[Socrates]

What is “Spiritual”, “Spirituality”, “Religion” and “Religious”?

What does “spiritual” and “spirituality” mean? What does “religion” and “religious” mean? They are often used in conjunction with each other and just as often they are used disjunctively. This inquiry will not be derived from some etymological or historical definitions to begin with; this will be purely from our own investigation, our intuition if you will. I will begin to question as many different possible uses for these terms and then see where we arrive, and then we will take a look at something much more tangible, such as the etymology, history and psychology. The dialectic that follows will therefore be devoid of the general definitions and based on experience. The religious man, or woman, often disclose their beliefs as a discipline, which can often lead to superstition, mainly based on the fact that the knowledge they accept as the truth has been given to them second-hand and not through their own understanding. Spiritual men and women when in a distinctive separation from religion/religious see their beliefs and/or ideas (as there is also a distinction between these too) as “coming from within”, in order to express their own views as authentic, in the sense that they were arrived at through their own intuition and/or critical thinking.

When religious and spiritual are conjunctive, they are both the result of a leap of faith. They also conjoin through a relative experience, such as a vivid and lucid dream or other mystical experience that is used as proof of the existence, truth and presence of divinity as something ontologically objective, even though the access to the experience (phenomena) was subjective to “reach” through discipline the noumena. One quality that is conjunct and inseparable between these terms and disclosures is that, idea or belief, intuition or experience, external, or from internal to external, is the quality of layout, structure, metaphysics and order.

The religious person believes in an objective being, sometimes literally a man or woman in the form of a god or goddess that has influence over human affairs. The spiritual person believes in an objective being sometimes in the same sense, sometimes even a god or goddess, as spiritual can be mutually inclusive of religious, therefore in this definition there is no difference. The spiritual disclosure may include an élan vital, a vital force, such as magnetism and electricity, as we see in the “Electric Universe Theory”. Often light is seen as a monad substance that we can reduce to explain order, it appears to be of a scientific (physics) nature of inquiry, whereby material reduction is used to qualify order. This can be seen as a kind of pantheism, or even panentheism, defining being, or God with “Consciousness in Light”. This type of disclosure still seeks ethics, morals and principles much the same way as the religious and or alternative spirituality disclosure, it uses Platonism as ontology and realism through a materialist reduction, it is notably the same idea as science, except that this is far from empirical and to quote Quine, it “dulls the edge of Occams’ Razor” in an infinite regression. Spiritual or religious, is not science in this regard in terms of definition and principle, it is more of a “gnosis”.
The exception, it seems as to why spiritual and spirituality can be distinct, is based on the externalisation of ideas and beliefs from within, this implies relative perspective, that each is entitled to their own view and all views are true, but they can contradict each other.

Spiritual is not just the externalisation of ideas and beliefs from the person subjectively, or this would only be defined as purely a mental quality instead of spiritual, of which mind and spirit are sometimes used in conjunction too (German: Gieste). Spiritual then, is often used in the sense that there is a “source” that “can be known”, through our own ideas and beliefs about the connection and interrelatedness of our being with other beings and finally the supreme being itself, be it a God or Goddess, a pantheistic innate force of nature (all is God) disclosure for the connection between present day humans and their ancestors, long since passed away who are still believed to have that deific influence through sacrifice and traditions.

A Source always seems, to be “required” to define something “spiritual” and/or “religious”. I have isolated a bipartide definition for “source”. From this point on, “internal source” will be explained using Sourdre, a French term similar to the usage of source in this way that means “well up” or “rise”, the limitations and deceptions of language can often negate a defining meaning in a context of ontology and epistemology, therefore other languages are required to add better emphasis. Sourdre is not too far removed from “emanate”, which has multiple meanings pertaining to “rising out of, to flow out of, spring out of, proceed from”, except Sourdre is more internal and subjective, autopoetic and pertains to creation from within. Emanation (source) can be nature, a literal being or object of some kind, like ancestors or in some cases an alien species. The source is influential while either hidden, dead or far away. Sourdre and emanation expresses what something rises from, this inquiry will define what is “rising from” and the second part will define what it is “rising from”. Emanation source is a term used by many religious/spiritual ideas, mainly Gnosticism and Cabbala, (although we will soon understand that these are mutually inclusive) they are usually described as ontologically objective, (exists independent of feelings, thoughts and reactions) whereas sourdre, accommodates a more subjective and autopoetic (self creating, self producing) possibility. There is, of course, an infinitely variable-disclosure of sourdre and emanation, the brief amount of contextual ideas mentioned here on in, are to give us an idea of the impression we observe when “religious or spiritual” is used as an abstract disclosure of ideas and beliefs.

