counter-culture. Among many other things, Taylor incorporates the
most significant 'founder' of liberal Christianity, Schleiermacher, as
one who sought to protect Christianity from those who despise it, and to
expand it among the despisers, by emphasizing its spiritual core. And
the incomparable Simmel — as a life-philosopher-cum 'sociologist' of the
human condition, the secular and, most especially, the sacred — attends
to the relationship between religion and the formless life'-vitalism of
'religiousness' (today's spirituality). In their different ways, the
authors of this second draw attention to perennial themes; and
remarkably similar themes at that.
I should stress that the sacred of the perennial is not necessarily
the same as what I have been calling 'ultimate spirituality'. As noted
previously, the term `ultimate spirituality' refers to the most
elemental theme-cum-dynamic of all, simply, spirituality as direct
experience of the sacred. Encompassing theistic and inner-life sacrality,
and other modes of spiritualities of the sacred such as of a
non-theistic Higher Power, the term is of general applicability.' Usage
does not hang on particular 'universal' truths being in evidence.
Perennialists are important to consider, though, because they draw
attention to continua/ continuities; and with emphasis typically being
placed on the perennial of sacrality of the inner-life, their writings
help flesh out this mode of the ultimate.
The next sub-section, 'On differentiating spirituality within and
beyond religious tradition', dwells on the more variegated: modes of
spirituality; the three zones. The foremost contemporary pioneering
analyst of what he calls `the nova', sometimes 'the spiritual
super-nova', namely the transformative zone, is Charles Taylor (2007,
pp. 297, 300). Approaching two thirds of A Secular Age is primarily
devoted to the topic. As he amply demonstrates, the `third ways' between
the 'exclusive humanism' of the secular, and 'Christian faith', are
informed by complex dynamics. Of particular note among other
contributors, Joseph Tamney draws attention to 'spirituality' within
strong tradition, one rooted in the Calvinistic. In somewhat similar
vein, Robert Fuller refers to 'spiritual but not religious' views among
church members. With regard to spirituality, continua commence within
religion itself, the conservative included.
The reader need not worry about the possibility of having to plough
through one-to-one introductions to some ninety entries. Basically,
entries are self-explanatory.
On religion and spirituality
Several topics might be worthwhile bearing in mind when perusing the
entries. One concerns differentiation between 'religion' and
'spirituality' and associated dynamics.
First, there are relationships between religious tradition and
spirituality Within tradition and beyond. Summarizing, there are
relationships of a com- plementary nature, tradition and religion
serving each other well. There are relationships of co-existence within
tradition, tradition and spirituality running parallel courses whilst
tolerating each other. Then there is the relationship of intolerance,
traditionalists, like those influenced by Karl Barth for example,
rejecting, attempting to eradicate that spirituality they judge with
some contempt. And then there are relationships of marginalization,
spirituality on the 'fringes' of tradition; or — among traditional
mystics, perennialists like Simmel and James and experiential liberals —
religion on the margins of spirituality. The latter is the view that
tradition — seen as reified, 'objective', or, as in Hegel's sense,
'positive' — gets in the way of what the spiritual core of 'religion'
should be all about. Tradition, itself, is basically taken to be out of
touch with life itself. Finally, there is autonomous spirituality,
basically standing on its own feet; albeit to varying degrees, doing
without theistic tradition.
Then there are relationships between poly/theistic sacred sources and
spirituality within and beyond tradition. First, spirituality is direct
experience of the source as God-on-High; second, spirituality is the
experience of more or less immanentized modes of the source, owing much
to human encounters for example; third, spirituality is the experience
of the source, now in the internalized mode of the Holy Spirit; fourth,
spirituality involves sources other than the theistic; and fifth, the
value of theistic source/s of spirituality depends on the test of
personal experience.
Simmel (1997) pioneered the study of what he saw as the relationship
between 'the objectivity of the facts of religion' (that is, 'form' and
'content') and 'religion as something that is located entirely within
the subject's inner life' (that is the 'formless') (p. 78). One of his
main contentions is that unless `religiousness' somehow remains anchored
to religion, detraditionalized, comprehensively immanentized
'religiousness' lapses into 'formlessness'. This can generate disquiet
within the transformative zone: the disquiet of 'knowing' the sacred
whilst 'knowing' it as too formless to be a meaningful reality. It need
not be significant enough, `feeling-full' enough, worthwhile enough to
serve as a response to existential issues; to serve as a basis for
action to make a difference. The formless requires a measure of the
objective. At the same time the objective can only too readily reify,
essentialize, valorize to serve as a shell, blanketing, preventing
expression; entering the subjectivities, the profoundly intimate
feelings of inner life to undermine, distort, denaturalize; to undermine
that which is irredeemably one's own, what one will die with. If the
objective of religion becomes too divorced from inner life, it becomes
hollowed-out, vacuous, with participants suffering from alienation and
anomie. The formless requires a measure of the objective; and vice
versa. For Simmel, a balance has to be struck, a balance which has to be
continually balanced.
If Simmel were alive today, it is certain that he would continue to
emphasize that formless spirituality, however 'vital' it might be taken
to be, is some, thing of a dead end; and that if religious traditions of
the Occident are to be kept alive - other than retreating into a rump of
conservative, conformist.. orientated people happy with the 'objective'
- spirituality has to be brought into play. What Simmel could not take
account of, though, is the remarkable development of spiritual
disciplines which has taken place, in the Occident, since his time:
practices which do not rely on the objectivities Simmel had in mind when
he wrote of religion (beliefs, etc.), but on experiential 'traditions'
of instructions, yoga partnerships (where movement of one practitioner
is guided by someone more practised), and the like: all to do with how
to practise for experience. In Simmel's language, 'religiousness'
(recalling that this is more or less equivalent to spirituality in
today's parlance) is so-to-speak informed by the 'formless'.
On spiritualities coming into action
There are a great many volumes, and several series, devoted to
spirituality as such: dwelling, that is, on the nature of spiritual
experience, the autobiographies or biographies of spiritual seekers, and
so on. Not wishing to replicate this literature on any scale, a
considerable number of entries have been included on spirituality in
action: a less frequently explored theme, and one of great importance.
An advantage of including these entries is that they help combat the
widely held view, in evidence in the Occident, for instance, that
spirituality is flaky, wimpish, only for weak, unduly soft or subjected
women; or reducible to an adjunct of self-pleasuring aspects of consumer
culture. It is remedial, salutatory, that during recent years a swathe
of publications has appeared which forcefully combat the negative
picture. When the compass of publications focused on the Occident is
broadened to encompass the role played, say, by Gandhi - and the
countless number he appealed to who were already on, or on the road
towards, spirituality-cum-humanism - the negative picture is combated
rather like a dagger to the heart. The transition of 'new' India to
democracy, a true cultural revolution if there ever was one, would have
been inconceivable if there had not been a' huge, humanistic, counter
current against the allegedly dominant hierarchical systems of caste,
the feudal, inequality. Without the liberal-cum-spiritual ethos of
approaching three-quarters of the population of Pakistan, it is
difficult to see why the country does not fall apart.
Speaking as a Romantic perennialist, during an 1838 lecture Emerson
affirmed, 'For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is
differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different
applications' (cited by James, 1974: 41). Leaving aside the metaphysical
question of whether 'the same spirit' is at work, there is certainly an
observable connection between the ways in which sacred spirituality is
'taken', by participants, and contexts of application. During the last
few decades, a great deal of progress has been made in the study of
spirituality in action:
- CAM and TCAM, where the focus is on healing energy, and, it must
be emphasized, the healing values bound up with energy flow;
- psychotherapy and counselling, where spirituality bears on
transforming the meaning of events, life-issues, perturbations of
feelings;
- welfare/social work, where the focus lies with humanistic
capacities, capabilities to act;
- business and management, where spirituality is brought to bear
on the restoration of 'human' values, the healing of stresses and
strains, the enhancement of vitality and creativity;
- child-centred education, where spirituality is bound up with the
expression of inner potential or 'gifts', the cultivation of
harmony, tranquillity, the reflective;
- the arts, where the aesthetic dimension of spirituality inspires
the expression of 'true' beauty, or the reflection of the mysterious
harmonics within the disorderly, even within the anti-life;
- well-being culture, as in holistic spas, for example, where
spirituality bears on bringing life alive;
- consumption, where spirituality serves as a quality experience
for consumptive people;
- MEP prosperity, where spirituality provides what is required for
acquisition in the material world;
- nature and the environment, where the dynamic is to do with
harmonious, healing relationships;
- the arts of popular culture, where spirituality often dwells
within magical moments, the inspirational, the 'out of this world',
the transportative, the extra-ordinary;
- and - to change gear significantly - development, where
spiritually-orientated faith-based organizations serve to inspire,
to bring Holy Spirituality to work among the wretched of the earth,
for instance.
