There is a reason I put these two things together, spiritual states and essence. Religious transformations have not been shown to change the fundamental nature of people—such experiences can often change things like attitudes, aims, and beliefs, but not personal capabilities, bio-psycho functioning (with a caveat given below), or personality (a la the Big Five). Rather, such transformations often are aimed not at the biopsychosocial self but at one’s essential self, frequently in terms of being “born again,” “initiated,” or “attained.” The idea of attaining to objective spiritual states is an ancient one, although it takes a good number of forms, depending on the model one is working within. It’s useful to remember that those models are all manmade.

Now then, certain religious practices certainly can change brain function—meditation, Yoga, and entheogen intake, for example. But it must be noted that significant changes to brain chemistry can also be induced by other practices, such as playing music, riding a roller coaster, or making love. The ability to change one’s mental state does not imply nor require the existence of a spiritual essence.

For the most part, I don’t care one way or another if someone believes in spiritual essence. But I am disturbed by many beliefs associated with it. For example, I very much dislike the idea that one’s essence requires certain experiences for whatever reason and manipulates events to make them happen—this is an especially distressing explanation of why suffering and cruelty occur (e.g. “she was raped because her soul needed to learn something from that experience”). This general belief is dangerous because it takes agency and responsibility away from people and places it on mysterious, unseen forces.

Another related problem is spiritual bypassing. In this case, when someone wants to avoid dealing with difficult or intractable problems in real life, or even just normal adult responsibilities, it is possible to focus on one’s spiritual essence. Similarly, people who are insecure can assuage their social anxiety by claiming spiritual superiority. In both cases, working with spiritual essence becomes a substitute for improving practical and social skills, becoming more conscientious, and facing personal demons.

For myself, I simply think that spiritual essence is not a very useful idea. Humans are not modeled on a Platonic ideal nor powered by an ethereal battery. We do not have a spiritual constituent within ourselves that rises or falls on some mystical axis. Rather, all things arise dynamically out of the complex soup of reality, a moment to moment emergence of being. As such, our existence does not require an unseen force, just as light does not need a luminiferous aether within which to travel.

It should be no surprise to you by now that I would argue that the root issue is existential anxiety. Belief in a spiritual essence can provide an emotional buffer against an indifferent universe. This makes perfect sense—it’s challenging to think of being stuck in such a dangerous place as Nature. There is a social element as well; humans are intrinsically social creatures, and as such are designed to work within hierarchies. When someone feels socially inadequate, imagining an idealized spiritual self can be a great comfort. Again, perfectly sensible.

This is why I believe it is so important in one’s spiritual life to work within several core areas, including intentionality, connectivity, character, exploration, and creativity. These are all areas that can lead to improved meaning, fulfillment, and joy. At the same time, it is useful to remember that the flesh is not corrupt, we are not Fallen, and no Final Judgment awaits us. There is no Grand Scale upon which our essential spirits are weighed. We simply are what we are, and what we are is both amazing and sacred, through and through. Our job, therefore, is not to be purified, idealized, or ascended, but rather to examine ourselves and work towards reaching our given potential, whatever that might be. We can always find ways to express ourselves in a more genuine way, to expand our horizons and gain insight into life and the universe. This really is a grand adventure and we are marvelous creatures. If we want to call this totality of our being essence, then I would be satisfied.

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.

Still, the fundamental needs behind these abstract domains predate the neocortex—such as the desire for safety, social affiliation and competence. While the afterlife is a relatively new concept, for example, fear of death is primordial. Religion also serves to order society and provide guidelines for behavior, both of which address affiliation and the basic mechanisms that deal with social hierarchy (which themselves relate to resource, mating and kin dynamics). But the neocortex allows us to manifest complex abstract structures using the power of the intentional mind. As such, we have the ability, and I would argue the obligation, to continually question and reconstruct our models of value and meaning.

Intentionality as a Value

Emerson once wrote, “The education of the will is the object of our existence.” I take this to mean that the highest human virtue is our own intentionality, that it is our sacred duty both to become more aware of our power to choose and to act, and to make sure those choices and actions are well-informed. After all, intentionality is the key to a power of transformation more potent than any on this planet in four billion years—we are altering the global environment that keeps us alive while reaching into the genetic code that determines our very being. It is in this ability to imagine, reason, and direct our actions that we are become as gods and demons, and with this awesome power comes great responsibility.

