Conclusion
Chapter 12 in Thesis – On the Universal Meaning and Significance of Spirituality –
The purpose of this thesis has been to understand the universal meaning and significance of spirituality such that we might want to understand about thoughts and emotions. More specifically the research question was “Should spirituality be considered a universal and vital dimension of human life? This question is important to answer as we are seeing an unprecedented exodus from religious spirituality and major populations without a spiritual identity whatsoever in the western world (Funk & Smith, 2012). This is especially true given the fact that spirituality has been a central and highly valued dimension of human life across human culture and history (Winkelman, 2010; (Stutley, 2002). This exodus from spirituality therefore begs the question – what exactly have these people left behind, and how important is it to human life? I have investigated this question from five different angles. 1. By understanding the historical context of spirituality, 2. By providing a universal understanding of spirituality, 3. By investigating the universality of spirituality, 4. By investigating the biological basis of spirituality and 5. By investigating the health effects of spirituality. Together, these investigations create the outlines of an answer to the research question which I will now attempt to lay out.
(1) In the history of spirituality we have seen that although western culture has seen a dramatic decline in spiritual life, it is by no means a thing of the past (Funk & Smith, 2012; Lipka & Gecewicz, 2017). From the early days of psychology (Zsolnai & Flanagan, 2019), spirituality has been pressing at the gates of mainstream culture, until the gates finally began to open (Goleman & Davidson, 2018; Pollan, 2019). A process which I have described as a spiritual renaissance. In the late 19th century, the phenomena of spiritualism and religious experience powerfully influenced the emergence of the western science of the mind, and therefore its understanding of itself (Jung et al., 2012; Zsolnai & Flanagan, 2019). These were the early stirrings of the spiritual renaissance. In the 20th century we saw three major waves of spiritual counterculture, opposing both the spirituality of organized religion and the lacking spirituality in science and western culture. These waves were the Beatniks, the Hippies (Issitt, 2009), and the New Age (Collins, 1998) and together they brought about a massive spiritual revival in western culture, drawing from foreign spiritual traditions across the globe, from western esoteric history and from psychotropic plants and pharmacology. This was the rise of the spiritual renaissance. Around the turn of the 20th century, spirituality became increasingly embraced by mainstream science, health practice and therefore culture at large (Rosmarin & Koenig, 2020), which has correlated with a dramatic rise in spirituality outside religion (Lipka & Gecewicz, 2017). This was the embrace of the spiritual renaissance and it is still ongoing. In the future, more spiritual ideas and practices will likely become assimilated or accommodated by western culture. This history first of all suggests that there may be something vitally important about spirituality for human nature and that it is unlikely to become a thing of the past. It also calls for a universal understanding of spirituality which is capable of reconciling the myriad forms of spirituality revived during the spiritual renaissance with one another, as well as with the scientific worldview. The first step towards such an understanding is to establish a universal definition of spirituality.
(2) Before defining spirituality, we understood that a universal definition of spirituality had to first be able to distinguish when and to what extent spirituality is present and additionally it should be compatible across worldviews. For this reason I chose to define spirituality in terms of universal experience in contrast to grounding the definition in worldview specific terms. I found that existing definitions tended to identify spirituality with experiences of either the sacred (Koenig et al., 2012), greater forces (Friedman & Hartelius, 2013) or transcendence (Vimal, 2015). I argued that these definitions failed to capture the essential experiential aspect of spirituality and that they therefore left important spiritual phenomena out of the picture. To identify this essence I investigated the universal experiential aspect to which “spirit” refers (François, 2008) and defined it as “the experience of a living conscious pattern of energy” or “the experience of consciousness and its phenomena” insofar as consciousness is always experienced as a living pattern of energy. I then used this definition to derive the definitions of other spiritual terms such as spirituality, spirit world and spiritual transformation. Spirituality was defined experientially as the subject pertaining to the experience of consciousness and the spirituality of a person or culture was defined as their paradigm for navigating the experience of consciousness and its phenomena. Experiences were said to be spiritual to the extent that the experience of consciousness is changed / altered and salient. People and cultures were defined as spiritual to the extent that they engaged with the navigation of their experience of consciousness and its phenomena. I then proposed that experiences of the sacred, greater forces and transcendence had been identified with spirituality because they were particularly salient and valued experiences of consciousness (spirit). With the consciousness definition of spirituality, I argued that we have a universal definition capable of distinguishing when and to what extent spirituality is present in any person and any experience, and that we can therefore use it to understand the relationship of spirituality and human vitality to answer the research question.
(3) As we began to investigate this relationship, we said that if spirituality is a vital dimension of human life then we would first of all expect it to have arisen universally across cultures. We also hypothesized that if spirituality is truly a universal dimension of human nature then we would expect to see fundamental regularities in the expression of spirituality across cultures as this would indicate a shared nature underlying different spirituality. We found that spirituality has been a part of human culture across the world (Brown, 1991). Moreover we found fundamental regularities in the many expressions of spirituality, from tribal shamanism to the major world religion. The most fundamental regularity we found was that spirituality has universally been represented by the same metaphor of a breathlike force of life (François, 2008), suggesting that people were describing the same universal phenomenon across cultures. We also found that Shamans universally shared similar roles and abilities (Stutley, 2002), that Shamanisms have universally developed the same fundamental infrastructure to their spiritual realms and that they used many of the same techniques to journey into them (Harner, 1990). Why would we see such regularities if not because of a shared nature underlying spirituality? Finally we saw that these regularities extend beyond shamanic spirituality to the spirituality of the major religions of today, from phenomena such as divine revelation and beings, to practices such as magic and ecstasy (Stutley, 2002). Despite all this evidence we also found reasons to doubt the universality of spirituality. As we also saw in history, western culture has experienced a dramatic decline in spiritual life in recent history, and although spirituality outside religion is on a marked rise in the US we still need to explain how the “neither spiritual nor religious” now make up a majority of the European population (Pew Research Center, 2020). I proposed that the reason so many people do not identify as spiritual was either that this demographic were not significantly engaged with their experience of consciousness, i.e. they are not spiritual or that they simply do not think of this engagement as spiritual. This would suggest that spirituality may ultimately not be a cultural universal. Does this mean that spirituality is not a universal and vital dimension of human nature, or does this simply mean that we have a culture which does not practice a universal and vital dimension of their nature?