Incomplete as it is, with regard to both foci and modes of
application, it is apparent that a great deal is going on. Three points
of note. First, the nowhere for Enlightenment, for ultimate spirituality
as an end in and of itself, is nearly as significant as might be
expected. Neither in the Occident, nor, more surprisingly, in much of
the Orient: in countries like India and South Korea where, in fact,
prosperity spirituality is predominant. Second, insofar as matters of
application are concerned, theistic and transformative
The activities are frequently similar; sometimes more or less
indistinguishable. The highest' common denominator concerns the quality,
the value, of the (truely) most especially that spiritual humanism which
runs through all applications: bar those which articulate, promote, the
most 'I'm worth it' of esteem-evaluations, married to power-obsessed,
ego-hungry, identity-capitalism.
And third, philosophy, in that older sense of the term 'philosophy of
life', is widely abroad. Above all, many modes of spirituality provide
the opportunity, encouragement, to reflect on how 'one' is living
'one's' life; and to do something about it. Whether the focus is on
oneself, or, more typically I think, oneself with, through, for and from
others, attention can be paid to what is going well, what is going
badly, what could go better, what, of the past, requires attention,
what, of the future, is the most worthwhile way to spend the rest of
one's life, and so on. The holistic thrust of so many spiritualities
-inner-life and immanentized theistic, in particular - means that the
compass of consideration is broad. Not just mind-body-spirit, but also
feelings, sentiments, dispositions, proclivities and the like; not just
oneself, but oneself as bound up with others; and also as bound up with
all those 'externals' of life which would best be dropped. The last is
of particular significance. Increasingly, theodicies of tradition (which
basically aim to make sense of how an all-powerful, all-loving theistic
God can allow/justify suffering) have to compete with `sacodicies':
inner-life (including the life of nature), immanentist,
experienced-informed accounts which attribute suffering to the
imperfections (and worse) of the secular. (Because the term `theodicy'
is so closely associated with religious tradition, I'll henceforth use
the coinage `sacodicy' when appropriate. The term is coined by drawing
on Gk. dike, meaning justice, judgement.) Philosophy of life; the
ethicality of ways of life; the 'philosophical' critique. Readers might
object: but look at the trash under 'wisdom' in the bookshop or on the
web. Well, the humanist - spiritual or not - can respond: respect the
philosophy of the different; value difference. A leading scholar of
mysticism once said to me that mysticism was of and for the elite,
spirituality of and for the masses. Quite? Well, 'the mass' will have to
make do with their wisdom-spirituality! The fact remains, though, that
it is not even 'the mass' of the Occident which engages; when it comes
to participation in practices, it is the professional, educated. Beyond
this, sneering is blinding.'
Spirituality in action: the following passage, bringing out the major
theme of Shelley's poetry, could be taken as the impossibly utopian of
Shelley's outlook. It is best to take it as inspirational; inspiration
as the expiration, the breathing out, of the best of life: for Shelley,
for all those who envisage life as momentum from what lies within the
failures of the secular to the glories, 'the glorious flashes', which
come from within to go beyond:
The world, according to the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, is a 'dim
vast vale of tears'. Visiting and illuminating this vale with inconstant
glorious flashes is the unseen Power, which works, not outside the
world, but from within it, striving to transform creation in accord with
its own radiant perfection. This power is the Spirit of Beauty, to whom
Shelley looks, as to a God, to work the ultimate millennium. (Guy Boas
1925: ix)
Shelley was expelled from his Oxford College. The College authorities
took what Shelley described as 'tyrannical violent proceedings'. The
reason? A pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism. The momentum of the
ethicality of Shelley's paeans does not hang on literality per se, as
when the necessity of atheism is taken literally. Cultivation, to
believe in to go with inspiration, is what really counts. As will now be
indicated, the inspiration driving 'transformation' is arguably best
cultivated beyond the 'spelt out'.
On cultivating spiritual humanism
In critical regards, Martha Nussbaum is the Thomas Paine of our time.
Both are religious, the former having taken up liberal Judaism, the
latter being a Deist. Both are rationalists of 'stands to reason'
persuasion. Most critically of all, both are powerful advocates of the
ethicality of humanity. So typical of those who contributed so much to
the development of this ethicality in the Occident, Paine grounded the
ethicality in reason, the laws of reason which he took to be the laws
laid down by the God of Deism. Whilst there is no doubt an elective
affinity between Nussbaum's humanism (1997; 2000) and her liberal
religion, she is more strictly the rationalist.
In the hands of Paine, where rationalism is rather tenuously
connected with experiences of the sacred, and in the hands of Nussbaum,
whose main published works make little reference to the sacred, the
basic working out, the advocacy of humanism links up with all those
other rationalistic efforts to provide the ethicality with the
legalistic details of the 'bite' of positive law. This might work well
enough in the Occident.' Elsewhere in the world, though, the basically
rationalistic-cum-legalistic approach suffers from serious
disadvantages. I am thinking of all those countries, like Pakistan,
which are extensively religious-spiritual; albeit to varying degrees,
deeply so. I am thinking of all those countries where 'way of life'
values, sentiments, dispositions which are not grounded in
religion-cum-spirituality are unlikely to flourish
Leading sociologist Bryan Turner is one of the all too few social
scientists k developing the study of humanism; reactivating, and taking
further, the concerns of which great masters, like Durkheim and Simmel,
were so acutely aware. As Turner emphasizes in his more recent work (for
example, 2006), one of the foremost challenges facing the globe is to
strengthen the ethicality of humanity. Whether secular or not, the
intrinsic, 'ultimate' worth of the ethicality in United Nations mode
counts in and of itself. (In the secular register, 'ultimate' until
philosophical anti-humanists miraculously come up with a better way
forward for the co-existence of difference.) Especially when not
secular, the ethicality provides the equality, capacities, capabilities,
sentiments, the value of freedom, above all, life, to combat the
tendency of religious tradition to evolve into 'we, and we alone hold
The Truth' intolerance I and exclusivism; to combat the fact that this
tendency has become reality in some of the most terrible areas of the
world. (Different dynamics are at work in the most terrible of all, the
predominantly 'Christian' Congo.)
The huge advantage of moving beyond the stands to reason approach
pursued by Martha Nussbaum, in order to bring spiritual humanism to
bear, is to pit the sacred against the sacred; to pit the all-inclusive
of the sacred within against the exclusivities of ethico-legal features
of sacred tradition. In the Orient, to bring the sacred to bear to
propagate the ethicality of humanity is to chime in with what could well
belong to the indigenous, with the present being sanctified by the past.
The ethicality is embedded in the spirituality of a great deal of
Sufism. In common with Romantics like Shelley and Wordsworth, Sufi
poetry and songs of the environs of the Hindu Kush affirm natural
humanism: human as nature; nature as human, with ethicality to
experience. It is embedded in so much of what is taking place in the
transformative zone in so many settings. It is embedded in all those
whose spirituality is in tune with great teachers, masters, leaders like
the Dalai Lama. It is embedded in liberal, immanentized religion, the
liberal Islam of countries like Pakistan; most especially in Indonesia
where there are more Muslims, of liberal persuasion, than anywhere
else.6 Suffused with the sacred, belonging to the sacred, the values,
sentiments, dispositions, proclivities, capacities of the ethicality
have power. The ethicality is charged by that which is believed in.