There is also a less ponderous side to intentionality, which is the ability to transform our communities and ourselves so to attain greater meaning, fulfillment, and joy. There are several streams of life where one can point their intention and connect with the larger world, realize one’s potential, and experience wonder, harmony, and love. While easier said than done, the rewards are certainly profound.

Outline of Intentionality

There is a very large literature on the nature of human intentionality. Although there are other far more sophisticated models of intentionality, or will, than I might create, I would nevertheless like to offer my own conceptualization. For those philosophy fans out there, my view on intentionality draws upon the compatibilist position, which says that determinism is compatible with free will. I also recommend the works of existential psychologist Rollo May, philosopher Daniel Dennett, and psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli (visit the wiki based on his work, WillProject). This is a bare bones model, and certainly open to change, but it gives an outline of my basic view.

1) Agency

I break intentionality into three broad, interrelated categories: agency, drive, and expression. Agency, the first category, can be defined as the capacity to make choices and to engage with the world based on those choices. Agency emerges from the interplay between skill and limitations. Skill is the what and how in agency—what needs to be done and how to do it—composed of knowledge (an emergent property of awareness, reason, and declarative or explicit memory) and ability (primarily arising from procedural or implicit memory, although what we call “talent” is often involved as well). Behavior requires a frame within which to act, and the boundaries of a given situation will largely determine what can and cannot be accomplished. Limitations, in this case, are both subjective (e.g. a lack of data, an injury) and objective (e.g. environmental conditions, available tools).

2) Drive

The second category of intentionality is drive, which is the emotional component of intentionality. Within this model, I am limiting drive to affective states that impel action—such as fear, desire, hunger, disgust, curiosity, excitement, anger, and sadness. Drive fuels action, although such feelings do not have to be arousing. For example, think of a chilly Saturday morning without any pressing need to get out of a warm bed—at some point, you will decide to brave the cold and throw the covers aside. You might have been saying to yourself for 20 minutes, “I should get up. I’m getting up now.” But it took that small bit of drive to push you past the threshold into action (more on action thresholds a bit later). Drive is influenced by many things, including temperament, personality, health & diet, rearing, and past trauma.

3) Expression

Both agency and drive are interrelated with the third component of intentionality, which I refer to as expression. Expression is the why of intention, and is far and away the most complex of the three. What is being expressed via intentionality are all the various elements that make up the self, including basic needs, instincts, desires, values, and, for lack of a better word, destiny.

At the bottom of the pile are the adaptive psychological components derived from the core drives of survival and reproduction, as well as the basic instincts of approaching pleasure and retreating from pain. These represent the earliest human and pre-human needs, influencing everything from the bottom up. As the brain evolved from the brain stem to the prefrontal cortex, it developed increasingly complex motivations and instincts (that are nevertheless built upon and influenced by those more primitive functions). There is a huge range of such psychological influencers, dealing with mating, child rearing, and social dynamics, through to more modern motivations built upon values and principles, and finally ending with transpersonal experiences, including the desire for personal growth, peak experiences, and communion with Nature/Universe/Deity (the latter of which, it must be noted, are in themselves optional choices rather than adaptive needs, and are, therefore, uniquely human).

Tied into all this is what I call destiny. I myself do not believe in predestination, but rather see existence as a constantly created emergent phenomenon arising out of the dynamic interplay of complex systems (that’s the Sacred River). That said, for any given person, conditions arise to produce a fully unique individual, with a singular genetic code, born into a particular circumstance during a given period of history, all interacting with a series of life experiences that literally shape the brain and the view of the self and the world. Intentionality is, in large part, an expression of this unique self, the gestalt or totality of being constantly manifested as one swims the Sacred River of existence. Remember, “the education of the will is the object of our existence”—by becoming better “swimmers”, we become ever more human, more genuine, more true to who we really are.

As a quick review, here is a rough outline of what we’ve just covered:

I) Agency
A) Skill
1) Knowledge
a) Awareness
b) Reason
c) Declarative memory
2) Ability
a) Procedural Memory
b) Talent
B) Limitations
1) Subjective
2) Objective
II) Drive
A) Temperment
B) Personality
C) Past experiences
III) Expression
A) Primitive needs
B) Values and principles
C) Transpersonal motivations

Passive and Active Intentionality

There are two phases of intentionality, the passive and the active. The passive includes things like imagination, evaluation, deliberation, and planning, but also includes drive, the emotional aspect of intention, often experienced as anxiety or anticipation. Passive intentionality represents a potential for action, which is often nonconscious and other times in full awareness (in the form of thinking). The active phase is much more immediate as it drives potential into action (although there is always some form of passive intentionality going on behind the scenes). Each phase has a range of mindfulness, from deeply nonconscious to full, immediate awareness. In the active phase, this range can take the form of thoughtless habit on the one end through to the state called flow on the other (which anyone who has experienced being “in the zone” can recognize).

