I'm an atheist, and I don't see a problem with talking about spirituality, because I do think there is such a thing as secular spirituality. It's very subjective though, as you said, so I can only give you this for what it's worth.

For me, spirituality is sort of synonymous with "emotional profundity", to put it as concisely as possible. Waking up next to someone you love is spiritual. Stopping to appreciate a sunset would be spiritual. Standing in awe at the size of the Grand Canyon would be spiritual. Things like that.

I don't believe that people actually possess spirits though, and I definitely don't believe that these feelings are instilled in us from any supernatural source.

I would say that something was a "spiritual experience" in the same way that I would call that quiet time just before nightfall "the magic hour". Of course, I don't really believe that one hour out of the day is magical. It's just a poetic way of commenting on the specialness of the situation.

I suppose that, in an indirect way, I could understand someone saying that spirituality is the meaning of life. I mean, all of us are looking for those profound feelings (Love, awe, peace, etc). We simply go about getting them in different ways. If someone is claiming that spirituality is the meaning of life, it might be appropriate to ask them the means to their spirituality. The means to their spirituality would most likely be something approaching objective.

As for the term "larger than yourself", I'd again say it merely applies to profundity. A secular thinker would probably mean it more in a figurative sense, but a religious thinker would probably sincerely attribute any profound feelings to a supernatural source.

I have no idea if any of this came close to answering your question, but I hope it helped a little.

If you take memes seriously, and you also acknowledge that *what* people believe will affect their actions, then the idea of a spiritual 'greater than yourself' starts to make sense.

First, imagine the website Google. Does Google run on one computer? No. It runs on many computers in parallel. There's no way a single computer could handle the traffic that Google gets. The deal is that each of the computers running the Google website is basically running the same software. So, the many separate computers, acting together, constitute the 'one' website called Google.

Likewise, imagine the cells of your body. Each of your cells contains an identical copy of 'your' DNA. Each cell is specialized during your physical development, but all together they act in harmony, due to the common DNA code they share, and all together they constitute 'you', i.e. your physical body, made of many separate cells.

Now, imagine a population of people, say a church, who share a core set of ideas, preached to them by a common source, a common doctrine. The memes are essentially shared by many people, and since they are believed (via faith), they will affect the people's behaviour *as a group*.

It is this group behaviour that is a physical phenomenon that could be interpreted as something 'greater than yourself'.

Think about it, a corporation: what the heck is that? Is it the buildings? No. Is it the employees? No. Is it the financial reports and other paperwork? No. But it is all these things combined. Corporations exist, but they exist as a collective of many parts, all working together to have a coherent behaviour.  

Now, you're unlikely to hear a supernatural spiritualist say that a corporation is an example of what they mean when they say 'greater than yourself'. They mean something more intangible. They mean something like 'god' or 'heaven' or a 'spirit world'. But these are just memes, again. Actually, they are BIG memes, probably deserving of their own name, and a good candidate name for such big memes is the memeplex.

An entire myth is a memeplex. The Bible is a memeplex. God, since he's attached to so many other memes, and means different things in different contexts, is a memeplex.

So, when a spiritualist says 'greater than yourself', what they really mean is a really big idea, greater than the 'spirit' of just one person. They also mean that this big idea *does* stuff.

Well, the idea of 'god' certainly does influence people's behaviours, and when a large group, such as the Roman Catholic Church, shares the same memeplex, you will see a big organization doing *big* things, things that *no one person alone* could do. These big ideas are able to start wars, infiltrate politics, cause mass suicides (Jonestown), provide charity to the poor and sick, etc. etc.

So, you can start imagining these memeplexes as real entities, just like Google is a real entity, and your body is a real entity. The 'bigger than yourself' memeplexes are made up of every mind that believes them and acts upon them. We are little computers, and these memeplexes are our shared software, and the network of us working together is a real thing that actually exists in the physical world and is actually 'greater than yourself'.