Anti-humanists (religious or secular) aside, the value of this cannot be
emphasized enough. Local and national people of influence, including,
say, activist Sufis, can work to cathect the value-laden energy of what
I have elsewhere called 'birth right spirituality' with legalistic
renderings of human rights, the rights of the child, and so on (Heelas,
2008), to put intrinsic moral worth, sentiments, proclivities, values
grounded in the sacred to work; to put what springs into life with birth
— 'natural' rights, elementals and capacities — to entitle formal rights
and to demand cultivation in the name of the sacred: the birthright as
'the right' to human rights. Educational settings are absolutely
critical; so is cultivation of what is alreadY `right', in many
localities, in connection with relationships with the land. So, too, is
the dynamic which can be encapsulated as 'the rite is right'.
Articulating, cultivating, expressing or amplifying birthright
spirituality — the sense of the demands of life, for the full life —
rituals serve the right, human rights, the sentiments of humankindness.
Such is the power of belief in. (Among those anthropologists who have
attended to this dynamic, Victor Turner (1974) and Roy Rappaport (1999)
are among the distinguished.)
On the theme of the enhancement of efficacy, it is also noteworthy that the sacodicy of spiritual humanism is all to the good for reform. Albeit in very different language, a great deal of the writings and teaching of spiritual humanists resonate with the critical theorists of, say, the Frankfurt School. Damage lies with the pulverizing effects of unjust, repressive, opiate-like techniques of social and cultural arrangements, including much of religious tradition. Damage lies with the power-lusting effect. By drawing attention to injustice, as sacodicy, spiritual humanism points the way, motivates the path to reform, even revolt. I could perhaps add that the sheer value of what spiritual humanism has and can contribute means that it should not be demeaned by using the purportedly academic, meta-language of 'capitalizing on cultural capital', with its capitalistic undertones. The point, precisely, is to enable the indigenous to emerge; to fortify it to counter, or temper — among other things — the injustices and inequalities so typically generated by market capitalism; the exploitative exclusivism of hierarchical tradition.
In the Occident, t s also plausible to argue that spiritual humanism
can contribute to bringing the ethicality of humanity alive: to more
effectively combat racism, religious intolerance, prejudice; the
widespread processes of the dehumanizing, regulating, delimiting and the
limiting. A few classical Romantics of nationalistic persuasion
notwithstanding, the Romantics paved the way. Breaking with Christian
tradition, to varying degrees and in varying ways, the majority of the
Romantics retained their faith in the sacred and Erasmus-like humanism.
Simultaneously, they attempted to break with the accelerating, as
industrializing, fall of the secular. The somewhat younger Wordsworth is
paradigmatic. A spiritual humanist and an activist, which explains why
the railway line into the Lake District stops at Windermere, a safe
distance from his abode, Dove Cottage. Belonging as so much of it does
to the romantic trajectory of the Occident, one of the great strengths
of the transformative zone today, which helps explain its appeal, is
that it, too, draws on the sacred and the ethicality of the secular. In
accord with an obvious, laid down continuum, the theistic zone (most
significantly in the mode of the sacred per se) and the secular — in the
mode of that so-called 'Christian culture' which is normally best
thought of as the culture of humanism — combine to provide an
efficacious, heart-moving spiritual humanism. The humanism of virtually
all CAM practices; the humanism of spirituality in education or in
business, and so on; a humanism which is taken to be 'vital' in both
senses of the world; which is felt to come from within the person; a
humanism which is not dry, estranged, 'objective' (in Simmel's sense)
like the legal, or the moralistic commandment-mode of `positive' (in
Hegel's sense) religious renderings; a humanism which is very
considerably more plausible, more palatable, if only because
non-moralistic, than that of liberal religion; a humanism which largely
lies beyond propositional beliefs which so readily go together with
exclusivistic differentiation, lying instead with experiences of
unitary, inclusivistic, perennialistic spiritual flow; a humanism which
replaces the (categorical) imperatives of the obligatory with the sense
of the right. Or so it is experienced. Addressing the two-fold failure
of Christian ethics and Goethean humanism to prevent the terrors of
National Socialism, Thomas Mann completed Dr Faustus early in 1947. The
historical record gives no reason for being sanguine today. In the
Occident, spiritual humanism has its place in the struggles with the
forces of anti-humanism.
One of the chapters of the volumes which I am most pleased to have
been able to include is on spiritual humanism in its 'natural' mode: the
'humanism' of nature. A great deal more research of the kind provided in
the articlc under consideration (Vol. IV, Ch. 76) is required, though,
to demonstrate the extent to which spiritual humanism naturalized is
contributing to resistance; to the struggle against capitalism going
wild. We do not even know, for example, the extent of humanism within
the transformative zone; anywhere. Neither do we know the extent to
which the presence of humanism is combated by other incumbents of the
transformative zone of the Occident and Orient of today: the prosperity
spirituality of acquisitive individualism, the consumerized
'spirituality' (which is probably more secular than transformative) of
those who treat spirituality as an experiential commodity to be taken in
and used up for pleasure, only to be left 'behind' (wherever that might
mean!).
One does not have to be a spiritual humanist to appreciate the
fundamental way in which we are each other. Until recently, I tended to
believe in Sam Keen. The founder of Psychology Today, his perspective is
simple. We are the sum of our experiences; the sum of our experiences of
other people and nature. Other people and nature (help) compose what we
are as 'individuals'. For good or for bad — and it goes without saying
that there are plenty of bad experiences — life is largely,
intrinsically, relational. Without experiencing others, we would not be
ourselves; we would not be human at all. After recently talking with
anthroposophist Hugo Verbrugh, an intimately related perspective dawned
on me; one I should have appreciated much more profoundly much earlier
in life. The point is elementary. Whereas the 'sun/ of our experiences'
points to the present, our memories, too, are primarily relational. As a
mode of reincarnation, the dead and the living live in each of us.
Naturally, since significant memories are experiential (`the memorable
experience'), and since memories are only remembered in the present, the
two perspectives ultimately boil down to the same thing; an obvious one
I at that, but one which the obsessive, culturally-`biased' use of the
language of individualism (to praise, to critique) serves to mask.
With that great thematic of spiritual humanism in mind — the
interconnected, the 'trans-human', the unitary beyond or below
difference — the point of the forgoing rather amateurish psychologizing-cum
philosophizing is clear. In more secular mode, spiritual humanism
'brings out' the beyond, the counter-individualism of even the most
individualistic. To say that a friend is really spiritual, or that a
sunset is spiritual, could well mean that the friend or the sunset has
entered, moved 'oneself' as a 'partner% more graphically, as movement of
the soul. In more sacred mode, spiritual humanism can function likewise:
if participants are to be believed, with the force of more
significant/powerful experiences. Simmel: these are the themes which he
develops in the essays included in the last part of Essays on Religion
(1997); Buber, his student, colleague and friend: these are the themes
of his classic I and Thou (2004): a work which does not emphasize the
theistic God-on-High; a work which does emphasize the 'God' which lies
between, simultaneously within the I-Thou, the profoundly experiential
intra-relational which, he held, springs into life when public identity,
role-play and the like are broken asunder. (The anthropologist Victor
Turner took up Buber's (and Simmel's) theme in his influential The
Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure (1974).) To encounter,
better `incounter'. Such is the experienced. Long considered the leading
feminist of 'strategic essentialism', Luce Irigaray now dwells with
experiential spiritual humanism. Resonating with her teacher, Levinas,
and her earlier The Way of Love (2002), she writes,
If the attraction that brings me towards the other is a quest for
transcendence, as a desire for a beyond that I cannot appropriate in my
world, and if the same goes for the other towards me, what calls us
together belongs to a transcendental dimension. It is in a
transcendental ecstasy that we exist together if what brought us closer
is a relation of desire between us, and not a mere complicity within an
environing world that is already there and supposedly the same for the
two. (2008, p. 80)
Small wonder that Irigaray pursues this mutual mode of being through
yoga (Vol. III, Ch. 58).