Source emanation is often, through disciplines, to be found or affirmed, meaning that it is only the conditional perception of the observer that prevents the hidden, occulted emanation from either manifesting, having influence at all, or being present at all, therefore beliefs indicate it has to be awoken, hence why sourdre/emanation influences our definition of source.

As the risen is interpreted as more and more remote from its influences, the manifestations are regarded as orphaned, asunder, tainted, impure, fragmented and broken, whereas the abstract ideal is pure, perfect and revered as truth. We can begin to understand what spiritual and religious seem to expose about human nature in the material world, we have an innate capacity and drive to see if something else is out there, yet it starts with a tainted view with what is here. We will examine suffering later in this thesis, which is central to both spirituality and religion. To keep to a fine point, we use ostensive definitions, we extend ourselves through language, this is what makes humankind unique in the fact that it can imagine complex ideas that have no impression to create or recall outside the palace of memory, a capacity to look beyond the pointing finger (language) and towards an object, which is not always material, rather it is abstract .

Simply put the capacity of ostensive extension, is that we desire to understand why and how we are/ are in/are part of and to define “this”, wanting to know how/why we get to/ we get in/we can be of/ we came from and how/why we rose from, “that”, while defining what exactly “that” is. Yet we will see upon inquiry, “that”, is directly related and inseparable from “this”, especially on the matter of suffering and how it can be overcome, which is central to both religion and spirituality, it is a reflection.

Let’s once again go back to the sourdre-like claim regarding the “that” -“it all comes from within”. This is incredibly ambiguous when you think about it. Either it implies that what we believe, is created entirely by ourselves, making man or woman the sourdre of the ideas, meaning that the ends are to awaken unto ourselves and therefore there is no emanation at all. From the pantheistic disclosure, through our own beliefs and ideas, we can connect to an emanation, some form of collective consciousness or force that in turn emanates back to mankind once the veil has been lifted, which is again counter intuitive as the “source” is in the social sphere of experience and can be nothing more than collective sourdre. There is of course another eventuality, that of solipsism. We could create an idea, turn it into a God or Goddess (deification), or to be more general, we create sourdre in our minds and then believe it to be absolute sourdre, eternal and unconditional, leading to a total affirmation of “that” sourdre/emanation and nothing else, which usually results in a burden of responsibility confused with obligation and duty to the sourdre/emanation and lack of empathy, understanding and independent will.

What causes this problem? What makes religion and spiritual difficult and/or impossible to separate? Essentially we could say that all religion starts off as a spiritual externalisation, idea created and externalised which later on is either forgotten to be a creation of man or it is taken to be so full of truth and wisdom that it must have been eternally existent anyway. The bipartide definition of sources, emanation/sourdre, is one such description of how easily abstractions can be confused for the concrete.

This is probably one of the most hazardously profound questions to ask, we will come to understand that it is nothing more than the layout and structure that is regarded as affirming “that” to be true, rather than the content and details of beliefs and ideas that we term religious and spiritual. Marshall McLuhan in his work Understanding Media speaks of how man “extends” himself via mediums, such as the wheel is the extension of the foot. In modern times, electricity in the form of the medium of the radio and television is interpreted by McLuhan as an “extension of the central nervous system”, which currently can be extended to the internet and beyond into the stars via satellites. He also shows how the content of the medium is incidental, that we are essentially only referring to another medium when we talk about the content. His deterministic view of media, shows how we have shrunk the world into a “global village” that is fast in delivery of content (mediums) and this leads to instant reaction, in essence, the medium is the message and as the mediums themselves extend and emerge, we become engulfed by them, governed by them, they are like a God in many respects. Mankind confuses the content as the message, when it is the medium itself that is the object of the message. An analogy would be the creation of a machine by man that eventually overtakes and controls man.