So, there's my naturalistic interpretation of 'greater than yourself'. Yahweh exists as an entity that has real effects in the world, because many people believe in him and act based on that belief. Another way you could say this is that Yahweh is just a character, and it's actually the 'Holy Spirit' that exists. When you read mythology and investigate religion, this idea will help you visualize and understand the dynamics of large-scale group behaviour. Just imagine thousands of people actually believing the myths and imagine how they would act based on this belief. 

It's actually a kind of scary concept.

And this is why I'm serious about my philosophy of wonderism. I want it to become a memeplex whose role will be to tame and in some cases replace the pathological memeplexes that are plaguing this world. But that's dangerous talk, and maybe it should wait for another time. 

Hi, I've been a fan of the RSS YouTube videos for a while, but this is my first post on these forums. A brief intro to provide perspective:

* Unreligious, bordering on antireligious.

* Raised Chistian, became athiest out of rebellion against the attempt to control me through threats in the name of love.

* Very strong sense of intuition which is quite helpful for all manner of intellectual and interpersonal challenges.

* Trying to develop a fully skeptical and fully rational world view by believing absolutely nothing without strong supporting evidence and without withstanding fierce rational scrutiny. (A very difficult prospect to apply that to *every* attitude and belief.)

I agree with Archeopteryx that spirituality means different things to different people. However, I would like to point out that it's irrational to assume that reality consists only of what we're aware of. James Randi has cast doubt on or outright debunked a lot of proclaimed supernatual practicioners, and it would seem that the majority of the people who make such claims are either dishonest or self-deluded. However, that does not discount the possibility that there are rational people who have seen genuine evidence to support the belief that some form of supernatural phenomenon exists in this world. I would assert that any such phenomenon would not be a contradiction to the laws of the universe, but would merely supercede our current understanding of those laws.

What would you have to experience to believe that there's more to reality and human nature than you had previously assumed? Would it be periodically getting the feeling that someone is watching you from outside of your field of vision... in conjunction with a feeling of where that person is... followed by a 100% success rate at turning to look at that position and seeing someone there looking at you? How about studying and practicing the martial arts concept of chi... and then one day, while bored in class, trying to form a ball of energy and move that ball quickly in an "infiniti" pattern around the front of the room... only to see a girl 5 rows in front of you and two rows to the right suddenly stiffen and then whirl around to look right at you? How about if you were sparring with someone, and just when you were about to lose, they suddenly froze in place for about 30 seconds allowing you to easily and effortlessly defeat them? How about if you stayed up all night playing tetris on the fastest possible setting... a setting where past observers had considered the pieces to be falling so fast that they couldn't understand how you could play at that speed... to discover a few hours later that on that same setting each piece appeared to fall so slowly that it was boring waiting for it to set into place... and then observing that 3 seconds would pass on your watch during the time 1 of those pieces fell... and then discovering an 8 hour discrepancy on your computer's system clock the next day? What if you were running down a hallway at your school late at night and you saw a girl you had a crush on... and you decided to stop running... and over the next 10 seconds you drifted to a complete stop without falling and without touching anything except the air around you?

What if you had experienced all of these things? Could you still rationally believe that that only things that were real were the things that you could see with your eyes? Of equal importance, who could you tell? There's a big difference between seeing evidence and having evidence to present to others. All of these examples are not deliberate manifestations of any special powers, and as such are not reliably reproducable. How could you tell someone about your belief without appearing to be insane? Even if you were to explain that you had all these experiences, how many people would believe you? How many would think that you belonged in a mental hospital on mind-altering medication?

My point in making this post is to illustrate that some people may have very good reasons for believing that some forms of supernatural phenomena exist, but may not be comfortable fully explaining their belief to someone who they do not share a very strong trust with. If you are acting as a counselor, and if you dismiss their spiritual beliefs out of hand, they may find it difficult to trust you. As for how best to deal with the subject when it's brought up, I would recommend that you keep in mind that:

* The word spiritual can mean very different things.

* Your beliefs are not guaranteed to be correct, nor are their beliefs guaranteed to be wrong.

* People are more likely to feel comfortable trusting someone who is open-minded and will keep what they say in strict confidence.