Moving from passive to active intentionality requires overcoming what I call the action threshold. This threshold is created in the dynamic interaction between drive and resistance. Stated simply, intended action cannot occur until motivation (the drive to act) overcomes inertia (the drive not to act). Part of educating the will—of becoming a better “swimmer”—involves developing skills and traits that help one overcome difficult action thresholds in service to genuine expression.

Conclusion

Once again, this has been the most basic treatment of a complex topic. As I have tried to illustrate, intentionality is not an isolated construct—it is deeply interwoven into the fabric of both one’s being and surrounding conditions. These are both emergent phenomena, and so intentionality will always be in flux to some degree—as John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” That said, effective intentionality is in alignment with both the deepest self and the demands in the environment, with adequate drive and the agency to be successful. To say this requires a lot of work is an understatement. It is, in effect, the work of being human. But, as with all honest work, this labor has a great payoff—a life of profound meaning, fulfillment, and joy.

Defining Experience, Religion, and Spirituality

First we have the difficult task of definition. David Yamane (2000) defines experience as “an ongoing temporal flow of reality received by consciousness, where consciousness is understood more broadly than simply as cognition” that also includes “feelings, expectations, and bodily states.” I agree with his insistence that a distinction be made between subjective experience and the interpretation of experience—”existing social or cultural structures predispose us to experience certain emotions, sensations, and bodily states in particular, culturally inscribed ways…there is no such thing as an unmediated experience. All experience is always already shot through with interpretation.” This will come into play a bit later in the essay.

Religion can be defined as “a covenant faith community with teachings and narratives that enhance the search for the sacred and encourage morality” (Dollahite, 1998). Another take says that religions “are rooted in authoritative spiritual traditions that transcend the person and point to larger realities within which the person is embedded,” whereas spirituality involves “inner, contemplative practices” dealing with things like transcendence and meaningfulness, with the search for the sacred being the link between the two (Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003). Other theorists describe spirituality not in terms of the sacred but as human characteristics, such as the development of insight, the awareness of the interconnectedness of all things, the experience of awe and mystery, an attitude of compassion and gratitude, and the “expression to the being that is in us; it has to do with feelings, with the power that comes from within, with knowing our deepest selves” (Beck, 1992). It also goes without saying that religions include non-sacred functions, such as social affiliation and self-identity, but these aspects aren’t as relevant within this discussion, so I shall leave them aside for now.

Defining the Religious Experience

And so, we come to defining religious or spiritual experience. It should come as no surprise that there is little consensus as to what is and is not a genuine religious experience. A broad definition might include all experiences subjectively interpreted as religiously important whereas a more narrow one might include only dramatic encounters with God, spirit, or ultimate reality. Perhaps a more sophisticated definition of religious experience involves “a continuing feeling of transcendental reality or of a divine presence,” not simply dramatic experiences, but also “seemingly more ordinary but deeply felt experiences” (Hardy, in Yamane, 2000).

After reading many definitions (and having such experiences myself) I shall use the following for the sake of this essay: a religious experience is one that results in a profound and meaningful shift in perspective—whether of time, space, function, relation, or state of being—involving an embodied sensation and a resultant interpretation that is explicitly religious in nature. While this can often involve the sensation of a paranormal presence, this is not absolutely necessary. For example, one might look at a blooming flower and be overcome with awe. On the flipside, sensing the presence of a disembodied being in a creaky old house might result in a strong emotional state, but wouldn’t necessarily be interpreted as a religious experience (although it might).

There are a wide range of events that can evoke experiences that people interpret as religious—ceremonial rituals, ecstatic dancing, prayer, transcendental meditation, chanting, musical performance, vision quests, conversion experiences, psychic communication, tantric love making, communion with nature, entheogen consumption, communal worship, almsgiving, lectio divina, fasting, sensory deprivation, and on and on. I think it is safe to say that the various experiences that each of these would evoke would all be quite different from one another. Before we talk about the differences, though, let’s explore what holds them together. On a basic level, there are three components that can lead to the type of religious experience defined in the preceding paragraph—(1) priming, (2) sensation, and (3) interpretation.

