Spirituality without faith.

To what extent can humanists be spiritual? Can those of us with a more or less naturalistic view of the world--one that doesn't involve spirits, gods, or ghosts legitimately seek spiritual experience? There seems a prima facie difficulty here since traditional notions of spirituality often posit a nonphysical realm categorically separate from the world described by science. Such dualism is, of course, the antithesis of naturalism, which understands existence to be of a piece, not split into the natural and supernatural. If for humanists the ultimate constituents of the world don't include immaterial essences, souls, or spirits, then it might seem that spirituality is off limits.

Standard dictionary definitions of spiritual contrast it with physical or material, so dualism is more or less built into the ordinary conception of it. But I will argue that, even within the monistic view of the cosmos entailed by a commitment to scientific empiricism, we can avail ourselves of spiritual experience and take an authentically spiritual stance when appreciating our situation as fully physical beings embedded in a material universe. In its dualism, the traditional notion of spirituality in effect sets up problems of existential alienation and cognitive dissonance that religions have wrestled with, more or less unsuccessfully, for millennia. At a stroke, naturalism cuts these problems off at the root, providing an emotionally satisfying and cognitively unified basis for feeling completely at home in the world.

CHARACTERISTICS OF SPIRITUALITY

Authentic spirituality involves an emotional response--what I will call the spiritual response--that can include feelings of significance, unity, awe, joy, acceptance, and consolation. As Richard Dawkins puts it in his book Unweaving the Rainbow, we have an "appetite for wonder," an appetite for evoking the positive emotional states that are linked to our deepest existential questions.

Spirituality also involves a cognitive context: a set of fundamental beliefs about oneself and the world that can both inspire the spiritual response and provide an interpretation of it. By contemplating such beliefs, we are temporarily drawn out of the mundane into the realization of life's deeper significance, and this realization generates emotional effects. But equally, the spiritual response thus generated is itself interpreted in the light of our basic beliefs--namely, it is taken to reflect the ultimate truth of our situation as we conceive it. The cognitive context of spirituality and the spiritual response are therefore linked tightly in reciprocal evocation and validation.

A third essential component of spirituality is what is ordinarily called spiritual practice. Since the intellectual appreciation of fundamental beliefs alone may not suffice to evoke a particularly deep experience, various noncognitive techniques can help to access the spiritual response. Activities such as dance, singing, chant, meditation, and participation in various rituals and ceremonies all can play a role in moving us from the head to the heart.

Although the emotional content of the spiritual response--feelings of connection, significance, serenity, acceptance--is common to all spirituality, the background beliefs and specific practices vary tremendously. A fascinating variety of spiritual traditions have arisen, ranging from the rigorous, ascetic regimes of Zen meditation to the ecstatic communal celebration of a Sunday morning gospel service, and each has its own conception of the world and the individual's place in it. Spiritual experience is taken to be the direct appreciation of the ultimate truth about the world as given in the tradition, a way to transcend one's limited everyday perspective in the quest for meaning, unity, and serenity.

TRADITIONAL SPIRITUALITY

Many, if not most of these traditions, as well as some New Age beliefs, involve the idea of a distinct spiritual realm, something set apart or above the everyday physical world (some types of Buddhism being notable exceptions). The varieties of spirituality are thus to a great extent varieties of dualism, at least in their cognitive contexts (belief systems).

This dualism is explained partially by our instinctive fear of death, which many religions allay by positing an immortal soul or spiritual essence which survives bodily dissolution. We gain ultimate security by virtue of being, in our true selves, something other than the physical, something that joins with a larger, immaterial, and changeless realm after death. We want cosmic reassurance, and our spiritual nature functions to connect us with that which is immortal. Thus the fear of death and its standard religious solution produce the dualism of body and spirit, of the natural and supernatural.

Not just religion but the Western philosophical tradition also has shaped the more or less commonsense view that we exist as bodies inhabited by souls, spirits, or mental agents. Cartesian mind-body dualism, although widely rejected in the current academic philosophical and scientific communities, is still the norm in lay culture. Such secular dualism comports well with the comforting tenets of religion, even if religion isn't part of a person's belief system.

Another salient characteristic of traditional spirituality (Christianity, for instance) is that it reads purpose into the universe: existence has a goal or teleology which gives us a role to play. The cosmos has been designed by a purposeful agent (God), and by dutifully fulfilling our mission in his cosmic drama we discover life's ultimate meaning. Given our tendency to look for agents and intentions in ordinary life, to figure out who's doing what and what things are for, it's natural that we might seek to assign a purpose or intent behind all of creation, and this we do by supposing, literally, that it has been intentionally created. Life has meaning, finally, because a supernatural agent endows it with meaning.

