Universal Definitions
Chapter 7 in Thesis – On the Universal Meaning and Significance of Spirituality –
– What is Vitality and Spirituality? –
Before answering the question “Should Spirituality be Considered a Universal and Vital Dimension of Human Life?” It is important to understand what is meant with the most central concepts of the question and therefore the thesis. The concepts are “spirituality and “vital”.
Vital
What does it mean to say that something is vital to the functioning of any system? To start off with an intuitive example, we can ask, what does it mean to say that the heart is vital to the functioning of the human organism? The first intuition may be to say that the heart is vital if it is necessary for the survival of the human organism, i.e. if the organism would die without it. This definition would indeed work well when it comes to the heart, as the survival of the human organism is very tightly bound to the function of the heart, making it very clear that the heart is a vital organ. However, the concept of vitality becomes muddier as we explore those parts which are less tightly bound to the survival of a system.
For instance, are thoughts and emotions vital to the human organism? Do we die if we lose thought functionality as we do with our heart? Some of the most severe cases of thought disorder can be found in schizophrenics, known as delusions (Hart & Lewine, 2017). Although schizophrenics have a significantly reduced life expectancy of 15-25 years below average, it is still perfectly possible to live relatively long lives with schizophrenia (Wildgust et al., 2010), and this is despite the fact that schizophrenics may have many additional dysfunctions besides their thought disorders. Certainly, schizophrenics do not tend to fall to their knees and die as soon as they are struck with thought dysfunction as people might in the case of a heart dysfunction. Does this mean that thought functionality is not vital to human life? That depends on how we define vitality.
It may be possible to survive for extended periods of time with severe disorders of thought and emotions, but there is still a connection between the functioning of these faculties and human life, as we can observe in their effects on health and lifespan. In the case of thought disorders we can see this by the facts that schizophrenia negatively correlates with health and lifespan, i.e. schizophrenics live less in length and quality (von Hausswolff-Juhlin et al., 2009). For this reason I will add an extra dimension to the way I will use the concept of “vital” in this thesis. A dimension of degree. What do I mean by this? I mean that a part may be more or less vital to a given system depending on the degree of correlation it has with the life/vitality of the system. In the case of the human heart, we can observe that a person will die almost immediately after losing heart function, indicating a very tight correlation between the heart and human vitality. Therefore, thinking in terms of degree, we can say that the heart is highly vital to the human organism. Thoughts and emotions on the other hand appear to have a looser correlation with human vitality, so these may be considered less vital than the heart.
So to summarize, I will define a part as being vital to the extent that its functioning correlates positively with the functioning or vitality of the whole. Additionally, I will take greater health and lifespan to be indicators of greater functioning or vitality in people, however I will also explore other indicators throughout this thesis. For instance, I will make the assumption that if a part has been present universally across culture, then it is likely to be significantly vital to human life. I will also make the assumption that, if a part is deeply ingrained in human biology, then it is also likely to be significantly vital to human life. As we will see in the methods section, these indicators will form the bases for my investigation of the research question. Speaking in terms of the research question, I will take spirituality to be vital to human life to the extent that it correlates with human vitality, as indicated by the extent of its universality, its biological basis and its relationship with human health and lifespan. It should however be kept in mind that there may be much more available evidence on the relationship with health than with lifespan, so I will rely primarily on health as an indicator of human vitality.
Spirituality
What is Required of a Universal Definition of Spirituality?
In order to understand to what extent spirituality correlates with human vitality, we must define spirituality. When is spirituality present and when is it not? To what extent is spirituality present in a given situation? Which experiences, people and practices may be considered spiritual, and which won’t? For instance, we might ask, is spirituality present in the practice of magic? If so, we will expect magic practitioners to exhibit greater health and lifespan according to the hypothesis. We might also ask “Is a monk generally more spiritual than a lawyer?” If so, we will generally expect a monk to live longer and healthier than a lawyer. We may also ask, is a mystical experience spiritual? If so, we will generally expect such experiences to have leverage on human health ect. These are all questions that a definition must be able to answer before we can begin to correlate spirituality with human vitality.
However, it is important to stress that there are also questions it doesn’t have to answer, and in fact would do best not to answer. Here I am thinking of metaphysical questions and questions relating to the ultimate nature of spirituality. Is spirit the product of matter? Is matter the product of spirit? Is spirit just inside our heads, or is it a feature of reality? The reason our definition cannot ground itself on any side of any of these questions, is because such a definition would of course not be universal. It would exclude all those people who land on the other side of the questions. Therefore, it is on purpose that my definition grounds itself independently of any worldview specific claims. And fortunately, it will not be necessary for the definition to be grounded in such claims in order to establish the vitality of spirituality for human life.
