WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY?
1.
Beyond the Life of the Body, the 'Heart', & the Mind
SYNOPSIS:
The meanings of "spirituality" in our time are so
elusive and vague
that we can only begin by saying what our human spirits are NOT.
If we clearly define what we understand to be
our capacities of body, 'heart', & mind,
then we can begin to point beyond
these
to our capacities of spirit.
Our human spirits enable us to say “I am I”.
In our spirits, we can become individual persons.
Our spirits give us the capacity to stand beyond ourselves,
to become free, creative, & loving.
Our spirits also enable us to notice our existential anxiety
and to become open to joy and peace.
OUTLINE:
A. The Life of the Body.
B. The Life of the 'Heart'.
C. The Life of the Mind.
D. The Life of the Spirit.
AUTHOR:
James Park is an existential philosopher.
He has been a Unitarian Universalist since 1980.
This sermon was adapted by him from his small book called
Spirituality
for
Humanists: Six Capacities of Our Human Spirits
.
And a version of it is included in his newer book
Spirituality
without Gods: Developing Our Capacities of Spirit .
To learn more about James Park, go to his website:
James
Leonard Park—Free
Library .
WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY?
Beyond the Life of the Body, the 'Heart', & the Mind.
by
James Leonard Park
Our human spirits form our core identity.
In developing our capacities of spirit, we create our selves.
In this series of 8 related chapters,
we will explore these dimensions of our human spirits:
(1) Our spirits live beyond our physical, emotional, & intellectual
capacities.
(2) How can we deepen our lives of spirit?
(3) Our spirits give us the capacity to stand beyond ourselves.
(4) Our human spirits give us the power to make free choices.
(5) Our spirits enable us to be creative and original.
(6) In our spirits, we can reach out to other persons in love.
(7) On the dark side, our spirits make us sensitive to anxiety.
(8) On the light side, our spirits enable us to glimpse joy and peace.
If we have developed our inner spirits,
we know what to do with solitude.
When the hubbub of external events and commitments diminishes,
we find richness within ourselves.
When we become quiet, we come alive in a deep way.
However, to become more fully persons of
spirit
we need not withdraw from the world.
In fact, the dimension of depth we develop while alone
can significantly shape the ways we engage ourselves in the
world.
Monks and hermits develop their spirits
by withdrawing from the world entirely—at least temporarily.
And we must agree with them: no solitude, no spirit.
Only when we are quiet, subtle, & deep
do we notice the soft movements of our spirits.
Some cultures have encouraged the development
of the human spirit.
Hindu and Buddhist cultures go so far in the direction of spirituality
that they sometimes neglect the more practical aspects of life.
And, of course, established traditions
of spirituality can distort
what would otherwise be highly personal forms of spirit.
Our Western culture, however, shows no danger
of being too spiritual.
A. The Life of the Body
Our culture faces the opposite danger: not
being spiritual enough
—stifling the emergence of this
deeper dimension of human life.
We Americans pay first attention to the life of the body.
Think of the amount of money, time, &
attention
we spend on the processes directed toward our physical survival.
Most of us spend literally the best hours of our lives
earning money so we can "keep body and soul together".
Actually we buy more creature
comforts than food
for our souls.
When we examine our spending, we find that our money goes mostly for
shelter, food, transportation, health-care, & other physical needs.
B. The Life of the 'Heart'
Our physical life is easy to distinguish from
our spiritual life,
altho some 'vitalists' use the word "spirit"
to refer to some 'spark of life' that can be found even in animals.
The animal vitality that makes a colt frisky or a monkey playful
is not what is meant by "spirit" in this context.
But when we turn to the life of feeling—what happens in our
'hearts'—
it becomes more difficult to distinguish spirituality from emotion.
All 4 dimensions of being (physical,
emotional, mental, & spiritual)
overlap and shade into one another; each profoundly affects the others.
Our physical being is the foundation for the three higher dimensions.
And our thinking and feeling are so deeply dependent on each other
that we sometimes cannot disentangle them.
For example, in the experience of jealousy,
how much is thinking that we are being replaced
and how much is our emotional response—automatic and
unplanned?
Nevertheless we should try to develop careful criteria
for separating these four dimensions of being:
(1) physical, (2) psychological/emotional,
(3) mental/intellectual,
& (4) spiritual.
Our physical existence was given by
our genes,
which began to form our bodies beginning right after conception.