Finally, spiritual experience, in Christianity and other non-naturalistic traditions, is interpreted as putting the individual in direct contact with the agent/creator or with some aspect of the spiritual realm. The feelings that arise during spiritual practice are construed as evidence of the realm's existence; they are the quasi-perceptual apprehension of god or spirit. Spiritual experience is taken to be a special way of knowing ultimate truths about the world, a way quite different from ordinary empirical modes of knowing.

DIFFICULTIES WITH TRADITIONAL SPIRITUALITY

As much as the characteristics of traditional spirituality provide answers to the questions of death and meaning, two major drawbacks are evident. The problem of death is solved by splitting ourselves into two substances--one material and perishable, the other spiritual and immortal--but as a result the material becomes inherently inferior in its changeability. The physical becomes the merely physical; it assumes a second class metaphysical status. This in turn leads to alienation from our physical selves and indeed from the material world as a whole. Yet we are embodied, and our world is material. So from this alienated perspective, most of our lives is spent in an unfortunate entanglement with crass physicality while awaiting the better, immaterial world to come.

Added to the dualism of substance is the dualism of having two types of knowledge: ordinary empirical knowledge derived from the senses and confirmed intersubjectively (for example, as in science) and the knowledge gained from the personal revelations of spiritual experience. Despite the arguments of some--such as Stephen J. Gould in his book Rocks of Ages--that these constitute "non-overlapping magisteria" which can't conflict since they have fundamentally different concerns, the fact remains that both sorts of knowledge make claims about what ultimately exists and they reach different conclusions. Science gives us no reason to believe in the supernatural (there is no scientifically admissible evidence for such a realm), while the firm intuition of spiritual experience, as interpreted within its traditional, non-naturalistic cognitive context, is precisely that a separate immaterial reality indeed exists. If I make use of both methods of knowing, then it is likely I will confront some basic cognitive dilemmas: which method, and therefore which conclusion, is correct? In deciding the momentous question of what fundamentally exists, on what grounds do I choose science over spirituality, or vice versa?

The upshot is that these two dualisms--one metaphysical, one epistemological--put adherents of traditional spirituality in a poor position to achieve, in this world, the apprehension of fundamental unity, even if they are promised salvation in the next. And unity, of course, is the essence of spirituality. Being of two natures and two minds, the traditional spiritualist is torn between the physical and immaterial world and unified with neither. Naturalists, I believe, suffer no such handicaps in their approach to ultimate concerns.

NATURALISM

Standard definitions of naturalism often contrast it with supernaturalism, meaning simply that naturalism denies the existence of a separate, categorically different supernatural realm that exists outside the natural world. As seen in the foregoing example, the supernatural realm is often taken to involve an agent, or agency, that acts as a first cause. Such an agent is causally privileged, in that from its supernatural vantage point it gets to influence events in the natural world (create and control it) without being at the effect of that world (for example, Thomas Aquinas' "unmoved mover"). Naturalism denies that there are any such causally privileged agents or entities; rather, anything that exists is entirely embedded among other existents which account for its origins and characteristics.

This, of course, rules out the traditional Christian God and his supernatural cousins of other religious traditions. But it also rules out any personal spirit, soul, or inner agent that possesses a special originative capacity not found elsewhere in nature. There is, as philosopher Gilbert Ryle put it in The Concept of Mind, "no ghost in the machine" of the human body--nothing mysteriously spiritual or mental that rides above the physical. Naturalism is fully inclusive of human affairs, even in their most complex manifestations.

The underlying unity and causal interconnectedness of all phenomena under naturalism is a direct consequence of the naturalist's commitment to scientific empiricism as a mode of knowing. In building up knowledge about the world, science inevitably situates objects of understanding in a wider, relational context. As an epistemology, therefore, scientific empiricism guarantees an underlying unity or interconnection of phenomena and so places all things within a single world--quite the opposite of traditional supernaturalism. This is why, as much as intelligent design theorists argue otherwise, science will never countenance "theories" that posit a separate supernatural realm containing causally privileged entities.