Perhaps the only claim that must be made to do this, is the claim that spirituality refers to something real in the human experience and that this reality can be defined in terms of universal human experience. That is, spirituality is not a complete fiction, and it is not just an illusion, it is a real phenomenon of the human experience with definable characteristics. For this reason, I will base my definition of spirituality on experiential phenomena. This means that I will refrain from saying “Spirituality is x” and instead say “spirituality is x experience”. This experiential approach has a long philosophical tradition behind it known as phenomenology (Zahavi, 2018), which can be described as an approach to understand the world in terms of experience.
One of my rationales for using the experiential approach, which may also have been a rationale for phenomenology, is that there are some things worth knowing which are mostly or only apparent through the landscape of experience. I find it likely that the phenomena relating to spirituality fall into this category, given that spiritual phenomena are hard to grasp through objective observation as noted by William James. However, my primary interest in the experiential approach for this thesis, is not its epistemological advantages, but rather that it has the potential for yielding universal definitions. To understand why it carries this potential will take a little elaboration.
Why and how will an Experiential Approach Work for Universal Definitions?
Why is an experiential approach well suited for universal definitions such as for spirituality? The short answer is that the universal aspects of the human experience provides a common ground to which different worldviews can relate. If we can trace a meaning found in one worldview, back to the common experiential ground to which it refers, then we may discover its correspondence to the meanings of other worldviews which also relate to that common ground.
The longer answer is that we are in a situation where people are capable of perceiving very different meanings as a result of observing the same phenomena of the human experience. For instance one person may look at the earth and perceive a celestial object while another may see a great simulated object. Therefore, one person may speak of the earth in terms of physics and another in terms of computer code. As a result it can gradually become hard to see that these two people are in fact talking about the same experiential phenomenon and as a result there may be little basis for communication. Using the experiential approach, we may be able to illuminate this common ground which underlies the seemingly irreconcilable meanings of different worldviews. Therefore my approach to a universal understanding of spirituality will be to trace spirituality back to the universal human experience to which it refers.
Considering the earth example, you may wonder, how hard could it be to identify that the simulationist and the programmer are both talking about the earth experience, isn’t it obvious? Not necessarily. For instance, ask yourself, is it obvious what the spirit world corresponds to in the materialistic worldview? What about divination? Or spirituality? To make the experiential approach and its utility clear we will look at some concrete examples of universal experiences and how they may be interpreted differently by the contrasting worldviews of materialism and idealism. Broadly speaking, the materialist conceives of everything as fundamentally physical and the idealists conceives of everything as fundamentally mental, the details are not important for this thought experiment.
Both the materialist and the idealist may for instance experience dreams, non-physical entities and higher forces, yet they will perceive different meanings in these phenomena. A materialist may refer to their dream experiences in terms of neurotransmitters while an idealist may call it a journey to the spirit realm. A materialist may refer to their experiences of non-physical entities by the word “dream characters” while an idealist might perceive them as “spirits” visiting from the spirit realm. A materialist may call their experience of a greater force “the laws of physics” while an idealist may call it “god”. In other words, both materialists and idealists have a common ground of experience but may perceive and interpret their experiences in different ways. In this way dreams, non-physical entities, and higher forces can serve as universal experiential definitions insofar as they are universally experienced. These experiential definitions to which everyone can relate can then be translated to different worldviews, i.e. a non-physical entity (universal) can translate to a spirit (spiritual worldview).
The central point is that even the most opposing worldviews are connected by a common experiential ground. Therefore, the shared phenomena of the human experience can become a platform for universal definitions, including that of spirituality. Now that we understand the rationale behind the experiential approach, we can proceed to use it for a universal definition of spirituality.
As it happens, most academic definitions of spirituality appear to share this phenomenological or experiential approach, making them a useful starting point for the current definition. I will begin by reviewing the existing definitions of spirituality and proceed to argue for my own experiential definition.
Existing Definitions of Spirituality
While the academic interest in spirituality has dramatically risen in recent decades, it is safe to say that we are far from an academic consensus when it comes to definition. With that said, there are some patterns to be found in existing definitions. In an article investigating the many meanings attributed to spirituality, the authors found 11 dominant patterns standing out in the 27 definitions of spirituality which were included in their analysis. They found the following patterns included in existing definitions.
“1. Transcendental experience/feelings/thought;
2. Life principle;
3. A process of re-formation/transformation;
4. A personal quest for the transcendent;
5. Relationship or connection with self, other, the cosmos, and God/ Transcendent;
6. A mechanism of enabling the individual to transcend the self in one capacity or another;
7. The unifying force or integrative energy within the individual and/or world and/or cosmos;
8. Personal and private;
9. Inner path that enables a person to discover the essence of their being.
10. Spirituality has 4 components: beliefs beyond material world, practice, awareness, and transcendental experience; and
11. Self-transcendence (self-forgetfulness, transpersonal identification, and mysticism).” (Vimal, 2015)
As we can see, there is an initially troubling diversity in the many meanings attributed to spirituality. How could spirituality both be something private and a cosmic unifying force? How could it both be something as generic as a life principle and something specific such as self-transcendence? Given the assumption that all of these 11 common themes are valid and meaningful characterizations of spirituality, one may be forced to conclude that they are somehow aspects of something more fundamental.
