Spirituality Is Secure Attachment with Reality
intimatemirror.substack.com
intimatemirror.substack.com
I learned this in A Secular Age, a fantastic book by the philosopher Charles Taylor. Basically the book is about how modern western society is increasingly immanent, focused on this reality and not on what is after life; e. g., heaven and hell, punishments and rewards after life, personal experience after death, and so on.
I bring this up because I think a decent working definition of spirituality is how one navigates this immanent situation. It seems to me that there quite likely is something beyond the bounds of human experience, but we aren’t quite sure what it is. A successful version of spirituality, to me, would be a way of navigating this situation in such a way that is psychologically healthy and philosophically justifiable. Simply denying existence outside of human frames seems like a denial of reality.
It's pretty tall order.
But, if we go with it by extending the reality past human death (why only human?), we, the humans, usually make it hugely anthropocentric, often more so than when astronomy put Earth in the center of universe. For me, it's a sign that many spiritual movements try to serve as a consolation to humans fearing death, rather than an honest research of anything past "this side" of reality. Certainly there are kinds of spirituality that avoid this trap, e.g. Theravada Buddhism; sadly it tries to describe provably incorrect things, like a number of heavens at particular heights above Earth.
A spiritualism that tries to pass simple checks should either actually predict "physical reality" and thus become science, or drop any pretenses that it can be observable in the "physical reality", thus going firmly into the realm of not even fairy tales but of strictly internal experience of an observer, hence becoming solipsist. Solipsism is logically entitled to anything :)
If you just "want to believe", the Pascal's Wager is as good as it has always been.
This is the real flaw with the positivist, scientific-dominant world view IMO. It obsesses over this external notion of objectivity while forgetting that human flourishing is (arguably) more important than merely accumulating information.
[0] By the way, note that it is the unstated meta-purpose of natural sciences—at its core, all research is driven by the goal of improving human existence. It is sometimes amusing, sometimes frustrating to see the people who are into physics and natural sciences evade acknowledging that it is a human-centric field, perhaps more so than philosophy (where different branches can be more or less concerned with it).
1. Is it possible for a view of the world in which humans aren’t at the center, but still flourish? I think the answer is…possibly; but I am a little, but not extremely, skeptical. I think human psychology seems to benefit from thinking we’re at the center of things, or at least that we aren’t merely another random creature in space.
2. The more interesting question is whether this is even possible, given the apparent nature of existence. I’m not an expert on quantum physics, but from my layman understanding, the observer necessarily affects the observed. Which would seem to imply that the observer is necessarily at the center of their own vision of the universe, even on a physical level. Again, I’m not sure how that spells out in physics and I could be mistaken in my understanding here, but: it does seem like the vision of the universe as this independent thing which humans move around on is a cultural legacy and not how reality actually is constructed.
On that last note - not sure I necessarily agree there. I think the unstated meta-purpose of natural sciences is to gain more information, with the assumption that more information is necessarily good. Scientists seem more driven by a desire for knowledge than a desire for human flourishing, to me.
> Is it possible for a view of the world in which humans aren’t at the center, but still flourish.
There are non-dualistic philosophical approaches to modeling reality where mind is the first-class citizen (as opposed to being explained away as an illusion, like materialistic monism mostly does). I assume such aporoach does not need to make humans the center of the universe, but intuitively it seems it should automatically put more emphasis on well-being.
The above works if you disregard that all observations of “physical reality”, any models, and the meta mode of attending to reality that leads you to structure your models in a particular way and choose which experiments to perform, are all a product of your mind and start treating physical models as gospel.
Natural science is about making predictions, not speaking truth. It offers models as a shortcut to predictions, but does not even claim to offer complete knowledge or “true” models. The territory is unknowable, all we have is maps, and all maps are wrong (physical models being a special case of maps). Natural science by design is not equipped to get us to any true reference points, and becomes remarkably useless as soon as our mind gets under the spotlight—though what it does do is provide us some useful maps (notably, “useful” as defined by our minds. You see the pattern).
It is a struggle to live a life given such uncertainty. We have options as to how to represent the territory, and so we go about it with varying degrees of rigour.
A seemingly popular approach of just taking the current models provided by natural sciences and using them as a proxy of truth does not score high on rigour in my opinion, since it strikes me as taking physics as a poor surrogate for religion.
Thus, I personally have no problem with spirituality, unless it flies in the face of observations and fails to offer sound philosophical reasoning. Like in physics models are shortcuts for predictions, spirituality/religion could be considered shortcuts for philosophy (with a degree of charitability, depending on the views one holds), and reducing philosophy to physics would degrade, not elevate it (after all, natural sciences came from and are subordinate to philosophy, not the other way around).
This is also why being a physicist and simultaneously a religious person (the case with many famous physicists) is not a contradiction.
My extended family has protestants, Catholics, ex-chatholics, atheist and then my father. One of his parents was atheist and the other descended from a long line of quakers and catholics. Around my late teens I finally asked what his thoughts were on the subject. His reply was something like, "let me know when it helps in any real meaningful/tangible way to provide for the family; then I will think about it and let you know." He never spoke anything on the subject, as if it didn't exist. Not against it, not for it, not even a curiosity. He is also the type that worked 2 jobs while also starting his own business that drained money for some years before providing a comfortable living. I would not say that he was at all in "a denial of reality". Quite the opposite.