On why spirituality is here to stay
Because there is not enough on the topic in the volumes, it is good
to include a few observations about the possible future of spirituality.
Apart from intristic interest, and implications for policy planning
(such as educational provisions for those younger
people who are on the road to 'deep' humanism, that if affinity with
spirituality than religious tradition), a justification lf spirituality
looks set to have a promising global future these volumes will not
become outdated too soon. Together with what has been said in the
previous chapter, pertaining to change, four reasons why spirituality is
here to stay might be worthy of consideration.
Not being a believer in academic fashion, I remained convinced of the
utility of what my old teacher, the great anthropologist and explorer of
human consciousness/imagination, Rodney Needham, took to be the
fundamental processes of 'the human mind'. I think he would concur with
the argument that cultures, ways of life, everywhere work with spectrums
of the kind: bad, not so bad, okay, better, better still, almost
perfect, virtually perfect, perfection, the perfect itself. Deploying a
version of the transcendental deductive argument in neo-Kantian manner,
societies exist. It is inconceivable that social cultures could exist
unless occupants (other than psychopaths and the like, that is) work
with some graded (I'm inclined to say `graduational) continuum of the
kind just outlined. How would one be able to ensure that crops are
properly tilled other than by judging them accordingly? Since societies
do exist, then the spectrum under consideration must exist. What is
critical about this is that the spectrum logically, automatically,
imaginatively leads, progresses to the notion of the perfect; that is,
the sacred. Analogous chains of thought, which also lead to the perfect,
include one flowing from the worthless to the 'perfectly worthwhile' to
the worthwhile, the transcendental deductive argument applying here as
well. If, somehow, a collective existed of the worthless, as
experienced, the collective would not last for long. (An argument of a
volume I'm completing on spirituality and the worthwhile.) Other
logical-cum-practical-necessity flows are provided by the move from the
dirty, to the clean, to the pure (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, 1966)
(imagine a collective living in what it takes to be dirt, for long);
from the short lasting, to the longer lasting, to the 'ever' lasting, to
eternity; from the contingent/impermanent/transitory, to the relatively
stable, to the stable, to the permanent; from the not enough, to the
enough, to the more than enough, to the infinite plenitude. (Not many
think that less is more; for those who do, some will see this as a way
to perfection.) Logics to the perfect, required for social cultures to
operate; necessitated to explain what is known to exist: the
sociocultural. And at the level of personal cultures, from utterly
muddled, inchoate consciousness (blind drunk) to that degree of cohesion
required not to lapse into the mal-functional to, ultimately, pure
consciousness.
Contentment with the way things are. Who can doubt that the
contenting contents of much consumer culture (Aldous Huxley's soma)
contribute to the fact that for the great bulk of the time the great
majority of inhabitants of the Occident, in particular, are disinclined
to move beyond the secular frame. The quest for the perfect is not going
to enter the ranks of some kind of end of history, though. That consumer
culture capitalizes on the above logics or 'progressions' contributes to
the cultural significance of the perfect. The ideology of progress is
waxing, not waning; and is universalizing. The role played by 'heaven'
and the like in fuelling the logic of the move to the perfect shows no
signs of waning, with surveys suggesting that 'heaven' is °1e of the
most resilient of Christian notions in much of Europe. And, of course,
there is the sheer efficacy of ideals: greatly enhanced by the desires
aroused by the gulf which inevitably exists between secular ideals of
any real significance and their realization in reality. So long as 'the
perfect' is there, so long as the desire for the perfect is there, there
is work to be done. spiritualities of the transformative zone, and/or of
the internalized within religion, will surely continue to perform their
tasks; elementally, facilitating progress to/wards the perfect. Unless,
possibly, there is a massive move towards spirituality within religious
tradition: which would mean that heaven's way would be a really serious
competitor with regard to whatever lies beyond theistic tradition.
The second argument hinges on the obvious point that whatever else
humans might be, humans are evolved beings. Our 'hardware', that is the
brain, has reached a certain stage of evolution. The brains of ants have
reached a much 'lower' stage. Ants make nothing of Mozart. Humans do.
Unless the evolution of the brain stops, unless that technological
advance, of the kind resulting in brains being uploaded into upgrading
'clouds' comes to an end, it is inconceivable that we will not progress:
to where we enter realms which are, at present, akin to Mozart for ants.
How many people think in this kind of 'There are more things in heaven
and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy' way has yet
to be determined. (A pretty terrible failure of research agendas.) The
frequency of 'there must be something there' statements reported by
questionnaires, however, suggests that Horatio's outlook (Einstein's
too, for that matter) is far from uncommon. With the decline of religion
in the Occident, spirituality is set to remain an obvious way of
incorporating this sense of mystery beyond comprehension: as meaningful
experience. As it has for long done among all those more devoted
believers of the Orient.
The third consideration is, perhaps, more firmly grounded. It is best
introduced by something emphasized by Thomas Mann; something written at
a time when cultural and social disintegration was far, far, more in
evidence than radical postmodernist thinkers have ever dreamt of. (Well,
almost!) Reflecting on a free-floating 'faith', longing for an object,
as the hallmark of the period around the end of the First World War,
Mann (1983 [orig. 1918]) observed, 'One must believe. And in what? In
belief [faith] —would be the correct answer' (p. 362).9 Even when there
is nothing to believe in, the imperative for believing in remains
imperative. Among other factors, including the 'hold' of secular ideals
as things to aspire for the worthwhile life, the 'necessity' of
'believing in' comes from heaven. That is to say, whether or not one
believes in heaven, most people cannot but be struck by what heaven has
to offer. It cultivates the sense of having to have something to believe
in. With the (relative) demise of belief in heaven in the Occident
(although not the demise of heaven as a cultural item), with many
secular ideals (like materialistic progress) falling under criticism or
disarray (albeit not the ideal of the ideal), the imperative of having
something to believe in becomes all the more pressing.
Of all contemporary scholars of the topic - so sadly neglected by
other than a few German and USA sociologists (etc.), so magisterially
portrayed by human condition, sociological, cultural, existential
(so-designated) novelists -I think it is fair to say that Charles Taylor
has illuminated the pivotal significance of Mann's point more than
anyone else. One can reflect upon points made in the appropriately named
first chapter of Sources of the Self (1989), 'Inescapable Frameworks'.
With Taylor's insights in mind, 'To have something to believe in'
amounts to saying 'To have something worthwhile to believe in'; to
'know' a 'true source of the worthwhile': arguably a more pointed
expression than Taylor's own 'sources of significance'. People rarely
(ever?) believe in things which are not considered worthwhile. For the
increasing number of disaffiliates of the main tradition of the
Occident, with the increasing failure of religion to continue its
central job of providing (identifying, motivating, cultivating) the
truly worthwhile, and with the secular increasingly in distress, the
transformative zone, in tandem with the immanentized sacrality of
detraditionalized religion, comes into its own. With so many people
having what they take to be spiritual (or religious) experiences (Vol.
I, Ch. 22) - including what could be intimations, inklings of the sacred
- the truly worthwhile is signposted; could become easier to find; could
be confirmed. Spiritualities of the Occident, I surmise, are set to
gradually 'transplant' the worthwhile from religion. At the same time,
cultural processes are 'implanting' the spiritual dimension of life on
their own, autonomous grounds. Maybe as a dream, maybe as some sort of
necessity of the dynamic of life, the perfect, the lure of the perfect,
is not going to go away. That much is as certain as can be.
The more convincing the spiritual experience, the greater the
amplification, the greater the significance of the transplant/implant of
the worthwhile: for increasing numbers in the Occident, spirituality as
the primary source of the worthwhile; the 'truly' worthwhile of healthy
living, humanism, relationality, and so on. Whether the educated or not,
whether Occidental or not, people are not easily fooled by - say -
healing spirituality. There is more than enough evidence from the
Occident and Orient to convince that spiritual sourcing for health
(including the wellbeing of feelings) is remarkably effective: in
experience-. The placebo effect - if that is what it is - works in
experience; indeed, works in much the same way meanings do in connection
with feelings, emotionality. Or think of the 'flowing', expressive
actions of those whose sense of the worthwhile is their sense of the
sacred. If only there was additional evidence to chart these kinds of
claim!