Indeed, multiple attempts have been made to identify this something, including the review above. The authors of the review observed that the transcendent is the most dominant feature on this list, and indeed the authors derived their definition of spirituality from this feature. “Spirituality is defined as an experiential sub-aspect of consciousness, which is the mental-aspect of a transcendental (spiritual) state of a mind-brain system 10 (or that of a brain-process) interacting with its environment, from the first-person perspective (1pp).”(Vimal, 2015) There is however an immediate issue that stands out to me in this definition. That is that this definition appears to base itself not just on experience, but also on the assumption that experience arises from the mind/brain system. Therefore, this definition would exclude all those people who do not think of their experience as a mind/brain phenomenon and therefore cannot serve as a universal definition. To solve this problem the authors could have derived the following definition from their analysis – “Spirituality is defined as the transcendental sub-aspect of experience”. Had the authors done so, it would have been better suited as a universal definition, however it may still not have gotten to the essence of spirituality.
I say this, because there have been other worthy attempts at defining the essential experience of spirituality, and which reached other conclusions than the experience of transcendence. Some other major approaches have identified spirituality with experiences of the sacred (Koenig et al., 2012) and still others have identified it with experiences of connection with greater forces (Friedman & Hartelius, 2013). While these may be great approaches with which to identify the most common features of experience associated with spirituality, I don’t believe they are sufficient to identify the most essential features of spirituality. The first reason for this is that while they all indeed appear to capture something fundamental about spirituality, it is not clear to me how they could all be at the essence at the same time. My concern is, that these experiences which have been most commonly associated with spirituality, may not be at the essence of spirituality but rather they may be the most fundamental or salient expressions of that essence. Such a fallacy may be exemplified by someone who identifies the ocean with its waves because the waves are the most salient feature of the ocean. In this analogy the ocean is not essentially its waves because the ocean does not cease to be an ocean when there are no waves. In a similar fashion, my hypothesis is that the experiences of transcendence, the sacred and higher forces may simply be the most notable waves of the deeper ocean of spirituality.
This is of course a hypothesis. A hypothesis which may be based on a shallow understanding of these existing definitions. Maybe one or more of these definitions could constitute the deeper ocean of spirituality. Be that as it may, an additional hypothesis will certainly not hurt the academic process. And as we will see in future sections, there are additional important reasons ahead to hypothesize a deeper essence underlying the existing definitions. So what makes me think that spirituality could have a deeper, more pervasive essence in experience? Why couldn’t spirituality refer to one or more of these already pervasive features?
The S-factor Definition
As I first encountered the dominant academic definitions of spirituality, I felt that something fundamental was missing, and that if I could only identify this something, then it would make sense of why people have identified spirituality with so many different things. I got the idea of calling this something the S-factor. My riddle went like this “The S-factor is that which is highly expressed in experiences of transcendence, the sacred and greater forces. What is the S-factor?” But why did I feel that something was missing in the first place and was that feeling rationally justifiable?
As I investigated where that feeling came from, I understood that I had simply encountered spiritual phenomena which did not fit well within those categories. In my research into Shamanism – the earliest form of spirituality – I learned that shamanic cultures conceived of a spirit world which existed alongside the physical world in such a way that they were intimately entangled with one another (Harvey, 2015). Everything in their environment, such as rocks and trees and creatures possessed both a physical and a spiritual dimension, including human beings (Harvey, 2005). This was not just true during special transcendent experiences, this was true all the time, even in the most mundane experiences of fiddling with one’s fingers or kicking over a rock. Such experiences did not seem particularly transcendent or sacred, yet if we were to ask a shaman, he could likely tell us all about the spirituality behind the fiddling of fingers. It seems that for the Shaman there is spirit in everything including those experiences which are not transcendent, sacred or in touch with greater forces. This line of thinking led me to the approach which I eventually ended up using in my definition of spirituality. What if the experience of spirit was the S-factor? In other words, what if the experience of spirit is that which is highly expressed in experiences of transcendence, the sacred and greater forces? What if spirituality is simply about spirit, in the same way that cosmology is about the cosmos and biology is about bio (life)? This hypothesis led me to investigate the meaning of spirit. So, what universal experience does spirit refer to?