Personally, I think the thing beyond the bounds of human experience is science waiting to be discovered. I have always found it fascinated that other animals have differing zones or frequencies of senses. How there are sounds we can not hear, colors we can not see but other creatures can. There is a whole world within our world that we can't always directly experience or when we do, we don't always have a way to link it to measurable things; yet it is still there. We should be spending more time discovering the reality just beyond our senses, or at least building that curiosity in the next generation to pursue instead of focusing on fairy-tale magical explanations.
Not everyone is curious about ultimate questions like these. That’s fine, but for those of us that are curious, they are very important questions indeed.
I bring up my experience, because who measures that (the totality of existence)? There was no denial from him, because from his view point that was the totality of existence.
This misses something about western society, though—it prioritizes immanence but in a way that fails to ever attain it. If you consider a Citizen-Kane type of person who accumulates wealth and fame: the underlying emotional need behind all that accumulation is for love and connection in the present, which if it were attained, would have this character of immanence. Wealth-accumulation is instrumental towards that goal, but Western culture makes it an end in itself. We wind up continuously striving after that "connection in the present" but go searching in the wrong direction, getting trapped on the plane of ideas and vanities and other-peoples'-expectations. But this only bars the way to the actual thing we want. It's a "metric becoming a goal", and therefore moves away from the actual goal.
The linked blog post I think is expressing something along these lines: "our longings, even those that appear mundane or materialistic, often mask attempts to recreate that sense of secure attachment". What's needed instead is an openness to reality, and in particular some way of reckoning with the feeling of the finiteness of one's life, compared to the seeming endlessness of the realm of ideas. (You'll die, but ideas are forever.) And the post rightly emphasizes "safety" as the essential thing.
This is I think what is meant by "we are loved precisely in the midst of our most profound insecurities - this is what it means to stand naked before God." While that God-language might describe what it actually feels like, it strikes me as misleading from the perspective of a person outside that state of existence, who would not know what to turn their attention to.
Never the less, the article mostly made sense to me, although it was a bit circular, I still found it tolerable as far as LLM assisted work goes, def didn't feel "written by AI".
I thought this was good: "spirituality is, at its heart, about our relationship with reality itself. Whether we name it God, Buddha-nature, or simply Life, we are always in relationship with it. The quality of that relationship - secure or insecure, trusting or defensive - shapes every aspect of our experience." - but the author uses "reality itself" and "just like a child" waaaayyy to often, at least they are honest at the start there is a lot of LLM in there.
In other words, up is up and down is down. Water is not wine. Reality doesn't come and go on the whims of a prayer halfway across the world.
I hate to pick out just one quote, but this is really emblematic of the issue I have with the source article. A Catholic mass is not about our psychological status or abstract relationship with reality - it's a remembrance of the incarnation of God into a specific man we call Jesus, his life in the ancient Roman governate of Judaea, his execution and resurrection, and his plans to come back and resurrect all of us at some point in the future.
If you would prefer to follow "Reality/God", more power to you. But it's critical to recognize that you're rejecting the Catholic tradition by doing so, not following some deeper truth.
This was a great read!
> This doesn't mean all experiences are pleasant. The worldly winds still blow harsh and cold. But secure attachment to reality means we can safely experience all of it. This is why challenging events often become crises of faith - they probe the very edges of our trust in existence itself.
Only we by virtue of extreme privilege can deign to pretend that this is real and only when we are young at that. It's a crisis because we are asking people to simultaneously come to grips with a world where they are both a special spiritual being personally loved by the creator of the universe and a fragile existence that can be snuffed out for no reason by a misplaced step or a gust of wind. Since the reality of our mortality is impossible to ignore one logically must doubt how special we really are.
> There is no prerequisite state we must achieve to earn the love of Reality/God. That love is already here, constantly available, needing only our remembrance.
Not even sure what this even means. Our gods to the extent that they exist are constructs that didn't exist before we are born and will only outlive us save to the extent that we manage to communicate these ideas to others. To be loved by god is merely to be loved by yourself no different than imagining our dead loved ones would be proud of us by virtue of emulating them in our own head.
Secure attachment to reality would be the erasure of these false idols.
> Consider the common experience of feeling "abandoned by God" during difficult times
This is simply understanding that we are in fact alone reliant upon ourselves and those who are close to us.
> The difference between becoming bitter and deepening in faith during times of challenge lies in our capacity to include the breakdown into our relationship with reality - and through this inclusion, discover a more complete wholeness.
Blaming yourself or blaming god are just two different ways to rationalize a delusion. If we continue to believe in god but simultaneously blame him this is obviously a more problematic path as we have no power to reform god.
> This reveals a surprising truth about both spiritual development and psychological growth: what appears as falling apart might actually be falling together. What feels like losing our religion might be faith deepening its roots. What seems like a crisis of connection might be an invitation into more authentic relationship with reality itself.
This sounds like Stockholm syndrome
> When we grasp this truth, we can approach both our own development and that of others with deeper compassion and wisdom. We begin to understand that the path to greater spiritual security might lead us through periods of apparent insecurity
When we believe in crazy baloney by definition no proof is ever given and many counterexamples are readily available so anyone with a functional brain will ultimately experience doubt. When we socially prove that doubt is normal and expected but not a reason for fundamental re-evaluation of norms by virtue of people both adjacent and above us in a social hierarchy "triumphing" over doubt we collectively grant permission to dismiss these troubling thoughts and continue believing in crazy.
The entire piece could be profitably shortened to the sentence that intellectual, emotional, or spiritual growth requires one to be secure in one's self, and in the acceptance of one's self and support of peers and betters in order to move forward from the stable base of self.