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What does it mean to be spiritual?

My understanding of Nirvana is that ego is annihilated.. There is still a sense of awareness which for Buddhists is the Buddha Nature.
For me being able to cease thinking completely and just stop for a while wouldnt suck...
it would be heavenly.
 
Ah. I actually just meant that I personally don't know what "spirituality" means, and I have had trouble discerning such from the variety of answers people give to the question. This doesn't entail that I reject spirituality as fruitless or meaningless. A lot of ambiguous things mean stuff. :p And how could I reject something without first knowing what it is? :p

You know, this got me thinking: I wonder how many people who list spirituality among their main interests in life, and who truly engage in it according to the dictionary definition, would be nonetheless just as stumped as you are to define the term. I bet a lot!

To what extent would rejection of the distinction between material and immaterial as ontologically fundamental fit into the set of spiritual takes? Certainly, doing so fits with your prior definition, whereby the individual tries to look to a more fundamental reality beyond mundane appearances.

Yes, I think it's perfectly compatible. The idea of whether or not there might be an overarching (or behind the scenes, if you prefer) order, purpose, plan, or meta-structure to our world and our lives in it, despite our inability to perceive it most of the time, is a wholly separate philosophical question from that of what "material" is. For example, if there is a higher power and it has intervened in the lives of individual humans in ways they have perceived, it has necessarily done so using physical means and effects that can be deemed physical events.

But what of the physicist who holds the ontological take that mathematical structures (or "information" in general), not matter, are fundamental to how the multiverse is structured? Is that a spiritual take?

The only thing I see missing is the individual's personal feeling of connectedness to this structure. Is this something most mathematicians and physicists feel in their hearts?
 
MyDoorsAreOpen said:
The only thing I see missing is the individual's personal feeling of connectedness to this structure. Is this something most mathematicians and physicists feel in their hearts?
Venerable MDAO, feel in their hearts? Sociopathic rapists likely feel rape in their hearts. I'm sure early 1900's lynch mobs felt some sort of passion in their collective hearts. As much as thought and cold cognition has ever led men astray I'm confident the emotional faculties have led men much further astray. Thus my feeling disturbed by your bringing feeling up as a spiritual criteria, as ironic as that might be.
 
^ Maybe not the best phrasing, but the point is that spirituality is a subjective feeling of connectedness. Both of your examples involve feeling passionate, but not personally connected to something much greater. I can only speak for myself, but analyzing anything objectively feels entirely different from searching for a meaningful place from myself in the greater picture. Can there be commonalities? Sure. I've felt awe, for example, when scientifically studying the human body. But it involves a wholly separate mental module than, say, going to a Kabbalah group.

In the end, though, I think we're going to find that spirituality is not set apart from other mental actions in which people seek to reframe or reevaluate their relationship with the world around them. It shares borders (i.e. common features) with artistry, philosophy, storytelling / mythmaking, national identity building, and even career training.
 
^Interesting. What sort of connection to you see between spirituality and career training?
 
Brugha Synergy is an example of an explanation of how spiritual belief systems, can befit many facets of society - as their structure is the working of many system structures - i feel with Hindu, and Christian beliefs, there is a 'quantitative-being' type theory which is the goal attained for the self, and a vital point missing in these thought systems. Yoga i feel is a good way to start learning more about this through experience.


NSFW:

Nomology, a decision science system for explaining qualitative structures is shown to
have three dimensions: adjusting, convincing and committing. Examples of the
system include Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Jung’s thinking types, the Systems
Development Life Cycle, and the Oriental systems approach WSR. The convincing
and committing systems combine into one system of developing, which is shown to be
associated with autopoiesis and to have the energy of negative-entropy. Two cases of
adjusting are shown to be linked: (1) body, mind, soul and spirit, and (2) direction,
mission, vision and synergy. The adjusting and developing systems combine into a
system of change management, examples of which include the Twelve Step
programme of Alcoholics Anonymous and from Information Systems development.
NOMOLOGY: A CONTEXT FOR EXAMINING SYSTEMS
Nomology, the science of the laws of the mind (Hamilton, 1877, pp. 122- 8 ) is a
meta-model


^
Cathal M. Brugha
 
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^Interesting. What sort of connection to you see between spirituality and career training?

Both of them involve redefining your identity in terms of membership in something greater than yourself, and modifying your behaviors, thought processes, and to some extent even values, to match that change in perspective. It's simply a matter of scale, that is, the size and scope of the greater plan in which you're finding a place for yourself.