Spirit
In Shamanism – Starting from the earliest form of spirituality still found in tribal settings across the world, what was “spirit” in Shamanism? In Shamanic cultures, much of if not the whole universe is perceived to be alive, conscious, and animated by spirit, which is why their worldview is sometimes known as animism (Harvey, 2005). As a result, people of shamanic cultures interact with the world as if it were alive and conscious, for instance by communicating with it. It appears that the “spiritual” in the shamanic universe had mind-like properties such as being alive and conscious but not restricted to that. The spirits of nature were capable of expressing the full palette of emotion as well as exhibiting the full range of personality and beyond. Depending on their personality and your relationship, spirits could make friends and they could make enemies (Stutley, 2002). However, spirits could also be considerably less humanlike and more abstract, such as in the cases of forest and mountain spirits. Therefore, it seems that in shamanic worldviews, spirit could express itself in many forms which would have a varying degree of resemblance with the human mind, ranging from highly familiar to highly alien. Yet it appears that the minimal common feature of all these expressions of spirit was aliveness and consciousness. Translating this to terms of experience, it would seem that in shamanism, spirit and therefore spirituality pertained to anything which was experienced as alive and conscious. Might this realm of experience be a candidate for the S – factor?
In Judeo-Christian Tradition – Moving forward to one of the main roots of the western cultural heritage, the Judeo-Christian tradition, I found some more clues. In biblical Hebrew the word for spirit is ruach which literally means “breath in motion” (Jacobs, 2013). In the bible this “breath in motion” could express itself as the broader sphere of conscious phenomena including emotion, volition, energy, power, temper, passion, jealousy and even depression. As with Shamanism, This Judeo-Christian notion of spirit also appears to extend well outside experiences of the transcendent, the sacred or of higher forces. Once again, the notion of spirit touches everyday experiential phenomena of consciousness as opposed to being restricted to dramatic experiences such as transcendence and the sacred. However significant the traditions of Shamanism and Judeo-Christianity, these are but two among many traditions found within the space of all spiritual traditions. If I am to ground a universal definition of spirituality in the experience of spirit, I need something more universal than that. To my luck, a couple of linguistics researchers specializing in cross-cultural semantic mapping provided the evidence needed to conclude whether the shamanic and judeo-christian notions of spirit were representative of a universal experience, the S-factor.
Cross Cultural Meanings – The word which the researchers investigated across cultures was not spirit but “breathe”, however with a crucial relevance for the word spirit (François, 2008). What they did was to take the word “breathe” and map out all the related meanings which were based on the same word “breathe”. Different meanings using the same root word or “lexeme” are said to be “colexified”. For example, in the english language the lexeme “straight” is used to signify many different meanings such as being heterosexual (being straight), speaking directly (straight to the point), being honest (a straight guy) ect. In this way many different meanings can derive from the same lexeme indicating an association in meaning. So, what the researchers did was to create a map of colexification for the lexeme “breathe” which illuminated all the different meanings associated with that word. They did this for 13 languages ranging from Russian and Arabic to Nelemwa, a southern oceanic language and Nahuatl an old Aztec language. This allowed them to identify any potential overlap of colexification across cultures, some of which may likely have been isolated from one another since the migration to the Americas was halted due to the melting of the ice caps at the end of the last ice age (Reich et al., 2012). However, even if culturally isolated cultures associate the same additional meanings with “breathe”, what does this have to do with spirit?
The relation is, that from their analysis, it is evident that people have universally used the same root word for “spirit” as they have for “breath” (François, 2008). In other words, these two meanings appear to have been universally colexified. This finding indicates an association in meaning between breath and spirit, suggesting that the perception of breath somehow resembles the perception of the phenomenon of spirit. In other words, the first universal meaning associated with spirit is breath, but far from the only one. From the same study we can see that the meaning of spirit is also universally colexified with “(breath of) life”, “living being, animal”, “soul of individual(immortal)”, “ghost”, “supernatural being (good / bad): spirit”, “strong passions: courage, pride arrogance, wrath”, “living part of individual: vital force”, “the person, the self”, “mind, thought”, “Seat of will & feelings: heart”, “frame of mind, mood”, “mental skills: intelligence, wit”. This is a great deal of overlap across 13 languages some of which may have been culturally isolated. What patterns can we find in this data?
Like the shamanic and the Judeo Christian notions of spirit, we can observe that the cross cultural associations with spirit are not restricted to the extraordinary realm of experience, supporting the idea that spirituality may relate to a more essential aspect of experience. Rather, most of the associated meanings with spirit pertain to the ordinary experiences of conscious phenomena such as moods, feelings, thoughts and passions. We can also observe an association between spirit and life such as we have seen in the traditions of shamanism where the whole world may appear alive including rocks and mountains. Finally, we can see that spirit has been associated with a force such as in breath of life and vital force. This was also seen in the Judeo-Christian Tradition. As we can see, there are some overarching universal patterns in the meanings of spirit, which we may use to understand the basic experience to which it refers. The patterns are consciousness and its phenomena, aliveness and a breathlike force. How can we use these patterns to understand the S-factor, i.e. the common ground of experience to which spirit refers?