As for the fourth, more routinely sociological consideration, the
long history of spirituality of the Orient alone puts paid to the idea
that (relatively) stand alone practices - autonomous in that they are
not firmly embedded sustained by religious tradition - are perfectly
able to perpetuate them- selves through time. To what persuasive effect
I do not know, but it might be worth mentioning that for longer than
three decades I, for one, have been arguing for the viability of
strongly detraditionalized 'traditions' of practice (Heelas, 1982,
passim). And it is not just that the organization of practices is viable
in the sense of providing the (relatively) non-formative for autonomous
participants to work with the (relatively) formless; that is, for
practices, with their embedded or closely linked values, assumptions,
etc., to serve as perspectives for monitoring the relatively formless,
for judging progress, and so on. In addition viability is provided by
predominantly positive outcomes (Vol. IV, Ch. 79). If practices did not
work, they would simply wither away.'
On what is 'more' . . .
Drawing together a number of points, and adding a couple or so new
ones, 1 would like to close with a few reflections on what is probably
the greatest challenge facing those intent on making sense of
spirituality. The challenge concerns all those countries where theistic
tradition is in decline. (And don't believe a word of those who would
have it otherwise!) The challenge concerns much the same countries where
spirituality beyond theistic/polytheistic tradition is popular, probably
increasingly so. (And don't be entirely put off by problems with surveys
- findings don't come out of the blue; they are indicative.) The
challenge is simple. How is it possible to make sense of this
popularity? Put rather differently, why is the transformative zone -
where some degree of 'believe in' the sacrality of spirituality is
almost certainly widespread - apparently waxing? Could it be the case
that this explains, or helps explain, why 'sincere' incumbents of the
secular zone, namely atheists, have not grown in number, to any
significant extent, since around the time Census records (in a number of
countries) began - not so long after the First World War. I think it
does largely account for the fact that there are far fewer atheists than
secularization theorists would expect.
Now, a number of somewhat attenuated ideas, with some hypotheses:
The failure of theistic tradition. With tradition having ceased, or
ceasing to be 'worthwhile religion', with belief-in engagement with
theistic sacrality disappearing, or gone, in the lives of many as the
worthwhile of human life, the sacred does not go away. Find me a person
in Australia who is not aware of heaven.
The (relatively) constant reminder, the 'direct' - mediated –
encounter with heaven and the like in popular/consumer culture,
literature (etc.), means that all are aware of the value of the truly
worthwhile-as-the-perfect. This is probably the most powerful of all
aspects of the legacy of the theistic tradition of the Occident. For
optimistic agnostics, half, believers, optimistic atheists, even
die-hard atheists: 'heaven' is there; however subliminal, serving as a
recurrent reminder of the perfect, perhaps amplifying it.
The perfect broadcast by the legacy of theist tradition: and in the
context of the secular condition (where, to emphasize a point, virtually
everyone spends most of their waking hours). The point need not be
belaboured, Many a secularist joins hands with those who 'know' the
sacred: the secular is imperfect. No doubt fuelled by utopias of the
sacred, intrinsic imperfections are thrown into relief.
Thrown into relief, now by the secular condition itself. The ideology
of progress is self-defeating. Without secular ideal/s being in place,
to serve as the telos, inspiration, aspiration, defining gauge,
'progress' loses its significance. Bearing in mind the transcendental
deductive argument adduced earlier, for progress to really work, other
than in an ad hoc or unintended consequences fashion, the teleological
of the ideal has to be there. And within the secular realm, ideals of
any significance cannot be met. Ideals continually stretch the
worthwhile to the more. By proving unobtainable, the more so as the
stretching process operates, ideals simultaneously undermine the
worthwhile. The ideology of progress operates in any number of contexts,
which can — and frequently do — generate disquiet with what the secular
has to offer. In my own trade, scholarly inquiry is premised on the rule
of 'the always better'. To 'meet' a goal is to bring further
ideal-aspirations to mind: to generate their discontents. As for the
perfect — that ever remains in front. The impulsion of the 'is this it?'
question, posed by a yet-to-be-determined number of people across
cultures: a question which, naturally, entails that the secular is 'not
it'.
Inherent imperfections of the secular are not just made worse by
necessary/ virtually inevitable idealism. As well as being beset by the
ideology of progress, on occasion existential awareness serves to
destablize: thereby pointing to, awakening the 'beyond'. Although the
volume is disappointing, Jurgen Habermas et al's An Awareness of What is
Missing (2010) has a wonderful title. Precisely because the secular is
secular, this awareness is more-or-less inevitably generated. In the
words of that distinguished North American thinker-of-culture Daniel
Bell (1977), 'The ground of religion [and spirituality] is existential:
the awareness of men [and womenl of their finiteness and the inexorable
limits to their powers ... (p. 447). I, for one, do not know of a way of
life, a culture, an individual which does not recognize the distinction
serving 'the finite or the limit — the beyond on the other "side"' in
some way or another. Who cannot sense that the experience of the finite
(let alone the failed) cannot but generate, minimally, a sense of the
beyond? That things are possible within the finite contributes to a
sense of the impossible, fuelling frustration about things not being
possible.
With the foregoing in mind, there are, I think, at least three
relatively clear-cut themes to explore; three plausible hypotheses:
- (a) that those who turn to the transformative zone include the
older of the secular, those who have had the time to come to realize
pretty major 'issues' to do with the worthwhile of the secular and
religion, and whose personal cultural circumstances activate, or
otherwise come to be associated with triggering experiences;
- (b) that the younger, who have been socialized 'towards' the
transformative, have 'worthwhile' concerns — that is concerns about
the worthwhile — when older, together with experiences which take
them more fully into the transformative, perhaps to actualize it;
- (c) and those 'moved' by the turn within of the major tradition
of the Occident.
The first and second of these themes have a fair amount in common. As
for their differences, the first predominantly concerns people who have
lost their faith with religion, and being relatively old, were not
socialized into spirituality when they were at school or by way of the
youth culture of their younger years. The second predominantly concerns
people who have been brought up with socialization 'towards' the
transformative. What this boils down to is that the second involves
people who are more likely to have a positive attitude to the
transformative than the former.
Three ideas, all alluded to previously, all providing golden
opportunities for further reflection. Exploration is in its infancy. I
must admit that as someone long disillusioned by theistic tradition, and
increasingly of the view that the secular cannot possibly answer the
rhetorical question 'Is this it?' with the affirmative 'Yes it is; life
is great', I'm especially fascinated by the 'Bertrand Russell
hypothesis'. The yearn, that desire, hope, built into the yearn; that
reasonable expectation built into the yearn: when the time, the
circumstances come, if they do, the transformative experience.
Basically, the yearn plus a new 'sense of reality' (to use the title of
one of Berlin's books): most likely spirituality as the meaningful
reality of experience. Just as yearning was not `really' enough for
exemplar Russell, the impulsion to 'the more' generated by the secular,
not least the 'making the most of life in the face of the death of
heavenllife, is not a rehearsal' factor, has ultimately to await the
experience. Even before the experience, the walk of beyond-beauty, the
into life of the hospice with spiritual care, though, there can be much
of value. Sans `the' experience, Thomas Mann's (1983) own credo, with
non-ironic voice for once, is that `The belief in God is the belief in
love, in life, and in art'; is that 'despair' is better for humanity
than the sweet-tasting do-gooder (pp. 371; 381). Here lie depths which
cannot be fully plumbed. Here lie depths which can be delved. With the
sacred so widely abroad, ultimate spirituality, variants, approximations
are safely embedded in many a locale across the globe. Some argue that
what is taking place is most at 'risk' in the Occident. The author of a
classic on mysticism, W. T. Stace (1960) wrote, 'It is better to be
vaguely right than to be precisely wrong' (p. 6). I'll be vaguely right
and — arguably `precisely' wrong to suggest that spirituality is certain
to take further root in the Occident: to 'catch up' with the Orient.
