Spiritual but not Religious: Moving beyond postmodern spirituality

[Guest guest]

Spiritual but not Religious

 

Moving beyond postmodern spirituality

by Elizabeth Debold

 

Standing on the bank of India's sacred Ganges as it rushes past

Rishikesh, I am captivated by the river's sapphire sparkle. A living

luminosity leaps from its many faceted surfaces, transforming the

air, the white rocks on the shore, and even my feet as I look down at

them. I turn to look around me and the same luminous sparkle shines

from everything: the rocky shore, the bone-thin bodies of the holy

men, an emaciated cow, the buildings and hills further on. Surprised,

I start to laugh. I've just finished a week of retreat, in silent

meditation, and this is my first foray outside the cool, dark ashram

and its austere regimen. My perception is heightened—colors vibrate,

the rushing river voices a soundless roar, and this extraordinary

light suffuses everything. It's alive, I realize; the light is alive.

Everything around me, the entire world, is transparent, lit from

within. I have the sense that I could simply reach out and tear the

surface of reality to reveal this underlying blaze. But the ordinary

sense of I-am-here-and-the-world-is-out-there is gone. All of the

space between is filled—it's all One—and I am not separate from that.

I am completely empty and this fullness is everywhere. I laugh:

lightness of being is something of a pun. Years later, I will learn

that this perception was a glimpse of the guru mind.

 

A Western seeker in the East—isn't this a classic scene from the

happy hippie days of the sixties and seventies? But this was the

nineties, I was in India with my American spiritual teacher, and I'm

no hippie. The gold rush days of Westerners going East for

enlightenment and the great Zen masters and Hindu yogis coming West

that reached a fever pitch in the seventies are now over. Many

thousands of flowers have bloomed through this remarkable cross-

pollination—an often unacknowledged result of our globalizing world.

While the nightly news keeps us aware that globalization has created

a world stage for religious conflict, less often do we recognize that

the innumerable books on spirituality, the countless martial arts

studios, the varied offerings for spiritual retreats and classes in

meditation and yoga are also a byproduct of our increased global

connectedness. With typical Western ingenuity, we've revealed the

mystic heart that beats within the various paths to God or to the

Self beyond the self. The burgeoning interfaith movement—often viewed

with concern by religious traditionalists—is a result of the growing

awareness of the commonality among different faiths. We've cracked

the code of these sacred traditions, plucking pearls of awakening

from the hard shell of religious ritual and sacrifice. It's a

stunning human achievement. And it's a testament to our enduring

search for who we are and why we are here.

 

However, considering this trend within a larger historical and social

context, and reflecting on my own experience, I wonder where the

current flourishing of spiritual pursuit is actually taking us.

Devising individualized spiritual paths from the cornucopia available

in today's spiritual marketplace, more and more of us are seeking

outside the context of religion. Religio, the root of the

word " religion, " means to bind—to the Absolute, and also to each

other, in a shared cultural understanding of who we are and why we

are here. Does this uniquely postmodern spirituality—each of us in a

religion of one—have the capacity to bind us into a true global

culture? Or do we need something more?

 

Over the past several decades, the number of people who are seeking—

and finding—direct access to the mystical dimension has increased

dramatically. Between 1962 and 1994, the percentage of U.S. adults

who report having had " a religious or mystical experience " grew from

twenty-two to thirty-three percent, and more recent polls indicate

that this figure may now be as high as forty percent. While this

figure would include the " conversion " experiences that are part of

Baptist and other fundamentalist Christian sects, the number of

Americans who identify themselves with a traditional religion has

decreased, and those who check " none " when asked for a religious

affiliation have doubled in the last decade. These

unconventional " nones, " who, after Catholics and Baptists, are

possibly the third-largest group in the country, comprise some twenty-

nine million people. According to a 2001 survey, two-thirds of

the " nones " believe in God, more than one-third consider themselves

religious, and they buy many books on spirituality. Looking at the

rise in numbers of people having spiritual experiences and the

decline in traditional religious affiliation, it seems very likely

that many of those who are now having mystical experiences are doing

so on their own, or in unorthodox ways.

