The word spirituality has a capacity to divide people like few others. For some, it’s an
innately beautiful touchstone, the designator of a special kind of experience that is so
valuable, it is best left reverentially unexplored and pure, lest one disturb its ethereal mysteries
with the cold hand of reason. For others, it’s nonsensical bunkum of appeal only to
adolescent dreamers, the underemployed and the weak minded. But precisely because ‘spiritual
experiences’ are so often either worshiped or derided, it pays to try to submit them
to dispassionate and sober examination, not in order a priori to crush them or honour
them, but so as to make them more intelligible, to friend and foe alike. Whatever our suspicions,
spiritual moments are capable of being pinned down, split into their constituent elements
and assessed with due regard. One should – and can – get respectfully rational about spirituality.
Spiritual moments’ belong to a mood that most of us
will only ever irregularly and perhaps haphazardly access, a mood in which practical concerns
are, for a time, kept entirely at bay and we accede to a slightly unnerving yet also
thrillingly oblique perspective on existence. During these moments, the ordinary world and
its pressures are kept at a distance from us. Perhaps it’s very early morning or late
at night. We might be driving down a deserted motorway or looking down at the earth from
a plane tracing its way across Greenland. It might be high summer or a deep-winter evening.
We don’t have to be anywhere or do anything, there are no immediate threats or passions
and we are liberated to consider the world from a new and unfamiliar angle.The essential
element is that we are able to look ‘beyond the ego’. Our customary state is – more
than we are generally even aware – to be heavily invested in ourselves: we aggressively
defend our interests, we strive for esteem, we obsess about our pleasures. It is exhausting
and pretty much all consuming. But in a spiritual moment, maybe helped along by the sound of
flowing water or the call of a distant owl, the habitual struggle ceases, we are freed
from our customary egoistic vigilance and we can do a properly extraordinary thing:
look at life as if we were not ourselves, as if we were a roaming eye that could inhabit
the perspective of anyone or anything else, a foreigner or a child, a crab on a seashore
or cloud on the hazy horizon. In our spiritual state, the ‘I’, the vessel that we are
usually supremely and exhaustively loyal to, ceases to be our primary responsibility. We
can take our leave and become a roaming vagabond promiscuous thing, a visitor of other mentalities
and modalities, as concerned with all that is not us as we are normally obsessed by what is.
As a result, a range of emotions that we would typically feel only
in relation to us can be experienced around other elements too. We might feel the pain
of someone we hardly know; or be gratified by the success of a stranger. We could take
pride in a beauty or intelligence to which we were wholly unconnected. We can be imaginative
participants in the entire cosmic drama. There might, in all this, be a particular emphasis
on love. That could sound odd, because we’re used to thinking of love in a very particular
context, that of the circumscribed affection that one person might have for a very accomplished
and desirable other.But understood spiritually, love involves a care and concern for anything
at all. We might find ourselves loving – that is, appreciating and delighting, understanding
and sympathising – with a family of dung beetles or a moss covered tundra, someone
else’s child or the birth of a faraway star. An intensity of enthusiasm that we usually
restrict to only one other nearby ego is now distributed more erratically and generously
across the entire universe and all its life forms. Spiritually-minded
people might at this point say that they can feel the presence of God inside them. This
may be a particularly enraging remark for atheists, but it is more explicable than it
sounds. What they may be trying to say is that, in certain states, they are able to
experience some of the generosity, nobility of feeling, and selflessness traditionally
associated with the divine. It isn’t that they promptly imagine themselves as bearded
men on clouds, it means that the objectivity and tenderness we might ascribe to a divine
force now seems, momentarily, to be within their grasp. Spiritual moods may
usher in especially anxiety-free states. No longer so closely wedded to ourselves, we
can cease to worry overly about what might happen to our puny and vulnerable selves in
the always uncertain future. We may be readier to give up on some of our ego-driven, jealously
guarded and pedantically-held goals. We may never get to quite where we want to go, but
we are readier to bob on the eddies of life, content to let events buffet us as they may.
We make our peace with the laws of entropy. We may never be properly loved or appropriately
appreciated. We’ll die – and that will be just fine. And yet at the same time, a
particular gaiety might descend on us, for a huge amount of our energy is normally directed
towards nursing our ego’s wounds and coping with what we deep down suspect is the utter
indifference of others. But that no longer seems like a spectre we have to ward off and
we can start to raise our eyes and notice life in a way we never otherwise do. Our invisibility
and meaninglessness is a given we now joyfully accept, rather than angrily or fearfully rage
against. We don’t quake in fear we might not be a somebody, we delight and embrace
the full knowledge of our eternal nullity – and delight that, right now, the blossom
looks truly enchanting in the field opposite. We cannot persist at a spiritually elevated plane
at all times, there will inevitably be bills to be paid and children to be picked up. But
the claims of the ordinary world do not invalidate or mock our occasional access to a more elevated
and disinterested zone. Spirituality has perhaps for too long been abandoned to its more overzealous
defenders who have done it a disservice. It deserves to be explored most particularly
by those who are by instinct most suspicious of it. A spiritual experience is neither ineffable
nor absurd; the term refers rather to a deeply sustaining interval of relief from the burdens
and blindness of being us.
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