Swimming the Sacred River

A virtuous person is one who intentionally seeks personal excellence. Of course, what defines excellence has been a topic of contemplation and debate for the entire history of humankind. Plato recognized four virtues: temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice. Christianity looks to traits such as faith, love, meekness, and chastity as important virtues. Submission to the will of God is the central virtue in Islam. The Buddha extolled compassion. Humanity, filial piety, and loyalty are Confucian virtues.

In all, there are countless traits and actions that world religions and cultures have put forth as exemplars of excellence. Starting with this foundation, psychologist Martin Seligman and his colleagues have outlined a list of human strengths and traits that potentially lead to well-being—knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence, each of which have a sub-list of yet more traits. No doubt research will continue to look into the scope and outcomes of various human traits.

Sacred River offers its own system of four cardinal virtues: Courage, Integrity, Beneficence, and Openness. These are not presented as immaculate virtues in the sense of a divine or revealed ideal. Rather, they are ways of being, both in action and attitude, in service to our central spiritual aim—leading a more meaningful, fulfilling, and joyous life.

We often see descriptions of healthy living that delineate various domains, a common set being “mind, body, spirit.” Within Religious Naturalism, of course, we do not acknowledge the existence of a “spirit” needing tending. Although we do not have souls that need to be nurtured, it is certainly reasonable to talk about developing a healthy spiritual life.

Exactly what this looks like will be different for every individual, of course, but one might say that it essentially entails promoting meaning, fulfillment, and joy, perhaps from an explicitly religious perspective. By this I mean from an orientation that includes experiences such as gratitude, reverence, and a sense of deep connection with all things.

But if we agree that there is such a thing a spiritual life, it is not really separate from “mind” or “body”, but rather emerges from the total matrix of our biopsychosocial self. In this sense, one’s spiritual life is not unlike one’s sex life. As important as it is for adults to have a healthy sex life, few would list it as a primary domain, e.g. mind, body, sex (although many might list it as a primary interest, of course).

But what really sets spirituality apart is the degree to which it can potentially become infused with virtually all aspects of living. For this reason Sacred River delineates seven core areas of living, all of which can be profitably approached with a spiritual perspective:

In reality, all these Spiritual Streams are interconnected via the body and mind; however, developing a spiritual life is not a metaphysical exercise, but ideally becomes an approach to living. In other words, this list is but a convenient way of focusing attention and implementing pragmatic action. At the same time, I am confident that it does a fairly good job of modeling, if not irreducible then at least well-demarcated domains of human life.

Some of these areas are not traditionally associated with spirituality, especially the Epicurean or Intellectual Streams. Pleasure is often seen in many religions as being the enemy of spiritual purity, with the latter often being the enemy of faith. We think it is time to change both sets of attitudes. I look forward to getting into specifics in another essay, but for now I will say that sacralizing both pleasure and knowledge is a vital step towards integrating spirituality with the goal of genuine human fulfillment.

The point of this brief note is to express the notion that spirituality isn’t something done alongside physical health, emotional well-being, or one’s job, family, or hobbies. While a life can certainly include explicit spiritual practices, such as ritual or meditation, spirituality ideally becomes infused within all activities, allowing for even the most mundane activity to become a source of meaning, fulfillment, and joy. This act of sanctification, of consecration is of living itself. No external authority is needed for this, only the power inherent in your being as a holy expression of Nature.

One of the central tenets of Sacred River states that intentional change is a moral imperative. This is grounded in the idea that the one thing that makes us most human is intentionality, the ability to plan, reflect, imagine, and act with forethought. We can choose to think and behave in ways that our primordial disposition might otherwise prefer. Further, we have the power to learn; one’s store of knowledge and skills is never fixed, even if age makes the process more challenging over time. And because our choices have consequences not only for one’s personal well-being, but also in regards to our social and ecological impact, we have an obligation to “educate the will” as Emerson put it.

The Second Virtue within Sacred River is Integrity. One aspect of integrity is genuineness, which can be interpreted as embodying one’s most authentic self. Of course, this “self” is not an unchanging relic, but an emergent process of being. There are many keys to achieving this flow of genuineness, but perhaps the most salient is self-knowledge or self-awareness. It is no small thing to be able to pay attention to the self, to one’s quiet motivations, expectations, beliefs, assumptions, fears, values, and all the obscured habits of the mind, to follow the tangled thread in the cognitive labyrinth that leads to our manifested actions and feelings. Any increase in such awareness can be considered another step in the journey of personal growth.