Upon closer analysis of how spiritual means – it comes from within – yet it is described as either connecting with a pre-existent emanation or it creates the sourdre existent and establishes it as ontologically objective (something that exists independently of our feelings thoughts and reactions), or an imperative objective (a goal to work towards “that” from “this”), the structure begins to emerge to the analyst with more clarity. “That” is an external source that is objective, therefore independent of (“this”) our emotions, thoughts, feelings and reactions, therefore fixed, eternal, unchanging and absolute, it is an objective in the sense that it implies imperative, usually moral in nature, leading to a devout quest to reach a goal and to fulfil an objective from the objective itself via the communication from within or in the case of religious people who obtain information second hand, which has been termed less esoteric and more exoteric, this is done indirectly through an “other”, meaning that religious is always looking towards an end. There is also the picture of something that has no beginning and no end. This seems counter intuitive. Given that teleology is obtained from the observations in nature supposedly, we can definitely see that what is being reported as “natural” for divinity by the spiritual, there seems to be lots of start, finish, fix and no flux. This is where we must ask where the ideas come from, if not from an impression, as the outcome of the content of the philosophy is nothing like what is reported to be truth in the structure. The content is confused with the medium, lost in the details so to speak, layer upon layer of information that soon act upon our lives to the point where the medium determines our lives. This bias towards the object, makes us “the object” too, there soon becomes no distinction between mediums, this becomes that, subject becomes object.

Spiritual people often use gurus, priests and mediums who claim to be the access to “that” and who have the way and method to fulfil the objectives, much the same way that religious people do. If escape from religion is what you seek, think again, as the same structure, the same beliefs, are represented and reinterpreted in a different emerging form.

I have hesitated to use the term “scam or trick”, which is harsh, but my intention is to show how we can learn from a time that we were fooled by someone to know that although different words are used by other scammers, we know that underneath, the scam is the same. I know that everyone will be able to relate to this analogy too. How many times have we received emails that request our bank account details as the sender is dying of cancer and has no relatives and wants to avoid giving the money to the state, or that there is charitable cause that you are required for to deliver the money with the promise of a reward, or that the president of Nigeria has died in a plane crash and that the sender is a close associate of him and needs to protect an investment from those who are usurping the government? You get the idea, the terms change, but essentially it is a mail fraud scam, once you give your bank account details, passport or driving licence over to the sender, you will be looted.

This is simply an example of how an idea can be interpreted many ways, this is not to say that religions and spirituality are a scam, this is definitely not our positive affirmation, which would be too easy to be pessimistic about. What it also indicates is that no impression of a new scheme is required, only the capacity to imagine and how to get from “this” to “that”.

The main maxim we will extract is that the structure is the same, the fundamental code that is required for mankind to say “That is religious” or “That is Spiritual”, only the details differ and more often than not, we sometimes get lost in the details. This labyrinth of ideas and beliefs mask over the real question of personal disclosures about our beliefs and ideas regarding the possibilities of a cosmic order, a cause for all existence, a cause for our actions, a root of being and certainties.

As long as the content fits the structure, a disclosure is accepted as religious or spiritual. Then we have the problem of sorting out whether it is sourdre or emanation in quality, is it more about “this” or “that” or is it about getting from one or the other? Do we have to choose between the two, or do we embrace them as a whole?

Often spiritual/religious ideas and beliefs are sought after due a desire of escapism while finding responsibility for determined states of affairs. Bad habits are likely to confuse responsibility with duty and obligation, when we look for a cause for issues like suffering and even more positive outcomes in life, making the alleged causation the emanation. This habitual search for cause of the effect then leads to the responsibility that we confuse with duty, obligation and morality, the belief that the cause has the right answers that we have deviated away from as the emanation becomes more and more remote and less-knowable. We the orphaned, the ones torn asunder and we the fragmented are in “this” despairing existence and we want “that” to come to us, or to show us the way in order to fix, save and welcome us, we want to belong and leave isolation, alienation and suffering behind.

The causa prima is nothing more than a justification of the objectives we set for ourselves in society, which we commonly refer to as laws, or canonical laws in Biblical scripture.
 
Ultimate and Conventional Life Defining Qualities

What if spirituality is a creation of mankind? What then? Do we respond with disillusionment because feel we were lied to, or do we perceive it as the single greatest accomplishment man has ever achieved?

What of this search for the cause? Does finding the emanation evoke responsibility in the form of duty, or is it only a self justification that leads to solipsism? How do gurus, priests and spiritual/religious thinkers come up with these disclosures that always fit a certain structure showing “this” and “that”? Later we will look at suffering, which is often only associated with human experience, for now as a preliminary invocation we will explore the external world of life, which is free from suffering we shall assume.

To refresh our principles: Every impression leads to an idea, yet ideas can exist outside of our perception? What! Is this not a misconception of form that cultural articulation conventionally leads to something we call “truth”, rather than ultimately existing in another realm external to perception? Ultimately we know this to be a fallacy; conventionality is always the drive behind metaphysics, eclipsing sourdre for a mind-created dictator thought of as an emanation!