Defining the S-factor
There may be multiple valid ways to look at these patterns and what they mean for the universal underlying experience of spirit. Earlier, we saw the example that the universal experience of greater forces may be interpreted both as god or the laws of nature depending on the worldview. What then is the equivalent universal experience in the case of spirit? Based on the three patterns I will define the universal experience underlying spirit as the experience of a living conscious pattern of energy (force). Living refers to the association between spirit and life. Conscious refers to the association between spirit and consciousness and its phenomena. Pattern of Energy refers to the association between spirit and a force or breath. I have translated force to pattern of energy because the experience of a pattern of energy captures the essential experience of force while potentially being more universally acceptable. Under the assumption that consciousness and its phenomena is generally experienced as some kind of living pattern of energy, we can shorten the definition of the S-factor to simply the “experience of consciousness and its phenomena”.
To make the difference between having and not having the S-factor experience intuitive, imagine holding an animation sketchbook featuring Mickey Mouse skipping along as he whistles a tune. If you look at each paper individually, you will not experience the S-factor. That is, you will not experience a living conscious pattern of energy in Mickey Mouse. However if you rapidly skip through the papers, Mickey may indeed appear to be skipping along and you may experience the S-factor, i.e. a living conscious pattern of energy may be experienced in Mickey. Another clear example of the S-factor experience may be observing an animal or observing one’s own conscious experience. In both of these cases a living conscious pattern of energy may be experienced. All in all, this means that the universal experience underlying the experience of spirit or the S-factor is defined as “the experience of consciousness and its phenomena”. As a final nuance, I will say that as with most other things the experience of a living conscious mattern of energy will stand out more when it changes, and more so when it changes significantly. That is, the S-factor will stand out more i.e. be more salient when it changes. An example of this can be when one’s own experience of consciousness changes dramatically, such as when a powerful emotion emerges, when one suddenly feels inspired or when one experiences an alteration of consciousness in any other way. This will also apply for the experience of consciousness outside oneself. In all of these cases the experience of consciousness is changing and it is therefore more likely to stand out in experience producing the experience of S-factor. We can therefore also think of the S-factor as the experience of change in consciousness and its phenomena. From here on I will therefore either refer to the S-factor as either “the experience of consciousness”, “the experience of consciousness and its phenomena” or “the experience of change/alteration in consciousness.” To give the definition name, I will call the definition either the S-factor definition or the consciousness definition. There are a couple of other nuances to point out and keep in mind when using the S-factor or the consciousness definition.
1. The S-factor may be experienced both in oneself and in others. One may experience a living conscious energy while observing one’s own stream of consciousness as well as that of others.
2. The S-factor is not a binary, it may come in varying degrees. For instance, one may experience a storm of emotions in one’s own stream of consciousness, yielding a strong experience of the S-factor. Yet one may also have a mundane experience of one’s stream of consciousness, yielding a weak experience of the S-factor
3. The S-factor may be experienced in anything and in everything. One does not necessarily have to perceive an animal or one’s own stream of consciousness to experience the S-factor. The S-factor can be had when perceiving a rock or when relating to the world at large. In other words, one may experience a living conscious energy in a rock and in the whole world.
To summarize, my answer to the question “what is that which is highly expressed in experiences of transcendence, the sacred and greater forces”, is first of all that it is the universal experience underlying the experience of spirit. I have called this universal experience the S-factor experience and defined it as the experience of a living conscious pattern of energy. I reached this conclusion using the experiential approach. I identified the common patterns in the meanings attributed to spirit across traditions and cultures and used those patterns to come to the conclusion. Therefore, what we have now, is a universal experiential definition of spirit. Using this definition, we can begin to see what other worldviews might mean by the same universal experience of a living conscious pattern of energy. For instance, we can now ask, what does the materialistic worldview call the S-factor, i.e. that which a spiritual worldview calls spirit? That is, how do they perceive the experience of consciousness and its phenomena and what meanings do they attribute to it? If my conclusion about the universal experience underlying spirit is sound, then we may have ourselves a useful cornerstone in the translation of spiritual phenomena across worldviews. However, the cornerstone is not enough. There are many other spiritual phenomena, such as a spiritual experience and a spiritual transformation which demands a universal understanding. I will now proceed to define some of the most common spiritual phenomena, and I will use the S-factor as the cornerstone to do so.