Priming

Priming is a well-established effect within psychology. It is the activation of certain pre-existing conceptual schemas, whether conceptual or perceptual. Priming evokes certain ideas, memories, and expectations, so that proceeding events will be largely framed within those constructs. For example, walking into a church will evoke far different schemas than walking into a bar, shaping the interpretations of otherwise similar experiences within them.

Psychologists Granqvist and Larsson (2006) write, “through the use of religious schemas, a religious individual may be predisposed to interpret a somatosensory sensation coupled with a sensed presence as the presence of God. A nonreligious individual may interpret the same sensation in anatomical or secular terms and may even seek medical help on the assumption that it is a hallucination.” Said simply, people are socialized to religion, and the existence of certain notions in the mind about religion are one vital component of the phenomenon (although I note that the next component, sensation, can itself be the priming agent). David Yamane (2000) agrees—”We know that existing social or cultural structures predispose us to experience certain emotions, sensations, and bodily states in particular, culturally inscribed ways…There is no such thing as an unmediated experience.”

Sensation

The next component is sensation. Although the sensation of perception is common (i.e. the feeling that one is receiving information via one or more of the five senses), at the core of a religious experience is emotion. “The connection between religion and emotion,” writes Emmons and Paloutzian, “is a long and intimate one. Religion has always been a source of profound emotional experience, traditionally love, gratitude, and thankful joy.” In general, there are two branches of emotional experience within religion: the charismatic and the contemplative. Fraser Watts (1996) explains that the “charismatic movement stresses the cultivation of intense positive emotions…whereas the contemplative tradition stresses a calming of the passions and the development of emotional quietude,” while a third, less common tradition involves the disciplined, creative expression of emotion.

But even when emotions are not being deliberately manipulated, they nevertheless play a central role. This is because emotions provide a sense of realness to an experience. Even William James acknowledged the legitimizing effects of emotions, and modern research further suggests that they “can play an important role in revealing the world rather than merely obfuscating our intellectualization of things” (Ratcliffe, 2003). Ethnologist Raymond Firth (1996) explains that it is the “element of emotion in whatever kind of experience that gives the basis to the belief [and] provides it with a strong flavour of reality”…Ultimately, “it is not intellectual or moral proofs for belief, or religious concepts that provide validity; it is the emotional proofs.”

Interpretation

The final component to the religious experience is interpretation. An event cannot be religious unless it is given meaning as such, plain and simple. Yamane (2000) maintains that there is no such thing as a religious experience “in-and-of itself. There are simply experiences which are made meaningful after the fact, often in terms of narratives furnished by certain religious groups.” It is not uncommon for an event to be considered highly religious at one time only to be seen in a completely different light after a change of perspective. An example might be certain experiences during hallucinogenic drug use interpreted as religious while in one’s teens, only to be seen merely as weird, chemically induced illusions as an older adult. Similarly, it might take the wisdom of age to perceive the profound spiritual beauty in a sunset, which was long overlooked as a youngster. Such an event in itself remains unchanged, but the perspective applied to it can change the meaning completely.

These three components—priming, sensation, and interpretation—weave a complex tapestry. Indeed, they each feed and are fed by the others. Pre-existing beliefs or schemas can be primed for or by a specific type of somato-emotional event which can then be interpreted as religious. However, interpreted experiences can also transform beliefs leading to new schema for priming. In talking about ritual, Dornan writes, “Ritual can both channel experience based on belief, and alter belief in accordance with experience…ritual performance is more than representation or symbolic expression of belief—it is the actual practice of ritual that both instantiates, reinforces, and authenticates belief though subjective experience.” Essentially, the same could be said of any religious practice.

To summarize: a religious experience is one that involves some shift in perspective (one might say a change in consciousness) related to an embodied sensation that is interpreted to be religiously meaningful. Such an experience involves (1) pre-existing beliefs or schemas, (2) a somato-emotional event, and (3) an interpretation involving religious concepts. Such a shift might be dramatic or it might be gentle, ongoing or fleeting, (seemingly) metaphysical or tellurian. And, as a general rule, religious experiences occur within the context of some established model of belief and practice, while each experience is yet unique and individual.

Categories of Religious Experience

So far we’ve established a broad, but I think well-defined outline of religious experience. Although the list of religious activities (prayer, meditation, ritual, etc.) is a very long one, I have not been able to find any established taxonomy for religious experiences themselves. Below I will describe various categories that are listed in the literature, and others that conform to my own experiences and observations.