Then, beginning on the day we were born,
social conditioning began to shape our psychological
dimension of being
—the complex
emotional responses that make up our personalities.
Our emotional striving expresses itself
most
deeply in our quest for love.
We want to love and be loved,
to care for others and be cared about.
Romantic
love
is our culture's most elaborately-developed emotion.
We have been led to believe (the intellectual level)
that our romantic feelings arise from 'human nature',
but a closer examination of how romantic love happens
shows it to be a learned response
—unleashed on
some unsuspecting victim.
After physical survival and its
embellishments,
we spend the next largest amount of time and money trying to feel
good.
Another way to define the psychological
dimension of our selves
—our learned
responses, emotions we have developed since birth—
is to adopt the model provided by deterministic psychology:
Everything within our psychological dimension of being
can be explained by cause
and effect, stimulus
and response.
As we shall see later in this series,
freedom is a manifestation of our spirits.
But all the feelings we can
explain psychologically come from our
'hearts'.
Our emotions arise in our 'hearts' in response to specific situations.
C. The Life of the Mind
Next above the life of the 'heart' ("above"
meaning more developed),
we experience the life of the mind.
Here again, we cannot draw any absolute distinctions
but only lay out criteria to clarify how much
of a certain experience is emotional and how much intellectual.
The life of the mind is characterized by words—human
language.
Other portable symbols such as hand signs can replace words,
but the essence of abstract thinking is metaphor,
the ability to transport an insight from one situation to another.
Animal cries and gestures are not transportable;
they always relate to the here
and now.
Animals do not talk about the distant past or the projected future:
They have no history to recount
and no plans to communicate to the next generation.
Lacking language, animals have no intellectual life.
But they certainly do respond emotionally
to their immediate situations.
And they do certainly have emotional memories.
How much time and attention do we give to our
mental lives?
The answer to this question varies tremendously from person to person.
The life of the mind
consists of thinking, talking, reading, &
writing.
As we satisfy our physical needs and our emotional desires,
we can devote more time and energy to our intellectual interests.
D. The Life of the Spirit
But our spiritual lives are above the three
other dimensions:
Spirit is not a biological striving—like the liveliness found
in
animals.
Spirit is not a psychological experience—responding to the
world.
Spirit is not an intellectual process—dependent on using
words.
No, our spiritual dimension is beyond all
these.
It is easier to describe what the human spirit is not than what
it is.
We understand very well the life of the human body.
And we usually understand our emotional and intellectual dimensions.
But the life of our spirits often remains in obscurity.
We have few direct ways to apply ourselves to enhance our lives of
spirit.
But there might be some ways in which we can consciously choose
to orient our beings so we become more sensitive to our spirits,
thereby encouraging this neglected dimension to emerge more fully.
In the rest of this series,
we will explore the following phenomena of our human spirits:
(2) ways to
expand our spirits;
(3) self-transcendence, self-criticism, & altruism;
(4) freedom; (5) creativity; (6) love;
(7) the discovery of anxiety; & (8) glimpses of joy.
The more completely we live in these modes of being,
the more fully we become persons of spirit.
If we neglect our spirits, this deep dimension
of our selves will not develop
—just as our
minds do not develop unless we exercise them by thinking.
How can we expand our spirits and live more deeply?
drafted April 2004; revised 4-19-2004; 12-3-2004;
4-1-2006; 11-8-2006; 6-22-2007; 2-16-2008; 11-24-2009;
10-28-2010;
12-2-2010; 3-26-2011; 8-9-2012; 3-25-2014; 4-10-2015; 4-24-2020;
5-25-2021;
"WHAT
IS SPIRITUALITY?
1.
Beyond the Life of the Body, the 'Heart', & the Mind
was adapted by the
author from
Spirituality
for Humanists:
Six
Capacities of Our Human Spirits
by James Park.
In 2011, all 8 chapters of Spirituality
for Humanists
were incorporated in a new book:
Spirituality
without Gods:
Developing Our Capacities of Spirit.
This chapter separating spirit from other dimensions of our lives is
Chapter 7.
Several others books on
Existential Spirituality
are reviewed on the Existential
Spirituality Bibliography
.
Read other free
books
on the Internet.
Return to the Existential
Spirituality page
Go to other
on-line
essays
by James
Park,
organized into 10 subject-areas.
Go to
the beginning of this website
James
Leonard Park—Free
Library