 

I was clearly a " none, " which is rather ironic given that I was

raised a Catholic and as a girl thought about being a nun. It was

the " none " sense of wanting a deeper ground to my life that led me to

Rishikesh. It wasn't that I hadn't invented an incredible life for

myself: a family of caring, wonderful friends; a regular practice of

Buddhist meditation; a challenging relationship with a brilliant and

big-hearted man; and work that drove me, anchored me, and was my

emotional center. Passion for my work—about girls' development and

women's liberation—was a mysterious force in my life. From high

school onward, at each critical life juncture, when I made a deeper

commitment to it, the world opened up. The more risks I took, the

more became possible, leading me from activism to graduate school at

Harvard to an extraordinary women's research group to writing a best-

selling book and even to Oprah. Given that my mother had raised me to

be a good wife and mother, I was often surprised, and almost in awe,

at what was unfolding. Yet my life felt flimsy, as though a sudden

gust of wind could sweep everything I had put together off the face

of the earth. I often felt fake and hollow, and I began to wonder if

having a child would make a difference. But wasn't that an awfully

poor reason to bring life into the world? With the help of a good

therapist, I had pretty much stopped using emotional drama to add

thrills to my life. Instead, I went from one intense project to

another, with intermittent bouts of shopping for things that I didn't

need. Sometimes a pair of shoes would haunt me for a week.

 

So I was in Rishikesh to find something deeper. And by following my

teacher's instructions during the retreat, that strange sense of

separation and constant craving fell away into a glorious realization

of the perfect goodness of life. I joined the many millions who have

glimpsed ultimate Oneness. Given that the path of the mystic has

usually been reserved for a few courageous souls—the " special forces "

of the religious traditions—these numbers are staggering. We seem to

be on the edge of something significant. But what exactly is it? Some

of the New Age's most beloved prophets—Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle,

and Barbara Marx Hubbard, to name a few—believe that such evidence is

an indication that we are in the process of a global transformation

of consciousness. Paul Ray, author (with Sherry Anderson) of the

popular Cultural Creatives, has estimated that twenty million people

in the U.S. are " in the process of awakening. " And he's recently

stated that a total of nearly four million people in the U.S. and

Europe are close to attaining a stable personal awakening.

 

While this is compelling news, the real significance of this surge in

spiritual experience will depend on how we make sense out of the

experiences themselves. Genuine moments of transcendent grace are

experienced by fundamentalists, fatalists, and contemporary seekers

of freedom alike. However, the fundamentalist sees in the experience

an utter validation of a personal relationship to the One True God in

which he or she believes. What happens when the religious context

isn't there—when we take spirituality out of the traditions and

experience transcendence on its own?

 

Spirituality and religion are like romance and marriage, argues one

Unitarian Universalist minister. " Without the traditions and legal

structures of marriage to contain it and sustain it, romance is

always in danger of flaming out or heading down blind alleys,

extinguished as quickly as it first appeared. " But for most of us

living in a contemporary postmodern context, the very idea of

religion may evoke a sense of stricture, empty ritual, and blind

adherence to precepts that are out of step with our time. A recent

poll suggests that of the one in five Americans who see themselves

as " spiritual but not religious, " forty-seven percent view religion

negatively. Although religion creates a structure for the highest

truths that have been revealed to us, providing an ethical and moral

context for our lives, for many of us today, spirituality and

religion aren't wedded together—they are divorced (and thankfully

so). But I wonder if our discomfort with the notion of religion may

be partially due to our collective amnesia about the significance

religion has had in human transformation.

 

Where we stand at the beginning of the third millennium makes it

difficult to understand the power of religious traditions that were

founded two or more millennia ago. Human consciousness has evolved so

much that it is almost inconceivable to grasp what life was like as

the great religions emerged and then rose in prominence across the

globe. Imagine being bound in a rigid social hierarchy to the small

group of people with whom you share a language and customs, living in

a frighteningly violent and disease-ridden world teeming with demons

and supernatural forces. Murder and mayhem are common; demonic forces

throw people into uncontrollable rages and lusts. Strange and

unpredictable things happen—your child is born deformed, bringing

disfavor on your tribe, which leads to a drought that ruins the

crops. You don't know why these things happen or whether your people

will be successful in appeasing the gods. Skirmishes with other

tribes may result in your death or your capture and enslavement. Most

of your life is spent trying to avoid the wrath of the gods or anyone

above you in the social hierarchy, as you toil in backbreaking labor

just to eke out survival. An inescapable parade of horrors is most

likely part of your existence: " perpetual war, senseless violence,

ritual sacrifice, systemic abuse, and mind-numbing repetition, " as

Robert Godwin documents in his remarkable One Cosmos under God. And

he notes that although roughly one hundred million people died due to

war in the twentieth century, it is estimated that if the world was

still populated only by tribes, this number would be twenty times

larger.

