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Secular Spirituality and Secularising the Religious

Let's turn our attention now to something a bit different, and that is the other major term of the course: spirituality. In removing any form of god and religion from the human dimension, it might be argued that the spirituality that many people claim to experience, which indicates to some the presence of the divine in the world, is either ignored or denied by the humanist. This is not strictly true, for while some humanists might claim that spirituality does not exist, others are more inclined to interpret it in a more secular sense.

There is no doubt that the word is connected with religion according to its usage in centuries past. The Oxford English Dictionary links the word with things "sacred " and "holy," and also with that old dualism of spirit and matter suggesting that it is concerned with the things of the spirit as opposed to material or worldly interests. In the latter sense the word can be used of immaterial or incorporeal "spirits " or "essences." This suggests that the word spirituality has to be rejected by humanists on two counts: first, because of its religious connotations and, second, because humanism is opposed to the idea of the human being as divided in any way into body and spirit or body and soul. This idea of division, as we saw earlier, is called dualism.

If humanists want to get rid of the word spirituality then they need something in its place, or need to redefine it in a secular sense.

The secular definition of spiritual we first met in your Area Overview -- that experienced when an individual is moved to the heights or depths of his or her being in positive and meaningful ways. It would be difficult to deny that there are times in life when the material world slips into insignificance for a moment or two, and the self experiences something of the depth of life, the quality of living experience. This is usually the result of some kind of stimuli in the environment -- beautiful music, magnificent scenery, the view from the top of a mountain, a sunset, snow, sex, a particular painting, holding your new-born baby -- indeed, there is no end to the stimuli that can promote a "transcendent" feeling, a feeling as if the material world is, even if for just one moment, utterly transcended. This has much to do with the depth of life and experience of the self in its more subtle modes. But it is not a part of the self that can be denied.

But many humanists don't like the word because it has too many religious connotations. The problem is finding some suitable term to describe such experiences. And if we are too scientific about this, reducing such experiences to biological, psychological tendencies in people, then we run the risk of being reductionist -- reducing the human being to his or her genetic, chemical and psychological components. This would mean that human potential is chemically and biologically very limited, that the choices we make and the emotions we feel are almost predetermined.

The human individual is something more than his or her biological, physical, behavioural, and psychological components, and even transcends genetic and environmental backgrounds. In the normal human need to interact with others, to love and be loved, to be valued and respected, there are a myriad ways of living our lives, and the inter-complexities of the world in which we live extend us beyond our mere selves in all sorts of dimensions. Of course we have basic genetic make-ups, but this does not reduce us to conglomerated automata that will always behave in a certain way in a certain situation. There are so many individuals who have risen beyond the confines of environmental and conditioned behavioural backgrounds. And the interaction of environment and genetic make-up open the door to the transcending of the genetic self in many directions.

The problem with reductionism is that, even if the human being can be isolated psychologically or genetically or behaviourally or physically, it is the interaction of all these factors along with so many others that contributes to any individual make-up, even to behaviour in, and response to, one particular situation in life. There is no reason why an individual experiences what he or she does; and it is these experiences that form individual character and personality. Generally, human beings are not contented with things as they are, and in the striving forward -- whether materialistically, socially, educationally, or in any way -- the variables which affect the individual far transcend reductionist theory. Characteristics of any individual may be chromosomatically dictated, but not the life-experiences that contribute to the formation of character.

It is perhaps because the many variables that contribute to the make-up of an individual cannot be so easily subjected to empirical research that reductionism has been so much accepted. We change as we live, and mostly we do so beyond the bounds of reductionist theory. Any humanist, in fact, who accepts reductionist theories of human beings, or anti-personalism, can wave goodbye to the aim of fulfilment of human potential, for some human beings, according to reductionist theory, would have little or none to fulfil. When we study a human being, we have to take into account a good number of paradoxes and perhaps unsolvable mysteries. The human being is full of surprises, making it difficult to get to the heart of what he or she is.

Humanism is, then, generally anti-reductionist, though some humanists accept partial reductionism, leaving immense scope for maximizing of human potential. It is in such a context of anti-reductionism that we need to set this word spirituality. Regardless of its religious associations, it is at least a word that does not lend itself to reductionism, and allows us to describe those very special moments of life when we do seem to transcend normal sense perception for heightened experience. No doubt in your Basic Module you tried to capture something of this in the special words you chose for ceremonies.

In a sensitively written and searching article, Robert Ashby, Executive Director of the British Humanist Association, attempts to define spirituality in humanist terms. In writing of "that strange light of the shore at night, the shifting glimmer of the swell...the peaceful sound and rhythm," he clearly knows what spirituality is all about. As a humanist he looks at the word analytically. But he admits, "The re-assertion of language destroys that spiritual experience, or at least makes it a memory."

Such experience may well be an emotional one. It is a suspension of ordinary perception and language that facilitates spiritual experience, along with a natural enhancement of sensitivity without the interference of articulated conscious thought. This certainly makes it a mode of more intense experience of a moment or moments of life without the encumbrance of our usual modes of thinking and being. Ashby clearly feels this:

The spiritual experience is a particular focus of this life, not some new sort of sense, hitherto undiscovered by scientists. This is quite simply because, as I have said, the experience is one of greater contact with one's real life, that moment of being, away from all the distraction of the world around. It is a concentration on life and the self. It is quite at odds with the bombardment of images around us, which suggest that life and self are about work, clothes, money, lifestyle and so on -- all of which are concepts that have arisen extremely late in the process of evolution of the human brain (p. 9). (Biblio)
In the final analysis he emerges with the definition of spirituality as: "Moments of being composed of emotion, imagination and memory -- which somehow link up to take us beyond everyday awareness to an enhanced sense of reality." We might adapt this definition to just "moments of heightened being."

So humanism can stress the importance of the awareness of beauty and the appreciation of Nature as part of the necessary experience of the self. Indeed, without this kind of experience there is a certain void or gap within each human being, and such "transcendent" experiences could be said to fill certain gaps in individual selfhood, and serve to add quality to the living experience. Moreover, this is one dimension of the human being that humanistic psychology suggests flies in the face of reductionist theories of the nature of the self.

In Britain, spirituality has become part of the educational framework for all children. It refers to the secular aesthetic awareness of beauty; the care of others; the care of animals and the environment; the appreciation of moving poetry; the ability to share emotion through story and poetry; the ability to enjoy good music and the opportunity to express these areas in their own ways; a sense of awe and wonder at Nature which are often the catalyst for later inquiry -- in short, much that would please humanists.

Spirituality is not a learned experience; it is a natural experience that we don't learn to be (and that is why it doesn't even make sense grammatically), but which we spontaneously experience as a result of some stimulus or other. In fact, we can't become spiritual. To say that we can become spiritual is like saying we can become beautiful or intellectual, through a learning process. Spirituality is not an activity, but a state of being, an emotion, a feeling. And we do not normally bother to learn how to express emotions at will unless there is something psychologically wrong with us or we are particularly good at acting. Moreover, when we encounter some sort of spiritual experience we are often alone, so the acquisition of "techniques" in spirituality is not readily to be obtained from group experience.