The opera of the beehive, every year the same social experiment takes place. The workers provide for the Queen who in turn provides only for herself the next royal generation that will rule the workers, who will in turn, like her noble self, prevent the workers from reproducing. Yet these creatures perform and it seems so mechanical, display the drive and will of the royal Queen, the will to reproduce another generation, the most fundamental and ultimate defining quality of “this” in life, being self preservation. Upon the digestion of their eggs, the slavish workers attack the Queen and sting her to death, only to face their demise in mere days or weeks, or if they are lucky, at best once the seasons change into autumn. The next year, the very same social experiment is conducted with the very same results. If they were given more time to live, would this allow an evolution of the opera and its predictable outcomes, that seem determined if it were not for the ultimate life quality of self preservation that the workers show, near the end of their “this”, a development of their own idea of “that”, but as is cosmic humility, they are slaves to the environment, the weather, ultimate defining life quality or not, they meet their end without a chance of passing it onto the next generation.
The flower responds to the stimuli of the Sun, it absorbs the light and it converts the light into energy that commences the photosynthesis process of all plants, it grows from a seed, it lives and then it dies. “This”, like the Opera of the beehive, is eternally repeated. It is this impression that gives us the idea that all life is determined in a plan of some kind and everything under the Sun is nothing more than a puppet on the strings of “that” itself.

Plants, stars and flowers don’t have awareness, nor do they have emanated form, they have no memory, no imagination, no way of thinking or sticking to a plan, they only have a quality of emergence, a constant transformation that exhibits an ultimate life defining quality of self preservation. They are irreducible down to their lowest levels; they know nothing of beginnings and endings. They are organisms, but they are not conscious. The atom leads to the construction of element and then to the product of compounds, which leads to the entity like the seed. The seed then transforms into the plant or flower which then goes through the process of life. This is emergence and complexity, the flower or plant may follow a certain rule, a shape may be common to the overall complexity of its form, but this shape, element or atom when reduced to its simplicity does not indicate anything that can be predicted in such a way to know what it will emerge into. It is empty, not form. Another example would be the Mandelbrot fractal; fundamentally it is only a circle, yet we see many emerging forms like insects, shorelines, river shapes and other abstract shapes that evolve every ten generations of the emergence, once the order is found in the chaos. There is no way to predict prior to the emergence what the circle will form into. The human is capable of taking this impression and unlike the rest of nature, it does have memory and can create ideas, the human is a conscious animal. The cause is the start of the extension, but as Hume pointed out, a sequence of events does not define the cause, as the emergence (that which is irreducible to its lowest levels) has now extended into new extensions that determine our consciousness.

ALL IS SUFFERING

Bringing our inquiry down to Earth and closer to home, we can now get away from “that” and take a closer look at sourdre (the medium to extend). Suffering is the prime example of sourdre, as it is usually experientially impressed upon our memory before we define what “this” is. Suffering can be our tainted view of “this” and the justification of why “that” is better. Value judgments are always based upon a moral prejudice of some kind.

Is it possible to “end all suffering”? As religion, religious, spiritual and spirituality, seek to “improve” conditions that have arisen from Sourdre.
I decided to ask myself what suffering is, aside from the tautological claim that it is viewed as everything within our human experience, due to either a priori pollution of the soul (emanation) or as sourdre a posteriori. Suffering has at least a tripartide variation of meaning.

The first type of suffering is what I will call Necessary Suffering – Suffering in this context includes occurrences like natural death, decay, loss, illness and other aspects of the natural world that mankind has no influence over, no control and is a reminder of cosmic humility, disease knows nothing of rank, class and roles in human society, plagues and cancers take away and damage life all across the animal and human kingdom, yet it is not superior for doing so, it is only surviving and seeking for self preservation – the most powerful natural quality that we can attach to all that we call “life”. Death is a part of life and not it’s opposite, every moment of our lives, we are dying just as we are living, each breath that we exhale is one more breath towards death. Decay of dead animals, humans and plants supply nourishment to other forms of emerging life, such as insects, which in turn are eaten by larger predators too. This type of suffering is feared the most, our finite existence and that we are nothing special at all when we relate to the rest of nature, the fear of death can create fear of life itself and a search for meaning away from it to the point where our view of life resembles nothing like its true appearance.