 

Miraculously, as if in response to a crying human need, the great

religious traditions either emerged or transformed in the span of

about one thousand years to embrace humanity in a new vision of the

future. This era is what historian Karl Jaspers identified as the

Axial Age, seeing in it the dawning of " what was later called reason

and personality. " We are still indebted to the insights of the sages

and saints who walked on earth then: Lao-tzu, Gautama Buddha, Jesus

Christ, Socrates, Confucius, Jeremiah, and Muhammad. From

approximately 800 BCE to 200 CE, there was a dramatic shift away from

identification with one's tribe and toward the development of

individual consciousness—giving birth to the first truly individual

sense of self. Before this, as Godwin explains, a human being " felt

his own impulses were 'not truly part of the self, since they [were]

not within man's conscious control.' " Tumultuous emotions, like rage,

envy, and lust, were thought to be " a supernatural attack [by gods or

demons] from the outside. " So, for example, it wasn't your own lust

driving you to distraction over an attractive neighbor, but the zing

of Eros' arrow. It was only during the Axial Age that human beings

gradually began to recognize, and take responsibility for, those

forces of good and evil that they had projected onto the gods. As

theologian Ewert Cousins tells us, " 'Know thyself' became the

watchword of Greece; the Upanishads identified the Atman, the

transcendent center of the self. The Buddha charted the way of

individual enlightenment; the Jewish prophets wakened individual

moral responsibility. " Practices of inquiry, meditation, petitionary

prayer, and confession were developed to give humanity the practical

means of cultivating an inner sense of responsibility and, most

importantly, a moral conscience.

 

How many of us postmodern Westerners today think of the moral

teachings of religion as a revolutionary step for humanity? I've

always related to the basic commandments of the Judeo-Christian

tradition as a combination of the quaintly outmoded and the

commonsensical. Certain commandments—Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt

not steal—make such perfect sense, it's hard to realize that they

were a radical challenge to people's lack of self-control several

thousand years ago. Others—like Thou shalt not make unto thee any

graven image—are odd remnants of a long-ago time. But for me, the

Commandments themselves weren't the real problem—it was the pervasive

sense of Catholic guilt, of being in a state of sin. Guilt was a lead

weight on the freedom that was lifting my generation at the end of

the last century. I was utterly fascinated by the words attributed to

Christ in the Bible. I wanted what he was experiencing, his

connection with the sacred, not a set of rules to follow. And that

desire for contact with the Source unmediated by the doctrines and

dogmas of religion is what many of us mean when we call

ourselves " spiritual but not religious. "

 

Strange as it may seem to us today, it was the development of an

individual sense of conscience—accompanied by the painful experience

of guilt—that enabled us to step out of the shadows and begin to

author history. As long as we humans felt ourselves to be mere

victims of powerful and uncontrollable forces, both internally and

externally, there was no way to be responsible or to make choices

that would lead toward salvation—in this life or the next. " Only an

independent self has the power to recognize its guilt and confess its

wrongdoing, " write social scientists James and Evelyn Whitehead, and

that recognition makes each person " responsible for his [or her] own

actions. " In the West, Christ's message that every soul was beloved

by God created a personal bond between God and each of his people

that was the context for developing this sense of responsibility. As

Richard Tarnas writes in his brilliant opus The Passion of the

Western Mind, " By granting immortality and value to the individual

soul, Christianity encouraged the growth of the individual

conscience, self-responsibility, and personal autonomy relative to

temporal powers—all decisive traits for the formation of the Western

character. " Christianity—and all of the major religions of the Axial

Age—gave each human being a way out, off the cycling wheel of toil

and trouble, to reach the salvation of heaven. But this demanded

strict obedience to one's relationship to God and to the

extraordinary order of God's creation, manifested in the dazzling

perfection of the Great Chain of Being. For the first time, we had a

moral obligation to bring ourselves in line with that perfection. And

if we broke that sacred covenant, thereby sinning, which literally

means " missing the mark, " we felt guilty, and that guilt propelled us

to do right and create a civilization to celebrate God's Kingdom on

earth. Each Christian knew his or her place in the cosmos and God's

heart and knew that through piety and sacrifice, it was possible to

abide for eternity with Him in the afterlife.