A major consideration concerns the rather significant popularity of
CAM in the Occident. Even pragmatic CAM, of the 'what works, works'
persuasion, demonstrates the 'going beyond' of the strictly secular.
Given that it is so easy to adopt this variety of CAM (in particular),
given that one does not have to believe in anything more than the
quality experience (if, as is typical, quality is the case), given that
it has been adopted by apparently ever-increasing numbers, and given
that it can lead on to 'other' things, the future looks assured. It
could be the case, though, that secular governmental restraints of
countries like Holland, where restraints have already had some success
in dampening activity, will prevail. To point to another consideration,
youth in many countries of the Occident are much more likely to be
`proto'. spiritually-inclined than anything else. Although relatively
few might have convincing experiences of the perfect, under appropriate
(educational, etc.) circumstances many of the younger are in the process
of socialization: learning the significance of interrelationships with
nature, or of 'wonder', as `ends' in themselves, for instance. Some are
primed for the circumstances, the occasion of the future: then, perhaps,
finding it quite easy to enrich any sense they might have of the 'I am a
spiritual person' variety. It could be the case, though, that
educational practices move away from 'spirituality'. It could be the
case that the so-called 'indifferent', the 'could not be bothered with;
nothing wrong with my life so long as there are football, girls and
booze', of the younger, increase in number: significantly.
Spiritualities of the transformative, in particular, tend to
accommodate `the best' of both worlds. Continua, perhaps more especially
continuities in this regard, are taken to combine the best of the
secular (for example humanism) and the best of theistic tradition (for
example the sacred). Here lies the security of moving with, combining,
the familiar, plausible, credible. Here lies the opportunity of
experiential drift; the 'drift "away" '.
In more speculative vein, on a global compass it is possible, perhaps
likely, that increasing numbers will find it increasingly difficult to
find 'true sources of the worthwhile within religious tradition. In
virtually all countries, the critical voice of the secular, the lures of
the secular, are becoming more powerful. With various forms of
'modernization' taking their hold, exercising their hold — competitive
individualism in the economic sector and, via consumption, for necessity
or pleasure — the secular is set to become ever more influential. Even
now, it is misleading to suppose 'blind faith' to be all that,
widespread. It is quite probable that belief in the beliefs of
'fundamentalism has coloured the judgement of many an eye. There is a
great deal which the eye has not taken fully into account: including the
extent to which lip-service is paid to belief and ritual, especially
when lip-service is useful for political (etc) tactics. Whether simply a
continuation of long-standing, relatively `casual' relationships with
religious tradition (arguably the case in much of Bangladesh, for
instance), or due to the impact of the increasing hold of the secular,
or both, the hunch is that theistic/polytheistic sources of the
worthwhile will not fare all that well. It cannot be emphasized enough
that relative to the global population so-called fundamentalists — those
believing in a battery of illiberal beliefs — are relatively few and far
between. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, which is probably the most
fundamentalistic' region of the world, it is probably safe to venture
that Christianity is frequently worn , lightly' during everyday life:
apart, that is, from a few key values and beliefs, associated, say, with
the Holy Spirit and heaven. In many countries, and for many people,
so-called great traditions ride with the secular.
The afflictions of the worthwhile thesis applies beyond the Occident. Spirituality, when it is experienced as expressing itself, as working, is an especially good option between the secular and pretty non-experiential 'rote' beliefs and rituals; and, of course, one which has long been in play in numerous regions. The secular at one and the same time failing (greater poverty, ill-being not greater wealth) and promising so much (wellbeing, success in the world); religion not always providing that reality of experience of the sacred, or akin, which can be contacted when occasion demands: here lies the option, most obviously (World Health Organization supported) TCAM, including the non-theistic, indigenously-informed TCAM of sub-Saharan Africa. It would be ethnocentric prejudice to suppose that the urge to move beyond imperfect reality, to experience the spiritual reality of beyond, is limited to the Occident. It would be ethnocentric hubris to suppose that religious tradition is not falling into doubt in many places beyond the Occident. It would be ethnocentric bias to deny the propulsive force of belief in the perfect, the perfect which has to be believed in, which is essential for life. An indeterminate number of the world's population, I surmise, is not all that different from those suffering from afflictions of the worthwhile in the Occident. Not all that many are 'beyond doubt'. Of those who are 'without doubt', and who are not die-hard believers in propositional beliefs (namely so-called fundamentalists), an equally indeterminate number of the world's population are absorbed by, taken 'in' by, what they `know' of spirituality. From the cosmopolitan ranks of decision-makers and facilitators of capital cities around much of the globe (including Tehran), from the impoverished ranks of those working the land drawing on indigenous transformative resources working from within: spirituality 'joins forces' with Inherent Islam, typically in humanist mode: set to make a difference. From the inherent spirituality, to the capacities of the inherent, to the capabilities fostered by the resource-allocations of decision-makers, facilitators.
Sufi Qalandar Sain Irshad Husain Shah, based in the Margalla Hills
northeast of Islamabad, a couple or so kilometres from the Offices of
central government (and the Diplomatic Compound), attracting the more
enlightened/liberal of decision-makers (including Sufi-orientated)
intent on enhancing sense of value in life, and Sufi-orientated poor,
intent on tackling what is less than worthwhile in their lives. I wish I
could explore further. Unfortunately, eruption of violence in Islamabad
and environs meant I could not spend time with Shah. A huge shame;
although having been told so much about this Sufi, the illustration is
indeed exemplary: of the kind of thing taking place across the Orient
and elsewhere.
contents of 4 volumes of Spirituality in the Modern World
Volume I: Overview—Part 1: Spirituality
1 On making some sense of spirituality- Paul Heelas
2 On some major issues- Paul Heelas
3 On some significant themes - Paul heelas
Part 2: On Formulating the perennial and the Zoned
(a) Perennial Spirituality Predominantly Within Religious
Tradition
4. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of
the Great Mystics, East and West [1945] (Perennial, 2004), pp.
vii–xi.
5. Harold Bloom, ‘Enthusiasm, Gnosticism, American Orphism’ and
‘The New Age: California Orphism’, The American Religion: The
Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (Simon & Schuster, 1993), pp.
45–58, 181–8.
(b) Perennial Spirituality: Within and Beyond Religious
‘Tradition’
6. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and
Revolution in Romantic Literature (W. W. Norton, 1973), pp. 429–37.
7. Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion
(University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 18–23.
8. Georg Simmel, ‘On the Salvation of the Soul’ [1903], Georg
Simmel: Essays on Religion (Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 29–35.
(c) On Differentiating Spirituality: Within and Beyond Religious
Tradition
9. David M. Wulff, ‘Spirituality: A Contemporary Alternative’,
Psychology of Religion (John Wiley, 1997) (extract).
10. Peter C. Hill et al., ‘Conceptualizing Religion and
Spirituality: Points of Commonality, Points of Departure’, Journal
of the Theory of Social Behaviour, 2000, 30, 1, 51–77.
11. Charles Taylor, ‘Religion Today’, A Secular Age (Harvard
University Press, 2007), pp. 506–13.
12. Joseph B. Tamney, ‘Truth Church’, The Resilience of
Conservative Religion: The Case of Popular, Conservative Protestant
Congregations (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 119–36, 152–6.
13. Robert C. Fuller, ‘Unchurched Spirituality: An Introduction’,
Spiritual But Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America
(Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 1–12.
14. Rodney Stark, Eva Hamberg, and Alan Miller, ‘Exploring
Spirituality and Unchurched Religions in America, Sweden, and
Japan’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2005, 20, 1, 3–23.
15. Catherine L. Albanese, ‘The Subtle Energies of Spirit:
Explorations in Metaphysical and New Age Spirituality’, Journal of
the American Academy of Religion, 1999, 67, 2, 305–25.