I, as well as scholars of religious and fraternal orders like Manly P. Hall and Victor Frankl, would argue that committing oneself to a greater group of people with a common cause serves as a model for the individual's search for a place in a greater cosmic plan. First we learn how to get along with other people, then we extrapolate those lessons for getting along with the source(s) of our very existence. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. As above so below. :)
 
I think you have quite a good question there. I wouldn't want to experience the opposite, but your question made me wonder what it means to not be spiritual. I wonder if it is possible for a person to not be spiritual at all.
 
^ I've met plenty of people who've described themselves as not at all spiritual. Ask them, and they'll tell you they couldn't care less where they've come from, where they're going, or what this all means. They're content to focus solely on the here and now, the tangible and concrete. A lot of such people would also self-describe, in my experience, as very hard-nosed or practical -- "If I can't see it and touch it, and can't clearly see its implications for my life, it doesn't matter to me."

I don't have the surveys to back this up, but I'd even bet many people who affiliate with an organized religion are actually not all that spiritual. I've even heard it said that spirituality is by and large a feminine phenomenon, and that for most men who attend religious services, the value is entirely social. In the US at least, this is especially true, I've noticed, for the so called ethno-religions like Judaism, the Armenian church, most of the Eastern Orthodox churches, and the indigenous Chinese religion. Many people follow these traditions and attend their services and rituals purely as a show of ethnic solidarity and a chance to stay connected with their roots and their ethnic communities, and seldom use them as a jumping off point for thinking about where they fit into an even greater cosmic picture.
 
I see spirituality as a measure of objectivity over your own existance.

A seperateness of conciousness from the hardwired responses of your own body and brain.

Being in touch with the part that monitors and assesses the needs desires and emotions of the human animal that we all are. This part, I suppose could be thought of as the soul. Its not relevant to spirituality if this part is thought of as truly seperate, like the christian notion of a soul.

Being willing to spend time in the soul headspace, or in particular not being afraid to do so, is the hallmark of a spiritual person.

So many people are slaves to their human animal, I feel that in an important way that these people don't really exist, they live and die according to the fate of their human animal. Too lazy to do other than act out the reactions their central nervous system suggests. Wasting their existance.

A spiritual person can make choices at a higher level of awareness granting some feeling of being able to influence the fate of their lives. At the least, they are awake to experience their fate and appreciate existance.
 
I don't have the surveys to back this up, but I'd even bet many people who affiliate with an organized religion are actually not all that spiritual. I've even heard it said that spirituality is by and large a feminine phenomenon, and that for most men who attend religious services, the value is entirely social. In the US at least, this is especially true, I've noticed, for the so called ethno-religions like Judaism, the Armenian church, most of the Eastern Orthodox churches, and the indigenous Chinese religion. Many people follow these traditions and attend their services and rituals purely as a show of ethnic solidarity and a chance to stay connected with their roots and their ethnic communities, and seldom use them as a jumping off point for thinking about where they fit into an even greater cosmic picture.
I agree re the dogs body of organised religion.

I think women are more open to spiritual notions, but tend to get lost in it all without achieving any real perspective. Window shoppiing for enlightnement.

Men seem more inclined to reject it out of hand as irrelevant or counterproductive, disdaining it entirely.
 
I agree re the dogs body of organised religion.

Hm?

I think women are more open to spiritual notions, but tend to get lost in it all without achieving any real perspective. Window shoppiing for enlightnement.

Men seem more inclined to reject it out of hand as irrelevant or counterproductive, disdaining it entirely.

I've heard psychologists say that the female mind is optimized for understanding complex interpersonal situations, whereas the male mind is optimized for understanding complex systems of things and facts. Granted that's painting with very broad strokes, but I think there's some truth to it statistically. If spirituality is more about feeling, communication, and a personal relationship, then it makes sense that more women than men would have an interest and aptitude in it. A highly masculine mind, on the other hand, is likely to hear talk of spirituality and ask, "What are the metaphysical facts as we know them, and how do these things you're saying fit with what we already know?" They're more interested in an objective and systematic understanding of what might be out there, than they are of just sending out a metaphorical "message in a bottle" to whomever or whatever might be out there.

My wife, who is Jewish, has told me that her people have always taken it as an article of faith that women are inherently spiritual because they are natural nurturers and communicators, whereas for men spirituality is something that needs to be actively cultivated.

