akautonomics said:
I was just noting that the cannabis and psychedelic community frequently make their drug use and wanky spiritual ideas a huge part of their self-identity.
That's the thing. All these discussions, and I'm still not satisfied that I have a coherent conception of what spirituality
is (if anything, I am most satisfied with MDAO's formulation put forth in a prior thread). I hold my experiences with psychedelics as having great value, and they've exerted a great impact on my current worldview, but they have also led me toward a sort of mystical atheism (or rather, rumination on how mystical experiences speak to the limits of what the axioms allowing explication to occur at all place on what can be explicated). More precisely, the limits of explication suggest to me that the grounding of being lies beyond that which presupposes a distinction between being and non-being, thus pointing to a sort of atheism/pantheism. In other words, being is grounded beyond the realm of what beings can say about what it is to be.
I think a key part of my epistemological method is skepticism toward the interpretation of psychedelic experiences suggested by psychedelics themselves; to experience psychedelia is simply to approach experience with an alternate interpretive lens, not clearly a priori more or less valid than interpretations of experience via other sets of axioms. Like any experience, psychedelia is to be ruminated upon and reinterpreted from varying mindsets.
I have been told by multiple people that I am spiritual, but I am also profoundly faithless: all for me must be tentative--I am willing to adopt sets of axioms tentatively to see where they go, but I see no grounding for certainty in any of the perspectives that they allow me to build. And so my question for those spiritual is this: can one be deeply spiritual but also profoundly faithless?
re: the place of science in spirituality:
I think that any viable spirituality must reckon with the findings of science. Even insofar as one discovers the epistemological limitations of the scientific method, and even if one reckons with the role of axiomatically driven construction of the objects of empirical study, one cannot offhandedly dismiss scientific findings, particularly without some clear, well justified alternative to be put forth instead. Thus, spirituality bereft of open dialog with science (off-handed dismissal of scientific findings does not count as dialogue) stands to produce its own obsolescence.
rangrz said:
I also think in many cases, it's that "spiritual" ideas are EASY to understand. They are accessible to almost anyone with little effort or education required.
Not for me. Rather, the point of spirituality seems to be to try to reckon with that which lies beyond the limits of what one is able to conceptualize. Thus, to act spiritually is to participate in a generative enterprise, where one draws multiple, limited interpretations of something that cannot be captured fully (in principle).
ebola