 

I think it would be safe to say that the very lack of that context—

the absence of that sense of knowing my place in the cosmos and in

God's heart—brought me to Rishikesh. I could no longer find that

sense of place in the religion of my youth. As a child, I was deeply

moved by the imposing majesty of Catholic ritual. I was in awe of the

statues of the beautiful long-haired man nailed to the cross with

blood dripping from his wounds and the lovely lady in blue balancing

on a globe with a snake crushed under her pretty feet. But that seems

like more than a lifetime ago. Twenty, thirty years later, after so

many years of schooling, I know too much, and perhaps not enough. My

intellect has been sharpened by the objectivity of science and a

classically modern education that tells me that life emerged from a

random, purposeless process and that science is the key to all human

progress. But both the longing in my heart and the inadequacy of

science and technology to create a truly just world called that into

question. Those of us born after the Second World War no longer stand

on the ground that has supported humanity through the ages—religion,

nation, the notion of progress, or even family. Thou shalt honor thy

father and mother, the Bible says. But my parents each move into the

darkening years of their lives alone, while I am free to roam.

Postmodernity—the transitional era that we are now in—is my milieu.

We postmoderns have seen through, and detached ourselves from, all

that has given meaning to human life in prior generations. It gives

me enormous freedom. But the price I pay is that I'm all alone.

 

Perhaps ironically, it is that aloneness—the acutely self-conscious,

self-reflective, responsible, and independent individual sense of

self—that became possible through the spiritual explosion of the

Axial Age and the development of the world's great religions. Over

the two thousand years since, human beings have taken increasing

responsibility for the miracle and burden of being conscious. In

fact, when the bureaucratic dogmatism of the Church threatened to

stifle the development of independent thought, another explosion in

consciousness erupted—what we call the Western Enlightenment. This

ignited the scientific revolution that has defined modernity. No

longer was God the ultimate Creator and Judge; we took the power of

creativity and objective reason back into ourselves. This was an

event of enormous spiritual significance. We so often think of the

birth of science as a purely rational affair because it has led to

such a reductionistic materialism, the belief that all of life can be

reduced to random processes inherent in matter. But one only needs to

listen to Voltaire to dispel that notion: " Meditation is the

dissolution of thoughts in eternal awareness or Pure consciousness

without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude

in infinity. " Voltaire was searching for direct contact with the

eternal—for a spiritual, but not religious, enlightenment.

 

Oddly enough, many of us today who are seeking the spiritual without

religion are looking for relief from the world that Voltaire and his

brother philosophes have wrought. Three hundred years later, the

demand to create and to produce in a globalizing world has cost us

our job security and often seems to threaten our sanity. Our

constantly whirling minds—the endless internal to-do lists, fantasies

about our weekend plans, inner dialogues with different parts of

ourselves—are leading us to pop Prozac, hike in the wilderness, lie

down on the therapist's couch, or sit alone in meditation. The

pressure is only escalating. And we are desperate for a way out—

sometimes just simple relief that can be bought on the cheap in a

bar. But others of us are looking for something deeper, wondering

what is permanent and real in a world where everything is disposable.

And so we seek, looking to have some experience of the ultimate that

will take us beyond ourselves and relieve us from the uncertainty and

confusion of our lives. No wonder that Andrew Delbanco observes in

The Real American Dream that " the most striking feature of

contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence. "

 

How do we satisfy that craving? With neither religion nor science

nor -isms of any kind " organizing desire into a structure of

meaning, " as Delbanco says, what do we have that meets the depth of

our longing for the More that transcends the mundane? We're caught in

a postmodern paradox: we desperately long for the embrace of

something larger, all-encompassing, and real, and yet all we trust is

the narrow bandwidth of the self. Our feelings—what feels right or

good or true—have become our compass through life. Significant

numbers of us— " nearly four out of ten teens (38%) and three out of

ten adults (31%), " according to a 2002 poll by the Barna Group—base

our moral choices only on " whatever feels right or comfortable. "

Guilt, and the sense of being obligated to something other than

oneself, is out of the question. It makes us feel uncomfortable.

Thus, we are left with nothing greater than the span of our feelings

to bind us to life and each other. And so the seeking of pleasure,

Delbanco argues, becomes our " last link to the feeling of

transcendence . . . the 'last sacrament of the dispossessed.' "

Without being accountable to anything larger than the impulse to

satisfy our cravings, even our spiritual pursuits can leave us empty.

When the Transcendent is revealed to me by the Ganges, what do I do

with that revelation of the radiant mystery that imbues creation with

life? My heart knows that this luminosity is the face of God, the

Ultimate, the Creative Principle. IT is I and all things: there is no

separation. My place in the universe has become transparent to me,

simply by my uniquely human capacity to know and to recognize that

which I witness. This glimpse of the Reality behind reality radically

challenges the island of " I " that I have always thought myself to be.