16. Paul Heelas, ‘"New Age" Spirituality as "Tradition", in Mark
Cobb, Bruce Rumbold, and Christina Puchalski (eds.), Spirituality in
Healthcare (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Part 3: Illustrating Diversity—Some Cultural and Practical Zones,
Ontological and Non-Ontological
17. Peter H. Van Ness, ‘Spirituality and the Secular Quest’, in
Van Ness (ed.), Spirituality and the Secular Quest (SCM Press,
1996), pp. 1–17.
18. Agnieszka Dyczewska, ‘Vegetarianism as an Example of
Dispersed Religiosity’, Implicit Religion, 2008, 11, 2, 111–25.
19. Kate Khatib, ‘Automatic Theologies: Surrealism and the
Politics of Equality’, in Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan
(eds.), Political Theologies: Religion in a Post-Secular World
(Fordham University Press, 2006), pp. 617–32.
20. Mark C. Taylor ‘Terminal Faith’, in Paul Heelas, David
Martin, and Paul Morris (eds.), Religion, Modernity and
Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1998), pp. 36–54.
21. Stef Aupers, ‘"Where the Zeroes Meet the Ones": Exploring the
Affinity between Magic and Computer Technology’, in Stef Aupers and
Dick Houtman (eds.), Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred
to the Self and the Digital (Brill, 2010), pp. 219–38.
Part 4: On Counting Zones
22. David Hay, ‘The Spirituality of Adults in Britain: Recent
Research’, Scottish Journal of Healthcare Chaplaincy, 2002, 5, 1,
4–9.
23. Paul Heelas and Dick Houtman, ‘Research Note: RAMP Findings
and Making Sense of the "God Within Each Person, Rather than Out
There"’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2009, 24, 1, 83–98.
24. Dick Houtman and Stef Aupers, ‘The Spiritual Turn and the
Decline of Tradition: The Spread of Post-Christian Spirituality in
14 Western Countries, 1981–2000’, Journal for the Scientific Study
of Religion, 2007, 46, 3, 305–20.
25 a. Sergey Flere and Andrey Kirbis, ‘New Age, Religiosity, and
Traditionalism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison’, Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion, 2009, 48, 1, 161–9.
25 b. Dick Houtman, Paul Heelas, and Stef Aupers, ‘Christian
Religiosity and New Age Spirituality: A Cross-Cultural Comparison’,
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2009, 48, 1, 169–79.
25 c. Sergey Flere and Andrey Kirbis, ‘New Age is Not Inimical to
Religion and Traditionalism’, Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion, 2009, 48, 1, 179–84.
Part 4: Changing Zones
26. Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion
(University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 64–6.
27. Inger Furseth, ‘From "Everything Has a Meaning" to "I Want to
Believe in Something": Religious Change Between Two Generations of
Women in Norway’, Social Compass, 2005, 52, 157–68.
28. Tony Glendinning and Steve Bruce, ‘New Ways of Believing or
Belonging: Is Religion Giving Way to Spirituality?’, British Journal
of Sociology, 2006, 57, 3, 399–414.
Volume Two: Spirituality From Within Religious Tradition
28. Walter Principe, ‘Toward Defining Spirituality’, Studies in
Religion, 1983, 12, 2, 127–41.
29. Pontifical Council for Culture and Pontifical Council for
Inter-Religious Dialogue, Jesus Christ, The Bearer of the Water of
Life: A Christian Reflection on the ‘New Age’ (CTS Manchester,
2003), pp. 38–41.
30. Stefania Palmisano, ‘Spirituality and Catholicism: The
Italian Experience’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2010, 25, 2,
221–41.
31. Johan Roeland and Peter Versteeg, ‘Transformations of Dutch
Protestantism: The Turn to Experiential Belief’.
32. Phillip C. Lucas, ‘The New Age Movement and the
Pentecostal/Charismatic Revival: Distinct Yet Parallel Phases of a
Fourth Great Awakening?’, in James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton
(eds.), Perspectives on the New Age (State University of New York
Press, 1992), pp. 189–211.
33. James Davison Hunter, ‘The Self Examined’, Evangelicalism:
The Coming Generation (University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp.
64–71.
34. Elizabeth Sirriyeh, ‘Sufi Thought and its Reconstruction’, in
Suha Taji-Farouki and Basheer M. Nafi (eds.), Islamic Thought in the
Twentieth Century (I. B. Tauris, 2004), pp. 104–27.
Part 5: Contexts of Participant-Affirmed Value
(a) World Peace
35. Ralph Pettman, ‘In Pursuit of World Peace: Modernism,
Sacralism and Cosmopiety’, Global Change, Peace and Security, 2010,
22, 2, 197–212.
(b) Environmental
36. Ian Harris, ‘Buddhist Environmental Ethics and
Detraditionalization: The Case of EcoBuddhism’, Religion, 1995, 25,
3, 199–211.
37. Michael S. Northcott, ‘Wilderness, Religion and Ecological
Restoration in the Scottish Highlands’, Ecotheology, 2005, 10, 3,
382–99.
38. Mark I. Wallace, ‘God is Underfoot: Pneumatology after
Derrida’, in John D. Caputo (ed.), The Religious (Blackwell, 2002),
pp. 197–211.
(c) Growing Up
39. Barbara Wintersgill, ‘Andrew Wright’s Critical Realism, Clive
Erricker’s Radical Postmodernism and Teenage Perceptions of
Spirituality’, in Tore Ahlback and Bjorn Dahla (eds.), Postmodern
Spirituality (Donner Institute for Research in Religious and
Cultural History, 2009), pp. 259–76.
40. Richard W. Flory and Donald E. Miller ‘The Embodied
Spirituality of the Post-Boomer Generations’, in Kieran Flanagan and
Peter C. Jupp (eds.), A Sociology of Spirituality (Ashgate, 2007),
pp. 201–18.
(d) Feminism and Gender
41. Linda Woodhead, ‘Spiritualizing the Sacred: A Critique of
Feminist Theology’, Modern Theology, 1997, 13, 2, 191–212.
42. Melissa Raphael, ‘Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late
Modern Religion’, Religion, 1996, 26, 3, 199–213.
43. Donna Maeda, ‘The Other Woman: Irreducible Alterity in
Feminist Thealogies’, Religion, 1997, 27, 2, 123–8.
(e) Art
44. Graham Howes, ‘From Religion to Spirituality’, The Art of the
Sacred (I. B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 130–45.
(f) Business
45. Mario Fernando and Brad Jackson, ‘The Influence of
Religion-Based Workplace Spirituality on Business Leaders’
Decision-Making: An Inter-faith Study’, Journal of Management &
Organization, 2006, 12, 1, 23–39.
(g) Challenges to Religious Tradition from Beyond
46. Jeanne Openshaw, ‘The Web of Deceit: Challenges to Hindu and
Muslim "Orthodoxies" by "Bauls" of Bengal’, Religion, 1997, 27, 4,
297–309.
Volume Three: ‘Autonomous’ Spiritualities Beyond Religious
Tradition
Part 6: Illustrating the Most Distinctively Autonomous—‘New Age’
47. Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman, ‘Beyond the Spiritual
Supermarket: The Social and Public Significance of New Age
Spirituality’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2006, 21, 2,
201–22.
48. Stef Aupers, ‘"We are all Gods’: New Age in the Netherlands
1960–2000’, in Erik Sengers (ed.), The Dutch and Their Gods
(Verlaren, 2005), pp. 180–201.
49. Liselotte Frisk, ‘Quantitative Studies of New Age: A Summary
and Discussion’, in Daren Kemp and James R. Lewis (eds.), Handbook
of New Age (Brill, 2007), pp. 103–22.
Part 7: Illustrating the Somewhat Less Autonomous
50. Boas Huss, ‘The New Age of Kabbalah: Contemporary Kabbalah,
the New Age and Postmodern Spirituality’, Journal of Modern Jewish
Studies, 2007, 6, 2, 107–25.
51. Patrick Haenni and Raphael Voix, ‘God by all Means … Eclectic
Faith and Sufi Resurgence Among the Moroccan Bourgeoisie’, in Martin
van Bruinessen and Julia Day Howell (eds.), Sufism and the ‘Modern’
in Islam (I. B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 240–56.