Given its inherently unifying mode of knowing, we can understand science as the history of naturalizing one phenomenon after another--of bringing within the orbit of empirical understanding things that used to be explained by supernatural agency, special powers, or special immaterial stuff. The project of naturalization intrinsic to science has demonstrated (or aims to demonstrate) that all phenomena consist entirely of the ultimate constituents of the universe described by physics, organized and elaborated via empirically derived laws at several distinct levels of description into astoundingly complex patterns, some of which are persons.

At none of these levels, and nowhere in science, is there a need to posit any essence, agency, spirit, or "spooky stuff" to make things happen. Rather, everything, down to the last detail, is a matter of functions and operations on basic elements, functions and operations that happen on their own, without supervision. This is the remarkable fact at the heart of naturalism (remarkable, at least, when compared to supernaturalism): there is no need for intentional agency or spirit as an explanatory postulate. The physical world is, on its own, sufficient to generate the marvels of life, consciousness, and human culture.

Since naturalism rules out the existence of entities, like God, that are causally privileged, it also rules out the possibility that the universe could be the intentional creation of a being or agency that in some respect stands outside it. This means that under naturalism the universe can't be construed as having an ultimate purpose or goal attached to it; it exists, strangely enough, for no reason.

Suppose we found evidence that we are indeed artifacts of some superbeing's intentional design. We can still sensibly ask, "Why is It here?" Even if It had something in mind in creating us, the question of ultimate meaning still arises for It and the larger universe of which we and It are a part. As much as we are driven to discern or impute purposes, to ask the teleological question "Why?" we will always find that question unanswerable when applied to the largest scale of things. For better or for worse, naturalism inevitably frustrates our ambition to make ultimate sense of the universe.

While traditional faiths hold that spiritual experience answers ultimate questions of meaning, naturalism holds that such experience is simply a function of brain states or processes, not contact with a nonmaterial realm. Research is underway to pin down the neural correlates of the spiritual response--for instance by imaging the brains of meditators and describing the neural effects of hallucinogenic (or "entheogenic") drugs in generating experiences of ecstasy and unity. Preliminary findings suggest that the sense of transpersonal connection arises when neural networks responsible for our sense of orientation in the world are shut down, and the sense of deep significance and conviction seems to have a neural correlate in the temporal lobe. In their book, Why God Won't Go Away, Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili describe several "association areas" in the cerebral cortex they believe are the neural basis for cosmic consciousness.

The spiritual response can thus be accounted for naturalistically as an experience that is at bottom identical to specific sorts of brain activity evoked by various sorts of stimuli. Furthermore, under naturalism the subjective sense of deep conviction characteristic of spiritual experience isn't evidence for the truth of any belief. However special such experiences may seem, they aren't a reliable way of knowing or of establishing facts about what ultimately exists: that privilege is accorded only to scientific empiricism and its intersubjective method of corroboration via experiment and evidence.

At every turn, it seems, naturalism denies just those things that give most comfort to the traditional spiritualist and that appear, at first glance, most necessary for a viable spirituality There exists no personal soul or spirit, no supernatural god or creator, no purpose that can be attached to existence, no ultimate meaning to life, and no special first-person way of knowing that puts the individual in direct contact with a deeper reality. The most profound experiences available to us are, like the most trivial experiences, a matter of brain states, nothing more. From the traditional perspective, all this seems a crushing blow to our existential hopes, a catastrophic leveling of the transcendental ambition to escape from the mundane into the exalted and eternal. But as we have seen, the traditional perspective has deep flaws inherent in its dualism, and although naturalism can't give us everything we might wish, it hardly represents a catastrophe for spirituality, in fact rather the opposite.

NATURALISTIC SPIRITUALITY

It's perhaps not that difficult to see how naturalism might serve as a basis for spirituality--both to inspire the spiritual response and to provide a plausible cognitive context for our ultimate concerns. First, it is clear that under naturalism connection with the world is built into every aspect of our being, not a hoped for eventuality in the life to come. We're joined to the cosmos and the everyday world as described by science in countless ways, fully linked with our surroundings in time, space, matter/energy, and causality. In fact, no more intimate connection with the totality of what is could be imagined. From a naturalistic perspective, there is an empirically valid referent for the sense of cosmic consciousness encountered in spiritual experience. Feelings of unity mirror the objective state of our complete interconnection with the world.