List of Definitions
As has been mentioned, In order to investigate the extent to which spirituality is vital to human life, we must be able to answer questions like “To what extent is an experience spiritual?” and “To what extent a person is spiritual?”. If we can answer these questions, we will also be able to correlate spirituality with indicators of human vitality to answer the research question. While defining spirit is not sufficient to answering these questions on its own, it can serve as a cornerstone to derive the definitions that will be. For this purpose, I will define the following phenomena – “spirituality”, “spiritual experience”, “spirit world”, “a spirit”, “spiritual transformation”, “spiritual practice”, “spiritual person”. As with spirit, I will attempt to define these phenomena in terms of universal experience.
Spirit – The universal experience underlying spirit (The S-factor) will be defined as the experience of a living conscious pattern of energy. The prototypical examples of an S-factor experience is when perceiving an animal or changes and alterations in one’s stream of consciousness, yet it is possible to experience the S-factor in everything including rocks and trees.
Spirituality – Spirituality will be defined broadly as the subject pertaining to spirit. In terms of universal experience – Spirituality: Pertaining to The Experience of Consciousness and its Phenomena. Beyond referring to spirituality as a subject I will also use it in another way depending on context. When talking about the spirituality of a person or a culture, I will take the spirituality to refer to that person or that culture’s / tradition’s paradigm for understanding and navigating the experience of consciousness and its phenomena. For instance, we might refer to Buddhist spirituality or Alice’s spirituality to refer to their paradigm or way of navigating the experience of consciousness and its phenomena.
Spiritual Experience – An experience is spiritual to the extent that spirit is changing or is salient (stands out). In terms of universal experience – An experience is spiritual to the extent that the experience of consciousness is changing or salient. So, when might consciousness be changing or salient and when may it not be? In mundane experiences, consciousness may behave in its ordinary patterns, and as a result we may not notice its dynamics very much. However, when consciousness changes out of the ordinary, it may become salient. As a result, one will tend to have highly spiritual experiences during dramatic changes in consciousness or highly altered states of consciousness. This could happen during experience of transcendence, connection with the sacred or with greater forces. However, an experience may not need to be dramatic in order to have a spiritual experience by this definition. Consciousness and its changes may also become highly salient during ordinary experiences if they are sufficiently engaged, such as when one is observing one’s stream of consciousness through mindfulness. Therefore, ordinary experiences can be spiritual as well as non-ordinary experiences, so long as one’s experience of consciousness changes and becomes salient.
Spirit World – The spirit world experience will refer to those experiences when one is completely immersed in spirit. In terms of universal experience, this means that the spirit world experience refers to those experiences when one is completely immersed in consciousness and its phenomena. The question is asked, if we experience everything through consciousness, then when are we not completely immersed in consciousness? To understand the difference, consider an analogy.
In this analogy you are snorkeling underwater and observing a coral reef. Here, the water is consciousness, and the reef is the object of consciousness which is observed through the medium of consciousness. In this scenario it is both possible for the water to change, such as if you start bleeding and the water turns red, and for the reef to change such as when a fish swims across the reef. If the water changes, it changes the way you experience everything including the reef. It is also possible for the reef to change, and for the water to stay the same. When speaking of changes in consciousness, I am speaking of changes in the water, not the reef. In this way, it is possible to go about one’s day and experience lots of different things and people, without noticing any changes in consciousness. Such a day would not have been spiritual. One’s consciousness may have changed quite a bit during the day, but if it wasn’t changed or salient in experience, then the experience was not spiritual by this definition. What then does it mean to be completely immersed in consciousness?
Using the metaphor, we can observe that the water can both be the medium through which we experience the contents of consciousness, and it can itself become the content of consciousness. It is possible to swim around and interact with the water itself, without reference to anything which might be experienced through the water. In the same way it is possible to interact only with consciousness without experiencing anything through consciousness. Maybe the most widely relatable example of this is when dreaming. When dreaming, one is interacting directly with consciousness, not through consciousness. In these cases I will say that one’s experience is completely immersed in consciousness, and one is having a spirit world experience.
A Spirit – A spirit will be defined as an entity or being of spirit. In terms of universal experience, a spirit will be defined as the experience of a conscious being. A conscious entity may be experienced in the form of physical people or animals. However a conscious entity may also be experienced in the form of non-physical beings such as dream characters, entity encounters during psychedelic experiences, or magical creatures in a spirit world experience.
Spiritual Transformation – Spiritual transformation will be defined as a transformation of spirit. In terms of universal experience, spiritual transformation will refer to the experience of a transformation in conscious phenomena. This may be the experience of a transformation of one’s own consciousness, or that of another. However the transformation could also concern something other than a conscious entity, such as a dream object transforming into another dream object.
Spiritual Growth – Spiritual growth will be defined as the growth of a spirit. In terms of universal experience spiritual growth refers to the experience of growth of a conscious being or entity. This may be an experience of growth in one’s own consciousness, such as the growth of a new perspective, or the experience of growth in another perceived consciousness.