I speak as an anatomical straight male who is towards the middle of the gender spectrum, and has both of these faculties about equally as developed. I can really see both sides of this.
 
Spirituality is feeling, or seeking to feel, a subjective connection to a higher power or reality that transcends the mundane world.

This seems like a pretty straightforward definition to me

I still don't get it. :(

"Spirituality is feeling, or seeking to feel, a subjective connection to..." -- O.K., I'm definitely with you so far...

"...a higher power or reality..." -- higher in what way? Better? More perfect? Or does "higher" mean more inclusive, as in, "a genus is higher biological classification than a species, because it is a broader category"? Or is it higher in the hierarchy of causality, meaning, the higher power caused us to exist, not vice versa? Or something different yet?

"...that transcends..." -- I'm assuming that this is restating the "higher" concept that I just questioned.

"...the mundane world." -- There are two definitions for "mundane" that I see in the dictionary I'm using: 1) "Lacking interest or excitement; dull." 2) "Of this earthly world rather than a heavenly or spiritual one." Which are you referring to? I would be surprised if your definition of spirituality rested on the premise that the world is a dull place, so, I'm assuming you're using the second definition. But that doesn't work either, because it just makes for a circular definition, which amounts to, "spirituality is the search for a connection to something spiritual".


I'm not trying to pick apart your definition for sport, by the way -- I genuinely want to understand what spirituality is.
 
spiritual[ spir-i-choo-uh l ]
adjective
1.of, pertaining to, or consisting of spirit; incorporeal.
2.of or pertaining to the spirit or soul, as distinguished from the physical nature: a spiritual approach to life.
3.closely akin in interests, attitude, outlook, etc.: the professor's spiritual heir in linguistics.

I don't think anyone actually printed a definition for the term spiritual, so I thought it would be a good add for this forum.

So, with that, I'd like to say that spiritualism (pertaining to our overall societie's definition, would be a different definition than the term as defined by the individual. As anyone can see by the posts found here, spiritual ideals or understandings of any individual are verry different in many ways. This is true despite that as a word it can posess many analogous meanings to the majority of people, and as well, invoke feelings in nearly all people which contain patterns of similarities.
 
I don't think anyone actually printed a definition for the term spiritual, so I thought it would be a good add for this forum.

Indeed. Good call.

O.K., so, what I can gather from dictionary trawling, spirituality is basically a term for any pursuit concerned with the human spirit or soul. The human spirit or soul is, and this is key, the essential and immaterial part of a human being.

My question now is, because I'm a materialist, does that make spirituality completely inaccessible to me?
 
If you ask me, the most basic premise of the spiritual mindset is that life/existence is inherently meaningful. The opposing viewpoint would be nihilism.
 
Perhaps some visual aid would be of assistance.

Depending upon individual quirks, preferences, or cultural sensibilities, "being spiritual" could look like [but is not limited to looking like] this:

burning_munk.jpg


...or this:

Little%20Suicide%20bomber.jpg
 
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My question now is, because I'm a materialist, does that make spirituality completely inaccessible to me?

I think that depends on what you hold to be materially possible. As qwe has described many times in here (and could probably word better than I), it's possible that some phenomena we deem supernatural are actually quite natural, but well beyond what we're currently aware of as physically possible. For example, it's possible that angels are actually disguised messengers from the extraterrestrial race that's been farming us for our whole existence. This is not a spiritual scenario that most of us would wish for, but it is indeed spirituality: it does propose a higher purpose to human existence, beyond the mundane world.

On the other hand, if by "materialist" you mean that you accept the data from empirical science (interpreted and extrapolated by formal logic, as needed) as the only reliable source of truth, then no, I don't see how anything most people would recognize as spirituality can be shoehorned into that, though I've seen many, many people try. Spirituality inherently involves heartfelt openness to the idea that what we directly observe of the human condition is not nearly all there is. To me, the proposition that your human existence is a random, one-off, purposeless accident of an utterly indifferent universe is about as far from spirituality as you can possibly get. If you share this belief, but also desire something you feel right calling "spirituality", don't take my word for it -- feel free to seek out one of the many highly verbose individuals out there who feel these two things are compatible. All I'm saying is, I've never been sold.

Never Knows Best said:
If you ask me, the most basic premise of the spiritual mindset is that life/existence is inherently meaningful. The opposing viewpoint would be nihilism.

This. Well said.
 
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