Second, in its denial of ultimate meaning and purpose, naturalism, strangely enough, may equal traditional faiths in its capacity to inspire the spiritual response. When we confront the startling fact that existence isn't subsumable under any overarching interpretation but simply is, we are left with an irreducible mystery about why we are here or exist at all; and mystery serves at least as well as purpose to inspire spiritual experience. Unable not to ask questions about ultimate purpose and meaning, but rebuffed by the logic which shows such questions unanswerable, we are caught in a cosmic perplexity, a state of profound existential astonishment. Like a Zen koan or other practices in which thinking confronts its own limitations, such a cognitive impasse can serve as the gateway to the direct, nondiscursive experience that the present is sufficient unto itself. In her book, The Sacred Depths of Nature, Ursula Goodenough expresses this eloquently:

   The realization that I needn't have answers to the Big Questions, needn't
   seek answers to the Big Questions has served as an epiphany. I lie on my
   back under the stars and the unseen galaxies and I let their enormity wash
   over me. I assimilate the vastness of the distances, the impermanence, the
   fact of it all. I go all the way out and then I go all the way down, to the
   fact of photons without mass and gauge bosons that become massless at high
   temperatures. I take in the abstractions about forces and symmetries and
   they caress me like Gregorian chants, the meaning of the words not
   mattering because the words are so haunting.

This response is quite different, obviously, from that of the Sartrian existentialist, for whom the discovery of no ultimate intrinsic purpose makes the universe "absurd." The absurdist interpretation mistakes the absence of meaning for meaninglessness, failing to see that the universe necessarily transcends the meaningful/meaningless distinction. (This is why physicist Stephen Weinberg was mistaken to say, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.") Instead of sliding into existential angst or ennui, we can savor the surprise and excitement of participating in an unscripted drama--one in which meaning is created locally against an inscrutable cosmic backdrop. This, I submit, is a far more interesting fate than the boring security of being a bit player in an end game scripted by God.

Besides connection and mystery, naturalism leads to wonder. It's truly a marvel what matter and energy can do when left to their own devices. Somehow, the concatenation of neural activity in our brains ends up constituting awareness, intelligence, and wonder itself. To see, transparently, how highly organized matter and mind are precisely one thing, not two, is the spiritual significance of the mind-body problem. To penetrate it would be to leave behind the last vestiges of dualism and alienation from the "merely" physical. And far beyond our parochial selves lies the incalculable vastness of the cosmic arena from which we spring. Wonder and awe are surely appropriate once we realize we belong to something so very far beyond us. Such sentiments count as deeply spiritual, even though no spirits are involved.

Because naturalism conceives of experience as identical to some sort of material organization, spiritual experience doesn't count as a special way of knowing but, rather, a special way of being. The intrinsically rewarding sense of ultimate unity, awe, and significance isn't a perception or direct knowledge; it's a feeling, one of a near infinity of possible brain states of which we are capable. Nevertheless, this feeling reflects the scientific facts of our embeddedness in nature. Naturalism need not posit a special route to the spiritual truth which could conflict with scientific empiricism; rather, it understands spiritual experience as a materially instantiated, noncognitive affirmation of what is actually the case. Thus naturalism is entirely monistic in its interpretation of spiritual experience: there is one world and one way of knowing it. By avoiding metaphysical and epistemic dualism, naturalism naturalizes spirituality, and in so doing provides a cognitive context for spiritual experience that reinforces its essential nondual quality.

LIMITATIONS OF NATURALISTIC SPIRITUALITY

As much as naturalism delivers us from dualism, alienation from the body, and cognitive dissonance, and as much as it can inspire us with the concrete reality of connection and the marvels of physical processes, it obviously cannot give us the prize of personal immortality promised by traditional spiritualities. Naturalism cannot rectify, as some faiths claim they can, what seems the root injustice of being born with desires that necessarily outstrip their fulfillment. There is no cosmic reassurance; rather, we are enjoined to make accommodation with the stubborn facts of impermanence, suffering, and death--not to escape them in dreams of disembodied transcendence.

Since naturalism is tough-minded in this respect, it's not a route many are likely to take in addressing ultimate concerns. But the argument could be put that, in acknowledging impermanence, naturalism actually reveals the source of value to us. If we knew for sure that we had immaterial souls and would live forever, would we place as much value on being? Endless life would be like plastic flowers: permanent, yes, but something we would quickly take for granted. As much as we dread our own extinction, therefore, immortality might not be quite the prize we suppose it is. In his book of the same title, Alan Watts called this insight the "wisdom of insecurity": we can't have both the ultimate security of the soul and true excitement and passion for life.