Spiritual Practice – Spiritual Practice will be defined as a practice which engages intentionally with spirit. In terms of universal experience, a spiritual practice will refer to a practice which engages intentionally with consciousness and its phenomena. Again, this can be understood in contrast to a practice which engages something through consciousness. A clear example of a spiritual practice will be intentionally observing one’s stream of consciousness as well as consciously attempting to change one’s stream of consciousness.
Spiritual Navigation – Spiritual Navigation will be defined as navigating the space of spirit whether consciously or unconsciously. In terms of universal experience, spiritual Navigation will be defined as the experience of navigating the space of consciousness and its phenomena, either consciously or unconsciously. When one is navigating consciousness consciously one is engaging in spiritual practice. However, one may navigate consciousness unconsciously as well, such as when unconsciously regulating one’s emotions. In this case one is not practicing spirituality, but one is navigating spirit.
Spiritual Person – A person will be defined as spiritual to the extent that they are engaged in the navigating spirit. In terms of universal experience, a person will be defined as spiritual to the extent that they are engaged in the navigation of the experiential space of consciousness and its phenomena. By this account a monk who spends years learning to navigate their consciousness in a cave will be considered highly spiritual. On the other hand, a person who has spent their life avoiding a confrontation with consciousness will not be considered very spiritual. One might imagine a repressed personality who is fixated on navigating their life exclusively through consciousness as opposed to also navigating consciousness itself.
Spiritual Path – A spiritual path will be defined as a long-term course of spiritual growth. In terms of universal experience, a spiritual path refers to a long-term course of growth in consciousness. This course may be intentional in varying degrees. One person may follow a set path with set rules and techniques such as the noble eightfold path of Buddhism and reach famous milestones of consciousness. Another person may never have heard of spirituality, but simply reflect on the course of their growth in consciousness during their lives. Both these cases will be understood as spiritual paths.
Implications for the Thesis
The approach I have taken for the definition of spirituality and its related terms, is to understand the universal experience which “spirit” refers to or the S-factor and derive the rest of the terms from the S-factor. The S-factor was determined to be the experience of a living conscious pattern of energy or consciousness and the spiritual terms which will be used in this thesis have been translated to universal experiences in relation to the S-factor. I will therefore call this definition the S-factor definition or the consciousness definition. However, there is an important caveat to address about the definition and how it relates to the research question.
If spirituality is defined as pertaining to the experience of consciousness, is it not then by definition universal and vital? Presumably everyone has an experience of consciousness and could not live without that experience. This is true and clearly, I am not interested in investigating whether it is universal and vital to have the experience of consciousness. In fact, the definition was based on the assumption that the experience of consciousness is universal, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to say that the experience of consciousness is the universal experience underlying spirit. What is not assumed however, is that it is universal nor vital to be engaged in the navigation of spirit. In other words, it is not assumed that everyone is equally engaged in the understanding or navigation of their experience of consciousness, i.e., not everyone is equally spiritual.
So, when I ask whether spirituality should be considered a vital dimension of human life, I mean, should it be considered vital to be engaged in the experience of consciousness, i.e. to be spiritual? The same will apply when speaking about the spirituality of a culture. As I have mentioned, I still maintain that spirituality as a subject “pertains to the experience of consciousness and its phenomena”, just like cosmology as a subject pertains to the cosmos. However, when I talk about spirituality in human life or in culture, I am referring not just to the experience of consciousness and its phenomena, but to the engagement with the experience of consciousness for that life or culture.
Reconciling the Universal Definition with Existing Definitions
Now that we have a theory of spirituality as pertaining to the experience of consciousness – the S-factor – how can we explain the conclusions of the dominant definitions which identify spirituality with experiences of transcendence, the sacred and greater forces?
Reason 1 – These three types of experiences often entail dramatic alterations of consciousness (spirit) making consciousness highly changed / altered and salient in those experiences. According to the current definition of “spiritual experience” this places these three types of experiences as highly spiritual and by implication makes them likely to be identified with spirituality. In other words, the first reason I propose for the fact that these experiences have been identified with spirituality in academic definitions, is because they are likely to produce highly spiritual experiences.
Reason 2 – These three types of experiences are also likely highly valuable for individuals and religious traditions, making them a likely orientation of spiritual paths and growth. Given that so many peoples’ and culture’s spiritual lives have found these experiences so significant and are therefore oriented towards them, it is likely that spirituality has come to be identified with those experiences for this reason.