The second type of suffering I will call Fictional Suffering – This type of suffering is best described as “dissatisfaction”. It includes the feeling that we are never content with life, our successes and our failures. Necessary suffering can often influence fictional suffering, the dawning of the reality that the only absolute truth in life is death can make our time on Earth appear very short indeed and that we must urgently reach our goals, even if this means taking a path that is destructive to animals and others in the world. We divorce our values into something that is objective, a tunnel vision is created whereby the ends are more important than the means, we use people, we hurt people, we lie to people and ourselves, we try too hard to finish and reach the end, but we never get there and even if we achieve something, there will always be the feeling of despair, as what we are identifying with externally is not what we truly value, such things like money and drug abuse are a prime example of this type of suffering. We can believe that money makes us happy and that abusing drugs will allow us to escape from reality, or both. The fictional suffering is an escape plan from that which we can’t control, therefore this suffering is not very practical at all. Why create such a responsibility that nobody can ever fulfill? This type of suffering is usually realised in truth when we see the choices that we make only increase suffering, misery and pain, although for short periods they seem to be covered up and hidden, they return and become worse. The way to let go of the fiction is to see that it has no value to you, as the catalyst for the suffering stems from looking for a way out of ourselves, we project ourselves into the future and focus on the object of certainty.

The third type of suffering I will call Forceful Suffering – This type of suffering is the result of not letting go of what we can’t control and is an extension of fictional suffering, in emergence, suffering tries to overcome itself and in doing so, it gets worse to the point of total devastation. Forceful suffering is the content of war, famine (excluding famine due to natural disasters) and pity. It is a Global type of suffering, created due to a mass of fictional sufferers who are afraid of necessary suffering and are seeking to eradicate it suffering absolutely, one such phrase and belief is “Peace is only possible with war” and “those people deserve to starve as they are not worthy” and pitiful force whereby any individual who wishes to do as they wish without harm, are instantly alienated and turned into a sinner, they are “forgiven” and branded as outlaws, mentally ill and a danger to society. Force can often be inflicted upon ourselves too, in the form of asceticism, as the Buddha experienced during his ascetic phase, starving himself almost to death in order to achieve something better than life. This type of suffering is a mass delusion of self justification, spin, lies, denial, retribution and vengeance, total chaos, destruction, dehumanisation, ignorance and wrath. The total loss and degradation of humanity, humaneness and human dignity is so vast in this type of suffering that we can barely come to understand it as possible, therefore empathy is inverted which explains it as somehow “Necessary”, that it was “just their job to arrest, convict, imprison and kill those people” and that we should “feel sorry for them for having to fulfill their duties and the horrors they have witnessed in the name of the Good”. This is of course is an extension of fictional suffering, a divorce of values and subjectivity that somehow makes responsibility irrelevant and it replaces it with duty. There is nothing necessary about this type of suffering, force is our own creation. Our divorce of subjectivity is the creation of Gods of war, the idea that there is an innate hierarchy in nature and that we are justified in the decision of who lives, and who dies.
The three types of suffering that work in a kind of emergence are all displaying types of imperfection.

 We are finite beings in a finite reality, we live and die and get ill, things decay and we are nothing special.
 We can never escape or permanently ignore what we don’t like with objects and objectives, with hopes of becoming more important.
 We can never accept responsibility, we call it duty as it is part of the “natural order” that has “always been” – this is the justification of force.
 
Suffering is a part of life and certainly a part of death too. Therefore we alter the use of “suffer” to “live” and alleviate duties, dogmas of perfection and an attempt to escape as irrelevant objectives as they only increase suffering in the sense that we can be fooled by ourselves and others into thinking that we can end suffering absolutely by following a prescription.

Suffering implies imperfection and as imperfection can often be, let’s say “less desirable”, we therefore strive for perfection as the desire, but in doing so, we immediately create an illness and when we get ill, we look for causes and ways to find them and remove them, isolate them and destroy them. Inevitably, this search for the cause leads to more illness and suffering and more causes.
 
When we accept that all is suffering, therefore we can say that “all is life”, we have no desire to seek a cause, it is all part of the experience and perfection is not sought after, only improvement, but we must be careful to not become dualistic here – seeking for better, does not automatically make “now” worse, bad or wrong and everything that occurs before now in the past is not tainted either, this would be looking for sickness again. The truthful disclosure is to say that life is how it is and we seek to be better, to do the best we can with what we have – therefore suffering never ends, it is a relative matter.

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