In discarding the possibility of a life hereafter, our values necessarily shift to this world. Our projects involve the joy and suffering inherent in being embodied, situated on a finite planet, and facing the pressing challenge of material sustainability. We must create meaning for ourselves using our capacities for compassion, creativity, and aesthetics applied in situations that demand the utmost gravity and those that invite the most self-forgetful indulgent play. Naturalism, in denying our dualistic transcendental ambitions, gives us just one world and therefore assigns it greater value than do its supernaturalistic competitors. Since the intuition of significance is central to spiritual experience, naturalism heightens the spiritual possibilities inherent in everyday life by adding greater significance and weight to our existence at this very moment.

SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

Once we let go of traditional definitions of spirituality, naturalism becomes a powerful resource to inspire spiritual experience and provide a unified cognitive context within which it can be interpreted. But how, practically speaking, can we evoke the spiritual response? Naturalism may inspire us, but to substantially change how we feel we may need to participate in some sort of spiritual practice.

Traditional religion has linked the spiritual response to sacred liturgies, with all their supernatural connotations, using music, theater, incense, architecture and other ritual elements to generate feelings of connection and wonder. There is no reason why such a link cannot be forged between naturalism and such feelings; it's simply a matter of finding (or designing) rituals and practices that pair these feelings with expressions of naturalistic beliefs. In his television series Cosmos, Carl Sagan accomplished this by telling a naturalistic creation story, set to some exceptionally beautiful music and stunning visual panoramas of stars and galaxies.

There's much to choose from in terms of existing spiritual practice that might be adapted for a naturalistic spirituality. Some Unitarian Universalist services come close to an entirely naturalistic celebration of community, despite the fact that they sometimes use theistic hymns and take place in buildings that look suspiciously like churches. Naturalists might wish to infiltrate these congregations, form committees over coffee, and lobby for less God and more naturalism in the liturgy. Sunday school would best teach ethics and respect and humility before the mysteries of life, without resorting to stale and incredible biblical tales. As for venues, those groups which live near planetariums might investigate the possibility of creating a participatory naturalistic service, with sound and lighting effects. Finding out what does and doesn't work in all of this is, of course, a matter of experimentation.

For those not inclined to communal practice, there are more private means of altering one's consciousness--meditation chief among them. When thinking quiets down and sensory input is at a minimum, very different sorts of feelings can arise, some of which are extraordinarily unlike normal waking consciousness. The feelings accessed during meditation, naturalistically understood, are just more brain states. But they can have directly felt qualities of unity and acceptance that mark them as subjectively quite special and that correspond to empirically grounded cognitions. Because many varieties of Buddhism are inherently naturalistic and emphatically this-worldly, humanists interested in exploring meditation could do worse than joining a local Zen center or vipassana (insight meditation) group.

A naturalistic spiritual practice, of course, need not announce itself. Rather, it can shade into and blend with ecstatic and artistic pursuits in which no mention or thought arises of any philosophy or world view--such as dance, music, athletics, and yoga. The point is simply to gain the sense of connection, joy, and immediacy, making the moment sufficient unto itself. As with meditation, which only comes through practice, we can learn these "spiritual arts" so that we have techniques with which to engage the present.

Drugs, whether legal or illicit, are of course another route to altered consciousness. Many spiritual traditions have made and continue to make use of drugs to induce transcendental states, and I see no a priori moral problem with this, as long as no significant health or social problems result. The difficulty, however, is that the brain is a delicate mechanism. Direct and repeated chemical impingements on the neural substrates of consciousness often do entail unwanted side effects, after-effects, or long-term health consequences. Behavioral routes to unitary states are a good deal safer (especially if one wants to have the experience often) and, because they require effort, the end result may have more subjective value and be taken less for granted than drug-induced ecstasies.

There are, then, many choices available to the naturalist in discovering a congenial spiritual practice. By opening ourselves up to the spiritual response from time to time, we can feel what we truly are: beings fully integrated at every moment into the greater scheme of things. Yes, we are also fully individuated humans living out our separate lives, but the realization of a deeper connection is necessary to set an authentic stage for our personal and collective strivings. Naturalism provides an all-encompassing perspective that can sustain us as well as any to be found in traditional spirituality, and it leaves behind the dualisms that can obscure the intuition of unity. Should we ever want recourse to the transpersonal, naturalism is there for us, not just as a philosophy, but as an inspiration to feel truly at home in the universe.

Thomas W. Clark is a frequent philosophical contributor to the Humanist. E-mail him at [e-mail] or visit his website www.naturalism.org.