I am literally in ecstasy, meaning " unstuck, " released from the

confines of my separate sense of self and acutely aware of everything

around me. Curious, I lean forward and feel a pull. The thought, this

changes everything, flashes through my mind. There is something more

that I am being called to—an obligation to this Whole. Something

higher than my self is calling me to surrender . . . and what do I

do? I exult in the feeling of ecstasy, the experience of freedom and

satisfaction. The next day, the direct experience of Oneness has

faded, and as it fades into memory, I begin to crave that incredible

feeling, almost instantly forgetting its significance and what it was

pointing to. I just want another blast from beyond, one that will

take me to a bliss beyond pain, boredom, and craving again. Nothing

has changed. So I keep moving on, craving more. And after the next

experience, I will once again move on, seeking another experience.

And then one more...

 

This is what it means to be one of the dispossessed, to be alone with

a racing mind and aching heart, seeking emotional relief within the

shallow confines of the self while avoiding pain or struggle or

guilt. How many hours of therapy have we collectively clocked to try

to find some relief from the intensity of our thoughts and feelings?

How much bliss and ecstasy do we need to have before we will be

satisfied? Without a larger raison d' & #65533;tre than the desire for self-

satisfaction, we will only find narcissism—an endless hall of mirrors—

at the end of our spiritual search. We have come to a " borderline " in

our individualistic culture, says philosopher Roland Benedikter,

where " we have just two possibilities: go toward despair or go one

step beyond. "

 

Even though many of us may understandably long for a simpler time,

it's too late. We can't go back. " Radical changes taking place around

the globe are propelling us quickly into what can be called the

Second Axial Age, " observed Brother Wayne Teasdale. After two

thousand and some years, a portion of humanity has finally won the

prize of an individuated consciousness. Now, argue the

Whiteheads, " recent discoveries of the genetic code for life; the

globalization of national economies; the growing recognition that

humans are responsible for the health of their environment—all these

events compel the human community toward a new level of consciousness

and conscience. " Those of us who benefit so much from our

interconnected world have to develop further, to widen our

perspective and deepen our sense of responsibility. " The earlier

shift was from a [tribal] collective to an individual consciousness, "

says theologian Leonard Swidler, but as we move toward a worldwide

culture, a second Axial Age becomes possible as " consciousness is now

becoming global. " In such a complex and interdependent world, we

cannot develop commandments to cover all of the difficult ethical

issues that human ingenuity has led us to, such as cloning, resource

depletion, and genetic engineering. Just as the great sages of the

first Axial Age launched the great traditions, we need " spiritual

geniuses, " says Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God, to

inspire a new kind of religion—a contemporary moral and philosophical

context for making sense of our lives.

 

Such a new religion would demand that we be beholden to something far

larger than ourselves—to the Truth revealed in those exquisite

moments of transcendence. " Having developed self-reflective,

analytic, critical consciousness in the first Axial Age, " writes

Cousins, " we must now, while retaining these values, reappropriate

and integrate into that consciousness . . . collective and cosmic

dimensions. " If, that is, we can step beyond the trap of narcissistic

self-satisfaction. As Benedikter comments, " Such a step would come

from an evolved, rational mind that is aware of something beyond its

own activity, beyond the ego—one that rediscovers an objectivity that

comes from the void beyond the self where one discovers, as Hegel

said, that one is not thinking one's own thoughts, but that the

cosmic order is thinking thoughts through me. But you cannot avoid

going through the void and the death of your normal self to reach

this place. "

 

It's more a leap than a step—beyond solitary seeking by the Ganges,

beyond the " spiritual but not religious. " The stirrings of spiritual

longing in the hearts and minds of so many of us postmodern

individualists may well be the first tremors of this second Axial

Age. As Cousins says, this " is not only a creative possibility to

enhance the twenty-first century; it is an absolute necessity if we

are to survive. " The spiritual accomplishment of the last Axial Age—

the development of a self-reflective individual eager for

transcendence—is no longer enough. Now that we can be responsible for

ourselves, we next have to take responsibility for the whole of which

we are a part. " We need to preserve the holiness of the single 'I,' "

Benedikter says, " and form a community where those single 'I's can

transform themselves and break through to a critical and contemporary

spirituality. " Rooted in mystical depth, transcending the

narcissistic self, engaging in an ecstatic rationality, we can create

a new religious context for an awakening world. A religion that calls

us to realize our deepest collective purpose, bound together as the

living expression of the mind and heart of God in a cosmic act of

mutual Self-creation.

 

Spiritual but not Religious

 

Moving beyond postmodern spirituality

by Elizabeth Debold

http://www.wie.org/j31/spiritual-not-religious.asp?page=1