The most common category written about involves mystical experience. There is no hard and fast definition, but I will say that, at the least, it involves a loss of ego or sense of isolated self, which is often a peak or ecstatic event (but not always). Normally called transcendence, this can involve, say, achieving a non-dual state with ultimate reality or God, where one can see “a fundamental unity underlying the diverse strivings of nature” (Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003). But in my definition, mystical experience can also include entering fully into a state of flow, where all awareness is swept up fully into the activity at hand.

Another category involves what is called psychism, defined simply as sensory intrusions within the stream of consciousness. These intrusions usually involve sounds, images, or a sense of presence, which can be experienced as originating from outside of the self. Such events can interrupt what is known as the “natural attitude”, and so they can be given a special status—since they do not easily conform to empirical constructions of the world, they can engender a new belief system if the “intrusions are intense enough, the interpretations are plausible enough, and the identity commitments are either weak enough to be abandoned or are strong enough to survive a change” (Laubach, 2004). If supernatural beliefs are already held, then psychic events can further intensify those beliefs. It is also not uncommon for those who interpret such intrusions as religiously veridical to feel special or privileged themselves, and research suggests that such folks often develop “privatized” religious practices and beliefs that support and legitimize their unique experiences.

Similar to psychism but of a different category is portaling, which, as the name suggests, involves the experience of out-of-body consciousness. Traditionally, this practice was mostly familiar to shamanistic traditions, but is now common in New Age movements that promote the idea of astral travel. Portaling is a cross-cultural phenomenon that has been studied in detail, seen by neuropsychologists as a “radical re-entrainment of the neurological systems mediating experience in the brain” (Dornan, 2004).

Affiliative connectivity is yet another broad category of religious experience. I include two sub-sets of experience—communal and individual. Communal affiliative connectivity involves profound religious feelings arising from group activity, most often in the form of worship or ceremony. The other subset, individual affiliative connectivity, primarily involves a personal sense of connection, which can include a deity, nature, or humankind as a whole. It is of a kind as the mystical union given above, but is generally not a peak experience involving ego-loss or attaining a non-dual state. Rather, it reflects profound religious feelings involving a sense of relationship, of being a part of or connected to something beyond the individual self. Although these two subsets have unique characteristics, obviously they can work in concert.

Many people are also drawn to the occult. For these folks, the true nature of things is seen as concealed from normal reality, and so the religious experience is typified by a sense of mystery and exploration. Meaning is found within models used to decipher the code of existence, which can involve the Hebrew Tree of Life, numerology, Tarot cards, astrology, and similar tools used to divine hidden truth.

Spiritual transformation can also be a profound experience. This term is most often applied to conversion experiences, also known as quantum change, which can be a sudden or gradual event. I myself include any religious experience, not just conversions, that involves a meaningful sense of change (which can happen during change-of-state rituals, such as baptisms or initiations). Interestingly, research suggests that such change has minimal effect on basic personality (i.e. the Big Five), but can lead to major differences in things like goals, attitudes, and behaviors. Indeed, Emmons and Paloutzian (2003) explain that “self-defining personality functions (such as identity, life meaning) do change dramatically after a spiritual transformation.”

One other possible category is tranquility, which is common in contemplative traditions. Here, profound spiritual meaning is found by achieving a deep sense of peace and harmony. This experience is unlike those outlined above in that it involves a state of being rather than a discrete event. Tranquility describes a way of being that is applied to all events, and so this category exists somewhat outside the scope of the others. Since tranquility doesn’t fit perfectly under my definition of a religious experience, either it isn’t one or my definition needs refinement.

The Experience Grid

The image above offers a simplistic model for organizing various religious experiences. One axis is the emotional, with the other representing the empirical orientation. Barring any changes, this is the model I will be using to organize both experience and eventually praxis. It isn’t too hard to figure out which quadrant various experiences fit. For example, contemplative meditation might result in a #1 experience whereas speaking in tongues might fit in #4. Being overcome by a sense of wonder of the natural world might belong in quadrant #2, and a #3 experience might involve a nurturing spirit encountered during astral travel. This model will be developed further in future posts.

In Closing

This brief foray into the realm of religious experience has only barely touched the surface. There is so much else to cover, including the possible nature of these experiences, the effects they can have on one’s life, how to know which are healthy and effective for any given individual, and the possible range of intentions, motivations, and aims related to each. This will certainly involve a long, ongoing discussion, and I look forward to your participation.

Before moving on to Part II, I will give you a teaser. In that upcoming essay, I will be addressing the two following assertions:

1) All sensory experiences involve a physical process within the brain and so must be caused and mediated by physical objects and processes. As such, all metaphysical or supernatural sources or states are considered non-veridical.

