Spirituality and Sustainability

Hello to rewilding philosophy, your newsletter on ^ekophilosophical health for our times. I found that the role of spirituality for sustainability can be tricky and I hope that my (humble) sense making of this makes sense to you, too.

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Are you spiritual? If so, what does spirituality mean to you?

For a long time, I tried to avoid answering the second part of this question. It seemed like too vast an idea to define. While I do consider myself a spiritual person, I didn't want to confine it to a simple definition.

A definition will never give it justice. I thought.

Foolish me.

While it's true that no word can fully encapsulate its meaning, this applies to every word, and with that it becomes meaningless.

Eventually, I found that not defining what spirituality means can actually be dangerous, or at least cause harm.

Let me explain why.

If you ask ChatGTP what spirituality is, it answers that

“Spirituality is a broad and multifaceted concept that encompasses a range of ideas and practices related to the human spirit or soul, as opposed to material or physical things. It often involves a sense of connection to something greater than oneself and typically involves a search for meaning in life.”

It was Walt Whitman who first used the word "spirituality" in this modern sense in his 1871 book, Democratic Vistas. Whitman saw spirituality as an essential component of democracy. He believed that for democracy to thrive, it needed to be underpinned by spirituality. He thought that all religions and scriptures were expressions of an unacknowledged cosmic nature and that the more-than-human world is a reflection of the divine. He also believed that spiritual experiences could be found in the everyday and the mundane.

The difference between ChatGTP’s description and the way (I think) Whitman uses the term is that the former opposes the soul or spirit with the material and physical world, thus equating spirituality with the metaphysical, while the latter grounds soul and spirit in the material, physical world.

The theologian and author Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes that spirituality is simply “what happens when we open ourselves to something greater than ourselves.” This notion of going beyond as a definition for spirituality can be found quite often. Unfortunately, this going beyond seems to be by many interpreted as going beyond the body and the physical. Spirituality becomes a metaphysical endeavour in which the bodily and worldly materiality is denied.

My sense is, and I don’t have empirical evidence for this, that many people—consciously or not—relate to and practice spirituality as described by ChatGPT (at least in the Western industrialized world). The fact that a large language model, which is based on existing data, provides this description might even be empirical evidence enough.

The challenge of defining spirituality as something merely metaphysical is that the physical gets disregarded. In times, in which our actions have real material and often devastating consequences though, escaping in the metaphysical promise of a consciousness shift that “saves” us while flying to Mexico for a genius connection with the natural world through ingesting mother Ayahuasca, includes a major error in logic.

In “Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters”, Robert Augustus Masters explores the phenomenon of using spiritual beliefs and practices to avoid dealing with unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks. He describes how this "spiritual bypassing" can manifest as excessive detachment, emotional numbing, overemphasis on the positive, and avoidance of personal, relational, and societal challenges. He writes,

“Spirituality ultimately means no escape, no need for escape, and utter freedom through limitation and every sort of difficulty.”

Escaping to a spirituality that is merely metaphysical is inadequate for our times. It’s an (understandable) escape from the realities of the world. When I talk to people who claim they have an intuitive sense that flying all over the place is fine, while justifying their actions through their spiritual enlightenment, I see spiritual bypassing happening. When they tell me they are connected to everything and we are all one, yet find ways to avoid paying taxes, I think spiritual bypassing is happening.

By defining spirituality only through the metaphysical, or even equating the two, we make spiritual bypassing much more likely, because it grounds a narrative that lets us overcome the physical boundaries. Be it the boundaries of our bodies or the planetary boundaries that describe the limits to the impacts of human activities on the Earth system.

Spirituality then becomes a dangerous endeavour.

As I described before, I align with the ontological idea that we all come from one source, that metaphysically we are one. But it doesn’t end there. We are also one physically—as in one huge ecosystem—with every being, agent, and entity on the whole planet.

Instead of thinking of spirituality merely in metaphysical terms, we can also think about it as the entanglement of the physical and metaphysical, an enchantment of the physical through attributing metaphysical properties to its existence. While we may never know if the metaphysical constitutes the physical (“we are all mind” as in analytic idealism) or wether the physical constitutes our notion of the metaphysical (materialism), we can accept both as being co-constituted through each other.

I like the way McGillchrist describes this

“During life it is possible that the spiritual and physical are entangled, neither causing the other, neither depending on the other for its existence, but their entanglement certainly depending on the co-existence of each” And he continues “we find the soul not by turning away from the body, but by embracing it in a way that spiritualises the body; and we find the sacred not by turning away from the world, but by embracing it, in a move that sanctifies matter. The soul is both in and transcends the body, as a poem is in and yet transcends mere language …”

This definition of spirituality is very close to the idea of animism, where the physical world is imbued with spiritual essence. In animism, every element of the world—be it a tree, a river, or a mountain—is seen as alive. Not necessarily in the sense of aliveness imbued with consciousness, but in the sense that the materials making up a stone, for example, were once, and might one day again be, part of a body that breathes. In this way, the stone is alive as part of Life; with a capital L, or as the Lion King would put it:

Animism doesn’t draw a hard line between the physical and metaphysical; instead, it sees them as intertwined aspects of a unified existence. I have written about animism before and will save a more detailed description and interpretation for another time. At this point, I wanted to make the distinction between a metaphysical spirituality and a (meta+)physical spirituality. It’s not a full definition of spirituality, but a first approximation of one key characteristic that I believe makes a “good” spirituality in our times.

By the way, in “Dark Green Religion” Bron Taylor gives super interesting ideas around how Disney interprets and spreads an animist worldview.

By embracing an entangled view of spirituality, we open ourselves to a more coherent understanding of our place in the world and begin to see our interactions with the more-than-human world, our bodies, and each other as sacred acts. The French philosopher and historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot talks about spiritual exercises as exercises of practical philosophy, because they involve the mind, body, and spirit and are not merely intellectual or theoretical activities but are meant to engage the whole person - physical and metaphysical. Every action then reverberates through both the physical and metaphysical, helping us to engage with the world in a way that is both embodied and transcendent, finding the divine, as Whitman suggested, in the mundane, and seeing our everyday experiences and challenges, such as the metacrisis, as opportunities for spiritual growth. Instead of denying the challenges and sufferings of the physical world, we understand and transform them through the metaphysical.

"Every act a ceremony. Every word a prayer. Every walk a pilgrimage. Every place a shrine." Charles Eisenstein.