Spiritual, not Religious
‘I’m spiritual; not religious.’
The disclaimer one hastily adds to disassociate themselves from the major organised belief systems, while acknowledging that the rational mind does not, in fact, have all the answers. But what does that really mean in practical terms?
For nearly 500 years Western culture has reinforced that nothing can have greater authority over one’s life than oneself. That one’s free will (God-given or not) is one’s power.
Indeed, there are many people today who, quite understandably, dismiss the notion that they have anything resembling a spiritual life. They feel the admittance of forces beyond their perception at work in their lives deprives them of their individual agency.
Whether we believe it or not, we are all spiritual beings. Skeptics may never describe it as such, but those who adamantly oppose the existence of a more numinous reality are often just looking for answers to the same big questions as those who embrace it.
Why do things happen the way they happen?
But I don’t think the goal of developing spiritual practice is finding answers — at least not any as concrete as we might like. This is the product of a self-centring worldview, where we assume all is knowable from within the human senses, and only with a certain amount of striving may you transcend your limitations.
Instead, what happens if we consider the spiritual as something transpersonal? Where we may seek to anchor ourselves amidst a chaotic sea of contradictory information in our shared questions, rather than their answers. Healthy spirituality is the honest interrogation of our greatest hopes, fears, and what values and ideals emerge from them.
It is that which guides individuals unconsciously toward their perceived purpose within a community, and a community toward fulfilling the collective’s needs and ambitions. Whatever one’s practice entails, it is what informs how to build, how to sustain, and how to grow in our relationships.
Spirituality is ultimately a practice of acknowledging control (and the acceptance of one’s inevitable lack of it). At its best it offers freedom to exist without shame and fear. Unchecked, it clenches like a fist, unable to relinquish its grip on what freedoms it strives for and, over time, will transform into its own oppressive structure.
We see this in the familiar ironclad dogma of organised religion, which stifles the individual and is slow to respond to the need for change within the collective. But we also see it in the inertia of much of the New Age movement, where existence is flattened into a vague conception of ‘oneness’ that does little to address the complexity of socio-economic struggles faced by many of its community.
While there are of course healthy forms of both religious and New Age practices, the popular perception of a spiritual life in the global West lacks potency and practicality to achieve its supposed visions.
We would far rather pray to destroy our demons than bring them into the light of our consciousness and understand them better.
We so often turn to the tarot and the stars in our moments of anxious activation, but use it intellectualise or disassociate from the emotional reality rather than take meaningful steps to work through it.
I do not mean this to chastise, only to consider what we set our intention toward. That we might stop striving against the things we dread, and locate its shadow within ourselves.
If your spiritual practice does not allow you to actually experience how we are interconnected, then what good does it do you?
We must tend to our spiritual life like a garden, or an unfinished painting; a constant, yet creative, work in progress. Spiritual practice does not provide answers to the things beyond our control, it invites us to be curious about the process by which we learn to accept, and love, what we have feared.