2) Religious experiences, regardless of the veridicality of the interpreted source or medium, certainly do occur phenomenologically and can lead to increased well-being. As such, they possess great potential value.

My task will be to find a way to square these two statements.

References

Angel, Leonard. (2002). Mystical naturalism. Religious Studies, 38(3), 317-338.
Besk, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. London: Sage.
Dollahite, David. (1998). Fathering, faith, and spirituality. The Journal of Men’s Studies, 7(1), 3-15.
Dornan, Jennifer. (2004). Beyond Belief: Religious Experience, Ritual, and Cultural Neuro-phenomenology in the Interpretation of Past Religious Systems. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 14(1), 25–36.
Emmons, Robert & Paloutzian, Raymond. (2003). The psychology of religion. Annual Review of Psychology, (54), 377-403.
Firth, Raymond. (1996). Religion: a Humanist Interpretation. London: Routledge
Granqvist, Pehr and Larsson, Marcus. (2006). Contribution of Religiousness in the Prediction and Interpretation of Mystical Experiences in a Sensory Deprivation Context: Activation of Religious Schemas. The Journal of Psychology, 140(4), 319-328.
Hardy, A. 1979. The spiritual nature of man: A study of contemporary religious experience. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kozart, M., Saver, J., Rabin, J. (1998). Religious experience was not correctly defined. The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 10(4), 475-477.
Laubach, Marty. (2004). The Social Effects of Psychism: Spiritual Experience and the Construction of Privatized Religion. Sociology of Religion, 65(3), 239-264.
Ratcliffe, Matthew. (2003). Scienti?c naturalism and the neurology of religious experience. Religious Studies 39, 323–345.
Watts, Fraser. (1996). Psychological and religious perspectives on emotion. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 6(2), 71-87.
Yamane, David. (2000). Narrative and religious experience. Sociology of Religion, 61(2), 171-190.
Zangwill, Nick. (2004). The myth of religious experience. Religious Studies 40, 1–22.

In a very general sense, progressivism is a worldview that recognizes the worth of human life and seeks to maximize freedom, opportunity, and fairness in society. Further, it aspires towards improving the well-being of all—via education, the arts, technology, social justice, health care, economic opportunity, et cetera—while also balancing human interests with those of the natural world. A progressive vision, therefore, seeks to enhance the liberty and fulfillment of both individuals and groups while simultaneously cultivating social responsibility and environmental stewardship. Progressives seek to manifest this vision through the promotion of diversity, empathy, pragmatism, critical thinking and debate, innovation, and cultural participation.

The above outline is very broad, but Progressivism can also by applied to religion specifically. There is, of course, a huge amount of information out there regarding progressive spirituality. I agree with the basic outline given by UU theologian James Luther Adams:

(1) Revelation and truth are not closed, but constantly revealed.
(2) All relations between persons ought ideally to rest on mutual, free consent and not coercion.
(3) Affirmation of the moral obligation to direct one’s effort toward the establishment of a just and loving community.
(4) Denial of the immaculate conception of virtue and affirmation of the necessity of social incarnation. Good must be consciously given form and power within history.
(5) The resources (divine and human) that are available for achievement of meaningful change justify an attitude of ultimate (but not necessarily immediate) optimism. There is hope in the ultimate abundance of the Universe.

I can string these together to say that a progressive spirituality recognizes the emergent nature of reality, promotes liberty and social beneficence, and aspires to meaningful change. At the root of all this is the idea that things can and should improve. While the world will always be imperfect, we have a moral obligation to make it better however we can. Yes, there will always be disagreements about what “better” is exactly and how to get there. But there is nevertheless an underlying agreement that change and improvement is both possible and desirable. Further, I would posit that a progressive vision of spiritual improvement would be a desire not to force a single way of being on everyone, but rather to create the conditions necessary to allow unique personal and cultural differences to thrive.

Now then, I take all this one step closer—I maintain that a progressive spirituality applies equally to the self. As such, I believe that I am an emergent being, flowing from the unchanging source of my being, yet constantly in a state of change (just as the Sacred River is and is not the same river from moment to moment). I have a moral obligation to improve, mature, and grow as a human being. As it happens, I have some firm ideas of what that means.