52. Suha Taji-Farouki, ‘The Beshara Perspective and the Teaching
of Ibn "Arabi", Beshara and Ibn ‘Arabi: A Movement of Sufi
Spirituality in the Modern World (Anqa Publishing, 2007), pp.
97–106.
53. Masayuki Ito, ‘New Spirituality in Contemporary Societies: A
Comparative View on Japanese "Spiritual World"’, in Inken Prohl and
Hartmut Zinswer (eds.), Zen, Reiki, Karate (Lit Verlag Munster,
2002), pp. 91–108.
Part 8: ‘Internal’ Dynamics, Including Ethicality
54. Steven M. Tipton, ‘Antinomian Rules: The Ethical Outlook of
American Zen Students’, Getting Saved from the Sixties (University
of California Press, 1984), pp. 95–155.
55. Benjamin Richard Smith, ‘Body, Mind and Spirit? Towards an
Analysis of the Practice of Yoga’, Body & Society, 2007, 13, 25,
25–46.
56. Jennifer Lea, ‘Liberation or Limitation? Understanding
Iyengar Yoga as a Practice of the Self’, Body & Society, 2009, 15,
71–92.
57. Luce Irigaray, ‘Eastern Teachings’, Between East and West:
From Singularity to Community (Columbia University Press, 2003).
Part 9: Contexts of Perceived Value
(a) Healing
58. Maya Warrier, ‘Revisiting the "Easternisation" Thesis: The
Spiritualisation of Ayurveda in Britain’.
59. Chikako Ozawa-De Silva and Brendan Ozawa-De Silva,
‘Secularizing Religious Practices: 2010: A Study of Subjectivity and
Existential Transformation in Naikan Therapy’, Journal for the
Scientific Study of Religion, 2010, 49, 1, 147–61.
60. David M. Eisenberg et al., ‘Trends in Alternative Medicine
Use in the United States, 1990–1997’, Journal of the American
Medical Association, 1998, 280, 18, 1569–75.
(b) The Workplace
61. Ellie Hedges and James A. Beckford, ‘Holism, Healing and the
New Age’, in Steven Sutcliffe and Marion Bowman (eds.), Beyond New
Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality (Edinburgh University Press,
2000), pp. 169–87.
62. Don Grant, Kathleen O’Neil, and Laura Stephens, ‘Spirituality
in the Workplace: New Empirical Directions in the Study of the
Sacred’, Sociology of Religion, 2004, 65, 3, 265–83.
63. Martin Ramstedt, ‘New Age and Business’, in Daren Kemp and
James R. Lewis (eds.), Handbook of New Age (Brill, 2007), pp.
103–22.
64. Paul Heelas, ‘God’s Company: New Age Ethics and the Bank of
Credit and Commerce International’, Religion Today, 1992, 8, 1, 1–4.
(c) Gender
65. Mary Farrell Bedenarowski, ‘The New Age Movement and Feminist
Spirituality: Overlapping Conversations at the End of the Century’,
in James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton (eds.), Perspectives on the
New Age (State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 167–78.
66. Michael F. Brown, ‘Towards Sacred Androgyny’, The Channeling
Zone (Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 93–114.
(d) Art
67. Leslie Goode, ‘Spiritualities of Life: The Neglected Role of
the Artistic Paradigm’, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2010, 25,
1, 107–23.
Volume Four: Explorations of Explanations
Part 10: The Matter of Efficacy
68. Bernice Martin, ‘From Pre- to Postmodernity in Latin America:
The Case of Pentacostalism’, in Paul Heelas, David Martin, and Paul
Morris (eds.), Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity (Blackwell,
1998), pp. 102–46.
69. Friday M. Mbon, ‘The Social Impact of Nigeria’s New Religious
Movements’, in James A. Beckford (ed.), New Religious Movements and
Rapid Social Change (Sage, 1986), pp. 177–96.
70. Steve Bruce, ‘The Failure of the New Age’, God is Dead:
Secularization in the West (Blackwell, 2002), pp. 75–105.
71. Teemu Taira, ‘The Problem of Capitalism in the Scholarship on
Contemporary Spirituality’, in Tore Ahlback and Bjorn Dahla (eds.),
Postmodern Spirituality (Donner Institute for Research in Religious
and Cultural History, 2009), pp. 230–44.
72. Steven M. Tipton, ‘Making the World Work: Ideas of Social
Responsibility in the Human Potential Movement’, in Eileen Barker
(ed.), Of Gods and Men: New Religious Movements in the West (Mercer
Press, 1983), pp. 265–82.
73. Siobhan Chandler, ‘The Social Ethic of Religiously
Unaffiliated Spirituality’, Religion Compass, 2008, 2, 2, 240–56.
74. Samira van Bohemen et al., ‘The Religiously Contested Nature
of Nature. Christian Dualism, Spiritual Holism and Environmental
Concern in the Netherlands’, Sociology of Religion, 2011
(forthcoming).
75. Siv Ellen Kraft, ‘Sami Indigenous Spirituality: Religion and
Nation-Building in Norwegian Sapmi’, Temenos, 2009, 45, 2, 179–206.
76. Miguel Farias and Pehr Granqvist, ‘The Psychology of the New
Age’, in Daren Kemp and James R. Lewis (eds.), Handbook of New Age
(Brill, 2007), pp. 123–50.
77. Klas Nevrin, ‘Empowerment and Using the Body in Modern
Postural Yoga’, in Mark Singleton and Jean Bryne (eds.), Yoga in the
Modern World: Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, 2008), pp.
121–39.
78. Robert H. Sharf, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Zen in the Twentieth
Century’, in Inken Prohl and Hartmut Zinswer (eds.), Zen, Reiki,
Karate (Lit Verlag Munster, 2002), pp. 143–54.
79. Taeyon Kim, ‘Neo-Confucian Body Techniques: Women’s Bodies in
Korea’s Consumer Society’, Body & Society, 2003, 9, 97–113.
Part 11: Growth
80. Georg Simmel, ‘The Conflict of Modern Culture’ [1918] and
‘The Problem of Religion Today’ [1911], Georg Simmel, Essays on
Religion (Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 7–19, 20–5.
81. Charles Taylor, ‘The Malaises of Modernity’ and ‘Cross
Pressures’, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), pp.
301–3, 594–602.
82. Dick Houtman and Peter Mascini, ‘Why Do Churches Become
Empty, While New Age Grows? Secularization and Religious Change in
the Netherlands’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion,
2002, 41, 3, 455–73.
83. Paul Heelas, ‘Challenging Secularization Theory: The Growth
of "New Age" Spiritualities of Life’, Hedgehog Review, 2006, 8, 1–2,
46–58.
84. John A. Astin, ‘Why Patients Use Alternative Medicine.
Results of a National Study’, Journal of the American Medical
Association, 1998, 279, 19, 1548–53.
85. Ioan M. Lewis, ‘Spirit Possession and Deprivation Cults’,
Man, 1966, 1, 3, 307–29.
86. Steve Bruce and Tony Glendinning, ‘The Interaction of Gender
and Occupation on Attitudes Towards Spirituality and Engagement in
Activities’ (2006).
87. Scott Taylor, ‘Gendering in the Holistic Milieu: A Critical
Realist Analysis of Homeopathic Work’, Gender, Work and
Organization, 2010, 17, 4, 454–74.
88. Maya Warrier, ‘Modernity and its Imbalances: Constructing
Modern Selfhood in the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission’, Religion,
2006, 36, 179–95.
89. Mark R. Mullins, ‘Japan’s New Age and Neo-New Religions:
Sociological Interpretations’, in James R. Lewis and J. Gordon
Melton (eds.), Perspectives on the New Age (State University of New
York Press, 1992), pp. 232–46.
90. Inken Prohl, ‘The Spiritual World: Aspects of New Age in Japan’, in Daren Kemp and James R. Lewis (eds.), Handbook of New Age (Brill, 2007), pp. 359–74.