I contend that it is a fallacy to equate spirituality with its most salient or valued expressions, for the same reason that it is a fallacy to equate architecture with its most salient and valuable expressions. By this logic architecture might have been defined as the design and building of whichever construction is most salient and valued by a given culture, be it a church or the modern skyscraper. Of course, architecture expresses itself as much more than the most salient and valued constructions of any given culture, and in the same way, spirituality expresses itself as much more than the most salient and valued spiritual experiences of any given culture by the S-factor / consciousness definition. A definition which anchored itself to any of these three experiences could possibly exclude entire spiritual traditions with different orientations or those parts of spiritual traditions with a different orientation. Some traditions may for instance be primarily occupied with cultivating spiritual powers (powers of consciousness) and manipulating the spirit (experience of consciousness) of others as in the case of various magical traditions (Bailey, 2006). These are traditions which are centrally concerned with understanding and navigating spirit yet they would likely be excluded by the dominant definitions of spirituality.
I believe that the current definition of spirituality can transcend and include the current three dominant types of definitions, while having a sound basis in evidence and literature. Most importantly I believe that the current definition can serve as a universal definition of spirituality, because it is grounded in universal human experience and is able to effectively translate terms of spirituality to terms of universal human experience. Now that we have a working definition, the consciousness definition, what implications does this have for answering the question “should spirituality be considered a universal and vital dimension of human life??”.
Implications for Thesis
In order to answer the research question, it is necessary to know where and to what extent spirituality is present, so that we might be able to research the relationship between spirituality and human vitality. It is for this reason we need a clear and nuanced definition of spirituality which I believe to have provided. For instance, it is now clear which people and experiences are more or less spiritual, allowing me to test the assumption that highly spiritual people and experience will correlate with human vitality. The added benefit of the universal nature of this definition is that I can include studies on people who do not have a spiritual worldview or people who do not consider their experiences spiritual. As long as they had an experience where their consciousness became highly changed, altered or salient I know that they will have had what corresponds to a spiritual experience and so this person’s experience becomes relevant. This is important, because I am not just interested in the importance of spirituality for people who hold spiritual beliefs, I am interested in the importance of spirituality for human vitality universally.
Beyond the utility of this definition for my thesis, I also hope that it will help create a basis for understanding and exchange across worldviews, such that a scientist can learn something about consciousness from the shaman and vice versa. More generally, I hope that this definition can help bring about the development of universal spirituality.
Review
We began this section by asking what is required by a universal definition of spirituality. A universal definition of spirituality should first be able to distinguish when and to what extent spirituality is present and additionally it should be compatible across different worldviews. This is why the current definition must be based on universal human experience as opposed to a specific worldview. An experiential approach to universal definitions works insofar as it is capable of translating worldview specific notions, such as spirituality, to the meaning systems of all other worldviews. It can do this by linking worldview specific ideas, to the universal experiences to which they refer, and then ask what other worldviews might take these experiences to mean. It is for this reason that the current definition is based on the experiential approach.
After establishing the approach, we proceeded to review the major trends in existing definitions of spirituality. We found that academic definitions generally identify spirituality with either experiences of transcendence, the sacred, or of greater powers. I argued that the problem with these definitions is that they would exclude a range of spiritual phenomena which is not primarily concerned with those three types of experiences. This led to the conclusion spirituality must refer to an aspect of experience which is highly expressed but not exclusive to these three types of experiences. I called this something the S-factor. I went with the assumption that spirituality pertains to spirit, in a similar fashion to how psychology pertains to psyche. Therefore, I reasoned that the universal experience which “spirit” refers to, might be the S-factor (that which is highly expressed in experiences of transcendence, the sacred and greater forces. So what does spirit refer to?
To answer this question, I proceeded to analyze the meanings associated with spirit in Shamanism, the Judeo-Christian Tradition and in cross cultural studies. I found that the major characteristic patterns of these meanings were consciousness, aliveness and a breathlike force. From these patterns I concluded that spirit refers to the universal experience of a living conscious pattern of energy or the experience of consciousness in short. In other words, the universal experience of consciousness and its phenomena is that which is highly expressed in experiences of transcendence, the sacred and greater forces. In the list of definitions, I proceeded to derive a series of worldview specific notions related to spirituality from the S-factor, including the notion of spirituality. The universal definition of spirituality as a subject therefore became “pertaining to the experience of consciousness” and the spirituality of a person or culture came to mean “a person or culture’s paradigm for understanding and navigating the experience of consciousness and its phenomena.”
Finally, I addressed the question of why the dominant trends in existing definitions was to identify spirituality with transcendence, the sacred and greater forces. I gave two potential reasons for this. The first was that the experience of consciousness is dramatically salient during these three types of experiences making them more likely to become identified with spirituality. The second was that these three types of experiences may likely have been the most valued types of experiences making them the primary orientations of spiritual lives and traditions. This too could have led to an identification of spirituality with those three types of experiences. I concluded that if my conclusion is sound, then the current consciousness definition of spirituality could transcend and include the existing definitions, as well as being able to include those spiritual phenomena which may have been excluded by current definitions.
Now that the definitions and the historical context is understood, it is time to ask, how will the research question be answered?
Author – Sagi Andersen