In general terms,  tolerance can be defined as acceptance (even if grudging) of people who look, act, or believe differently than you do. This is a fine principle that falls under the Third Virtue, Beneficence. If Nature tells us anything, it is that variety is a fundamental property of a healthy system, and so even on a pragmatic level it makes sense to promote tolerance of difference. Homogeneity might be easier, but it would be static and, well, boring. Far better to celebrate diversity, no?

On the whole, I think it is better to err on the side of tolerance when faced with an uncomfortable difference. After all, who are we to say what is the right way to live? Religious Naturalists don’t have a holy rule book, and so we are forced to use reason and empathy to determine which things are acceptable and which aren’t.

Okay, so far we’ve come a long way. Let’s see what we have—at the core of Sacred River is the central aim of increasing a sense of meaning, fulfillment, and joy in one’s life. The three central pillars of Sacred River include religious naturalism, allegoricalism, and progressivism. From this, we can say that sacredness is found within the lived experience of engaging with the natural world as understood via the natural sciences, but with an acknowledgment that religious objects and events can act as powerful doorways to our deepest emotional centers, which can allow for a sense of meaningful profundity. Behavior is guided by an ethic of humanism, which states that humans are worthwhile in their own right and that we are morally mandated to promote liberty, opportunity, and fairness in society, while also developing within ourselves increased health, agency, knowledge, and wisdom. The central key to progress is intentionality, the human tool that drives directed change.

Much of what we’ve been exploring so far has been theoretical, especially in regards to what underlies the religious impulse and letting go of supernaturalism as a way of interpreting nature. This is important, and no doubt many more theoretical essays will be written. A significant part of spirituality is the development of a particular worldview, and that is what we’ve largely been working on. However, it’s vital to point out that a spiritual life is an active life. Since we do not have any mysterious “essence” that makes us more or less spiritual, being spiritual must include having a spiritual practice.

Ursula Goodenough, one of the leading speakers in the Religious Naturalism movement, once pointed out that while the story of Nature can induce awe and wonder, the scientific knowledge of universal processes rarely inspires religious feelings. That is one reason why this spiritual movement isn’t “religious scientism”. It simply isn’t enough to think that Nature is great in and of itself—religion is, ultimately, about the human condition. Unless a spiritual movement appeals to one’s core existential concerns, it simply will not be of much use.

Goodenough also explains that religion answers two basic questions: How Things Are and What Is Important. I agree with her that the answer to the first question is, well, how things actually are. The single best method we’ve come up with to figure this out is the scientific method. This is not to say that there aren’t an infinity of questions—of course there are. Science will never have it all figured out; that is a very good thing, because otherwise things would become very boring. At the same time, I maintain that we can scratch a few things off the list: what we know about the physical origins of the Earth, the general process of evolution, the biopsychosocial basis of human functioning, geology, engineering, and astrophysics pretty much rules out 99% of religious theories regarding How Things Are. Moreover, the scientific method is far more effective in finding out new things that we never even knew we didn’t know.

To our knowledge, humans are unique in that we have intentionality. We possess both self-awareness and the ability to make choices within a range of action possibilities. It is a gift of the most recent addition to our big brains, the neocortex, the outer rind of neurons that, among other things, allows for judgment, reasoning, and language. We take all this for granted, of course, but it is truly astounding—math, art, science, music, architecture, poetry, engineering, sports—these are all unique to homo sapiens.

Religion

Another major product of our neocortex is religion. It is arguable that religion was really just the earliest form of natural science, using available data and human reason to explain and predict various phenomena, such as seasonal changes or various illnesses. It has been a long strange trip from that point to modern religion. Although some religious movements still try to explain the physical world (such as the many Christians who use the Bible to determine the age of the Earth), most have moved into the more abstract domains, such as morality, transcendence, and the afterlife.

While my posts thus far have focused on a philosophical framework for spirituality, it is important to understand that such constructs are not the meat of a religious life. Ultimately, what makes a path spiritual or religious is the experience of it as such. As Jennifer Dornan (2004) writes, “the symbols and abstract ideas of a religion do not have the social force of belief unless there is some performative, experiential aspect to provide meaning and import to those symbols.” At the same time, such experiences have little intrinsic meaning until interpreted in the light of some established philosophy or ideology, and this dynamic dance is the engine behind the countless number of religious systems in the world. With this in mind, let’s begin to explore the world of religious experience.