(4) To settle this question we hypothesized that if spirituality is universal and vital to human nature then we would expect spiritual experiences to be a function of human nature and therefore express itself in ordinary human lives, just like thoughts and emotions. We looked for answers in the research on altered states of consciousness because the experience of consciousness changes and becomes salient during these states (Tart, 1972), making them spiritual experiences by the consciousness definition. Moreover, we saw that spiritual experiences are often reported during altered states (Griffiths et al., 2006). This is true of those experiences which are intentionally induced such as meditative experiences (Nelson, 2009) and those which naturally occur such as spontaneous spiritual awakenings and near-death experiences (Corneille & Luke, 2021; Long, 2014). Looking at the research, the most fundamental biological correlate of spiritual experience is fluctuations in the entropy or general flexibility of the brain (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014). As the brain becomes more entropic or flexible, the default activity disintegrates, and spiritual experiences become more likely to occur (Swanson, 2018). The walls may begin to breathe, the trees may come alive and the experience of oneself may begin to dissolve, until one is having a full-blown spirit world experience at the highest levels of entropy. These fluctuations of entropy do not only occur under the influence of psychedelic compounds where it has been studied, it also expresses itself in natural human functions such as creativity and dreaming (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019). All in all, it is clear that spirituality is a natural function of human nature and that it expresses itself naturally and routinely in human life. This is no surprise through the lens of the consciousness definition of spirituality, insofar as it is not surprising that the alteration of the experience of consciousness is a natural dimension of human nature.
(5) Finally, we hypothesized that if spirituality is vital to human life, then we would expect to find a correlation between spirituality and human health and lifespan. We found that there is a clear relationship between being spiritual or religious and being healthier both mentally and physically (Koenig et al., 2012), supporting the vitality hypothesis. We also found that extremely spiritual people display extraordinary physical and mental health as well as biological age (Goleman & Davidson, 2018), further supporting the relationship between spirituality and health as well as lifespan. Finally we found that experiences of meditation and psychedelics are significantly correlated with health when tested in placebo and randomized controlled trials (Goleman & Davidson, 2018; Luoma et al., 2020; Muthukumaraswamy et al., 2021). This indicates that the relationship between spirituality and health does not exclusively depend on religion or other variables such as having a particular worldview. The implications for the “neither spiritual nor religious” are now becoming clearer. Not only have we found that this demographic must share the underlying biological basis of spirituality, thereby making the ways of spiritual traditions relevant for them, we have now also found that these ways may powerfully promote their vitality in proportion to how much they practice (Goleman & Davidson, 2018). In terms of the consciousness definition and the definition of vitality, we can conclude that engaging in the navigation of consciousness and its phenomena clearly correlates positively with health and with some significant evidence for lifespan as well. In simple terms we can conclude that the evidence supports the hypothesis that spirituality is a vital dimension of human life.
This concludes the findings of the five angles I have taken in the investigation of the research question “Should spirituality be considered a universal and vital dimension of human life?” and we therefore have ample material with which to formulate an answer. In my analysis, spirituality appears to be a natural expression of human nature, comparable to thoughts and emotions, and one which is vital to human life both physically and mentally. This is concluded on the following grounds
(a) I have found that spirituality has almost always been a central dimension of human culture throughout history and in the case where a culture did experience a decline of its spiritual dimension, this was met with fierce spiritual counterculture eventually leading to a spiritual renaissance. These are the historical patterns we would expect to see for any natural and vital part of human nature, i.e., we would expect these parts to have been a central priority across cultures and for the cultures who failed to prioritize them to be met with fierce resistance until an eventual renaissance.
(b) I have found that in terms of universal human experience, spirituality fundamentally pertains to the experience of consciousness and its phenomena, and that as a dimension of human life and culture it pertains to the understanding and navigation of the experience of consciousness and its phenomena. This supports the conclusion because, if indeed spirituality pertains to such a fundamental part of the human experience, then we would expect the understanding and navigation of it to be natural and a vital dimension of human life.
(c) I have found that spirituality has been universal to human culture and moreover that there have been fundamental common patterns across the variety of spirituality across history. This too is what we would expect to see if spirituality were a vital part of human nature as opposed to merely a cultural construct.
(d) I have found that spiritual experience is reflected in the nature of human biology at some of its most fundamental levels, and that this nature expresses itself regularly in ordinary human lives in various different ways. This is once again what we would expect to find under the hypothesis that spirituality is a fundamental and vital aspect of human life. (e) I have found that spiritual practice correlates with human health and lifespan in proportion with the duration and intensity of practice, both within and outside the religious context. Again, this is what we would expect to find for the practice of navigating any vital dimension of human nature.
All in all, it appears that all the five angles of this thesis are in support of the hypothesis that spirituality is a universal and vital dimension of human life. Taken together, my answer to the research question “Should spirituality be considered a universal and vital dimension of human life?” is that spirituality appears to reflect a universal reality of human nature and to have a strong relationship to human vitality, and therefore yes, it should be considered a universal and vital dimension of human life.
Author – Sagi Andersen