I’ve been wondering about this for a while, and find it unclear whether my spiritual side is simply “not actually religion”.
I wonder if you could clarify for me what you mean by “spiritual” in “spiritual side”? I was raised as a Roman Catholic, and to me ‘spiritual’ means the other side of Descartes’s dualism—the non-physical side. So, for example, I learned that the Deity and angels are purely spiritual. But being human, my spiritual side is my immortal soul—which pretty much includes my mind.
I’m pretty sure you (and millions of other people who talk about spirituality) mean something different from this, but I have never been able to figure out what you all mean.
A definition of ‘spiritual’ is preferred, but failing that, could you taboo ‘spiritual’ and say what you meant by ‘spiritual side’ without using the word?
More or less, it’s schizophrenic/delusional episodes, with an awareness that this is in fact what they are. Mostly what I use ‘spiritual’ to refer to is that, during these episodes, I tend to pick up a strong sense of ‘purpose’ - high level goals end up developed. I have no clue how I develop these top-level goals, and I’ve never found a way to do it via rationality. Rationality can help me mediate conflicts between goals, conflicts between goals and reality, and help me achieve goals, but it doesn’t seem able to set those top-level priorities.
About the closest I’ve come to doing it rationally is to realise that I’m craving purpose, and do various activities that tend to induce this state. Guided meditation is ideal, since it seems to produce more ‘productive’ episodes. It varies heavily whether I will get any particularly useful purpose out of one of these episodes; many episodes are drifting and purposeless, and others result in either impossible goals or ‘applause light’ goals that have no actual substance attached.
Ostensibly I could try to infer my goals from my emotional preferences, which I’ve been slowly working on as an alternative. Being bi-polar and having a number of other neurological instabilities makes it very difficult to get any sort of coherent mapping there, beyond very basic elements like ‘will to live’. Even those basics can be unstable: For about a year I had no real preference on my own survival due to a particularly bad schizophrenic episode.
I’d actually be rather curious how others handle the formation of top-level goals :)
I do also notice certain skills that I’m much more adept at when I’m having such an episode. I’ve observed this empirically, and can come up with rational explanations for it. I’m pretty certain the same results could be replicated rationally, either by studying the skills or by figuring out what I’m doing different during the schizophrenic episodes. I don’t feel that ‘spiritual’ is necessarily a good label for this aspect; “intuition” or simply “changing my perceptual lens on reality” seem more accurate. I mention it here simply because it happens to stem from the same source (schizophrenic episodes)
I’d actually be rather curious how others handle the formation of top-level goals :)
I find I have very little emotion attached to my highest-level goals. I’m not sure but I think I derive them by abstracting from my lower-level goals, which are based more on habit and emotion, and from ideas I absorb from books, etc. I then use them to try and make my lower-level goals less contradictory.
FWIW, I typically use the term in a secular sense to refer to those with interests in items from this list:
meditation, religious experiences, drugs, altered states, yoga, chanting, buddhism, taoism, other eastern mysticism, martial arts and self-improvement.
I wonder if you could clarify for me what you mean by “spiritual” in “spiritual side”? I was raised as a Roman Catholic, and to me ‘spiritual’ means the other side of Descartes’s dualism—the non-physical side. So, for example, I learned that the Deity and angels are purely spiritual. But being human, my spiritual side is my immortal soul—which pretty much includes my mind.
I’m pretty sure you (and millions of other people who talk about spirituality) mean something different from this, but I have never been able to figure out what you all mean.
A definition of ‘spiritual’ is preferred, but failing that, could you taboo ‘spiritual’ and say what you meant by ‘spiritual side’ without using the word?
More or less, it’s schizophrenic/delusional episodes, with an awareness that this is in fact what they are. Mostly what I use ‘spiritual’ to refer to is that, during these episodes, I tend to pick up a strong sense of ‘purpose’ - high level goals end up developed. I have no clue how I develop these top-level goals, and I’ve never found a way to do it via rationality. Rationality can help me mediate conflicts between goals, conflicts between goals and reality, and help me achieve goals, but it doesn’t seem able to set those top-level priorities.
About the closest I’ve come to doing it rationally is to realise that I’m craving purpose, and do various activities that tend to induce this state. Guided meditation is ideal, since it seems to produce more ‘productive’ episodes. It varies heavily whether I will get any particularly useful purpose out of one of these episodes; many episodes are drifting and purposeless, and others result in either impossible goals or ‘applause light’ goals that have no actual substance attached.
Ostensibly I could try to infer my goals from my emotional preferences, which I’ve been slowly working on as an alternative. Being bi-polar and having a number of other neurological instabilities makes it very difficult to get any sort of coherent mapping there, beyond very basic elements like ‘will to live’. Even those basics can be unstable: For about a year I had no real preference on my own survival due to a particularly bad schizophrenic episode.
I’d actually be rather curious how others handle the formation of top-level goals :)
I do also notice certain skills that I’m much more adept at when I’m having such an episode. I’ve observed this empirically, and can come up with rational explanations for it. I’m pretty certain the same results could be replicated rationally, either by studying the skills or by figuring out what I’m doing different during the schizophrenic episodes. I don’t feel that ‘spiritual’ is necessarily a good label for this aspect; “intuition” or simply “changing my perceptual lens on reality” seem more accurate. I mention it here simply because it happens to stem from the same source (schizophrenic episodes)
I find I have very little emotion attached to my highest-level goals. I’m not sure but I think I derive them by abstracting from my lower-level goals, which are based more on habit and emotion, and from ideas I absorb from books, etc. I then use them to try and make my lower-level goals less contradictory.
Yeah, this does not seem to have much to do with what we are usually talking about when discussing religion, supernaturalism, etc.
FWIW, I typically use the term in a secular sense to refer to those with interests in items from this list:
meditation, religious experiences, drugs, altered states, yoga, chanting, buddhism, taoism, other eastern mysticism, martial arts and self-improvement.