The first thing is what I call the Three Domains of Health, which include the physical, the psychological, and the characterological. Physical health is pretty straightforward. By psychological health, in broad terms, I mean the development of cognitive coherence and flexibility; adequate emotional self-regulation; the ability to form healthy relationships and experience social attunement; having a stable (but not rigid) sense of self; and the capability to be inwardly and outwardly aware (i.e. mindfulness). As a budding psychotherapist, I of course have more details on this, but will leave it as it stands for the sake of brevity. I have reduced characterological health to what I believe are four irreducible yet interconnected traits: courage, integrity, beneficence, and openness. Every one of these “health domains” are amenable to change and improvement, a goal geared not only to lead to a happy life, but to enable optimal functioning, to become the most you that you can be.

Other areas of improvement include knowledge acquisition (both experiential and didactic), agency (the ability to be effective in the world), and what can be called “mystical attunement” (I dislike this phrase, but lack a better one at the moment), the increased perception of connection/union between one’s deepest self and Nature/God/The All. I will try to explore each of these and other categories in future posts. The takeaway here is that changes in each of these areas do more than add knowledge and abilities—they profoundly change the very nature of the person.

And so we now have a basic spiritual scaffolding consisting of religious naturalism, allegoricalism, and progressivism. The first looks to the natural world and our place in it as the source of understanding reality and developing meaning; the second supports the development and use of religious objects (icons, rituals, texts, etc) while acknowledging that they are ultimately symbols for human ideas, values, principles, experiences, and desires; and the third insists on personal and social evolution by promoting liberty, opportunity, and fairness in society and health, education, agency, and mystical attunement in individuals. There are, of course, as yet unspoken philosophies embedded in this scaffolding, such as emergence theory, sacred humanism, process theology, and so on. But now that we have a basic outline, we can begin to fill in some details. I hope you will continue to join me.

One label for this viewpoint is allegoricalism, where religious objects are not taken as true in and of themselves (i.e. literalism), but are used to represent meaningful ideas, principles, values, experiences, and desires. In fact, human thinking is allegorical by nature—we constantly reduce complex concepts down to simple icons, such as flags, proverbs, logos, and the like. On a cognitive level, we also tend to take multiple memories and nonconsciously combine them into single, highly inaccurate amalgams (or cognitive palimpsests, if you will). It’s just what we do (I won’t bore you with the evolutionary advantages to this function).

Allegoricalism is the key to a liberal religious perspective. Liberal traditions tend to be much more interested in values and principles than in any given manifestation of those things. At the same time, they commonly understand that symbols are important to a spiritual life, and so they will employ things like rituals and sacred texts and icons—even while knowing that no inherent power or truth lies in the objects themselves, only what we project onto them.

Just as our combined memories of childhood are meaningful and satisfying despite their inaccuracies, so are our religious symbols. I know that there doesn’t exist a man with an elephant head and a tiny mouse that he rides around upon—but nevertheless I adore Ganesha. When I tickle his fat belly, I allow myself to imagine his laughter; when I place a grain of rice at his feet, I see him delighting in its taste and nourishment. Doing these things allows me to flex my mind and connect with a reality beyond my daily life, making it a bit more joyous, meaningful, and fulfilling.

As we all know, there are dangers in religious beliefs as well, most especially when they are taken as literal. For example, when such beliefs divide people into value categories, only trouble can come from it—unbelievers, heretics, infidels, sinners, outsiders, troglodytes, apostates…these arbitrary classifications all serve only to create in/out groups, often engendering (or outright encouraging) things like hatred, contempt, and fear. Another dilemma sets in when religious beliefs are used to address pragmatic problems or questions when other, more effective tools are available. An obvious example is using the Bible to determine the age of the Earth instead of empirical science and physical evidence. The world is a complex, infuriating place, and it can be tempting—and often comforting—to use religious models to try to make sense of it. The allegorical position promotes using secular systems and tools that are best qualified to lead to effective outcomes, even if religious models are used in parallel to develop meaning out of it all or to promote comfort and strength to deal with challenges.

In my last post, I talked about Religious Naturalism, which holds that the natural world must be placed at the center of our most significant experiences and understandings. The awe and wonder felt towards that world can find meaningful expression in allegoricalism. This endeavor is fundamentally subjective and individual, since the translation of the world into allegorical form will be unique for each person. At the same time, it is possible to have enough of a shared symbol set—usually rooted in shared principles and values—to allow for religious groups to form and thrive.

A structural benefit to the combination of religious naturalism and allegoricalism is the lack of any need to defend religious objects from empirical criticism since those objects are not held to be intrinsically “real.” Rather, the final argument is whether or not those objects promote well-being and support effective solutions to problems. To return to my personal example, I do not have to defend my reverence of Ganesha because I do not argue for his objective existence, but can say that my “relationship” with him benefits me spiritually without hindering my agency in dealing with life. For example, when roadblocks spring up, I might or might not pray to Ganesha to help remove obstacles (one of his fortes) but I will nevertheless apply real-world, pragmatic solutions.

And so we have two of the three legs of my personal spiritual path—religious naturalism, which “honors the experience and expression of the human emotions of awe, reverence, wonder and gratitude at and for the magnificence of the cosmos and the human possibilities for participation in it,” and allegoricalism, which interprets and employs religious objects as symbols of values, principles, experiences, and desires. The third leg, which I will talk about soon, is Progressivism. Stay tuned.

All forms of Religious Naturalism agree that the natural world must be placed at the center of our most significant experiences and understandings. [...] Religious Naturalists affirm the human need for meaning and value in our lives, drawing on two fundamental convictions in those quests: 1) the sense of nature’s richness, spectacular complexity and fecundity and 2) the recognition that nature is not only the realm in which we live out our lives, but that we and who we are – our physical bodies, our amazing brains with their capacity for human sensibilities and understanding, and even our predisposition to be religious – are actually part of nature.

And further…

Religious Naturalism is “religious” in at least the sense that it honors the experience and expression of the human emotions of awe, reverence, wonder and gratitude at and for the magnificence of the cosmos and the human possibilities for participation in it. Some who describe themselves as religious naturalists participate in the social traditions of religion, including communal gatherings and rituals, to foster a sense of community, to reinforce their understandings and to provide a base for other activities.

Another key statement in the article notes that religious naturalists look to empirical science to examine the measurable world while recognizing “science’s limitations in accounting for judgments of value and in providing a full account of human experience.”

I have to say, this describes perfectly my own position which I’ve more or less had since I was a kid. I’ve always been deeply uncomfortable with the idea of the objective existence of gods, angels, demons, and the like. There was a time when I got caught up in things like subtle bodies, crystals, spirits, astral planes, change at a distance, divination, et cetera. While I rarely agree with Freud, I think he was right on when he said that all such beliefs are basically driven by wish fulfillment, the desire to experience oneself as effective and powerful (or rather, to avoid believing one is powerless and in danger). I can say at least that this was true for me—I can look back and see that I adopted those ideas and practices because they acted as a balm for my depression and insecurity.

Spirituality writer John Welwood calls what I was doing spiritual bypassing—a “tendency to use spiritual practice to bypass or avoid dealing with certain personal or emotional ‘unfinished business’.” He goes on to say, “Spiritual bypassing is particularly tempting for people who are having difficulty navigating life’s developmental challenges… While still struggling to find themselves, many people are introduced to spiritual teachings and practices that urge them to give themselves up. As a result, they wind up using spiritual practices to create a new ‘spiritual’ identity, which is actually an old dysfunctional identity—based on avoidance of unresolved psychological issues—repackaged in a new guise.” As it happened, I got into psychotherapy at that time and made great strides after about two years. When I came out of that, I found that my motivation to focus on those beliefs had faded dramatically.

As my need to escape from myself declined, I found myself replacing the desire for power with that of forming connections, meaning, and joy. Perhaps not coincidentally, a few short years later I gave up my design practice and went back to school to become a clinical psychologist. Here I learned even more about the human mind while gaining intense experience in personal connections as a practicing therapist. It was during this time that the last remnants of my supernatural beliefs winked out.

And yet, I now consider myself to be more spiritual than at any time in my life. In part, this is because I see wonder in the world and in human endeavor. The ability for us to create and thrive is astounding to me—art, music, theater, dance, writing, cinema, cuisine, architecture, engineering, sport, philosophy, science…just amazing. And the simplicities of daily life are achingly beautiful. And the universe! What a wondrous, stupendous place! And as far as we can tell, the most complex, unlikely thing in that universe resides in our skulls. Just wow.

To my mind, no supernatural theory about the nature of humans or the universe can compete with quantum mechanics, the rings of Saturn, evolution, or the emergence of consciousness out of a 3-pound jelly-like clump of cells.

At the same time, that 3-pound jelly-like clump of cells, even in this age of science and reason, so often holds on to concepts like change at a distance, alternate planes of reality, and the existence of non-corporeal beings of every kind. I think there is a good reason for this, and that that reason is not only related to spiritual bypassing. I will be exploring this along with my own continued interest in things like ritual and allegoricalism in an upcoming post. For now, I think I will attend church by going for a walk.