10:57pm September 15, 2014

Some personal definitions

spirituality: Communion with That Which Is And Can Never Be Named, and all personal changes and ethics and other things that happen to be associated with it. (Wikipedia says: “Traditionally spirituality has been defined as a process of personal transformation in accordance with religious ideals.” That works, too.)

mystic: Someone who communes directly with That Which Is And Can Never Be Named. Someone like Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, or St. John of the Cross, to name some Catholic examples, but there are examples in every religion.

mysticism: The art of communing with That Which Is And Can Never Be Named.

religion: A culture built up around something that at least vaguely resembles That Which Is And Can Never Be Named. Sometimes it involves worship, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it involves gods, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s hard to speak of a culture even having a religion because everything that would be called religious is so woven into the culture that it’s just the culture itself.

spiritual experience: A deeply transformative experience involving some aspect of That Which Is And Can Never Be Named. You can tell a genuine spiritual experience from a counterfeit one (which can be created by wishful thinking, drugs, seizures, all kinds of things) largely by whether it creates a lasting positive change in you and your life.

Definitions that I do not use, but that lots and lots of other people seem to use:

spirituality: Anything having to do with the occult, invisible, or unseen, supernatural, etc., regardless of whether it has anything to do with That Which Is And Can Never Be Named.

mysticism: Random confusing stuff that new agers like to say because it sounds cool and nobody can understand it.

religion: Christianity, especially Christianity as taught to young children. Sometimes also Judaism or Islam (also usually the child’s version) but mostly Christianity.

spiritual experience: Something akin to a good acid trip. Focusing mostly on things like what you saw and heard, rather than any deeper transformation that might have been taking place at the time. (Usually the ones people focus on who use this definition, are either counterfeit, or not being understood properly for what they are.)

I generally find that people following any serious spiritual path are most likely to use the first set of definitions, and people who don’t like religion and spirituality at all are most likely to use the second set of definitions (and so are new agers, for reasons I can’t figure out – it’s like new agers and militant atheists inexplicably use the same vocabulary at times).

This makes it very difficult to have a conversation.

I still don’t totally understand how the skeptic movement uses the word mysticism. They certainly don’t use it to mean communion with gods. They seem to use it to mean something more like mystification.

Google’s dictionary even sums up the extremely different definitions of mysticism like this:

belief that union with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender.
belief characterized by self-delusion or dreamy confusion of thought, especially when based on the assumption of occult qualities or mysterious agencies.

It’s very insulting to talk about oneself as a mystic in the first sense and then have people immediately assume you’re talking about the second sense of the word. I am a mystic because I commune directly with That Which Is, not because I’m a fuzzy-headed fool tangled up in the occult.

And no, claiming to commune directly with That Which Is is not about being special. Quite the opposite. If you approach That Which Is thinking that it makes you special, you will rapidly regret it in the most profound way possible. And you won’t be able to approach very close anyway, because your ego will be in the way telling you how great you are. But approach with an “I’m special” attitude, and you’ll end up feeling like you just showed up to school buck naked… and then got publicly humiliated by your teacher in front of the entire school.

At any rate, this kind of communion is available to anyone willing and capable of putting in years, decades, of agonizing effort that involves things like looking at your every last flaw and deciding what to do about it. It is not glamorous, it is often not fun, and it is outright grueling at times. But for those of us who end up on that path, it’s worth it in ways that can’t be explained in words.

I’m not trying to say there’s no good side to being a mystic, not at all, or nobody would be one. But I’m just trying to say that it’s not easy and that if you go into it for egotistical reasons, you will get thwapped upside the head, hard, for as long as it takes to either break you of that habit or send you screaming away from the entire idea. Spiritual pride is a terrible thing to bring into a relationship with That Which Is And Can Never Be Named.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw these definitions out there, because when religious and spiritual people are using one set of definitions, and unbelievers of various sorts are using another, it makes it incredibly hard to communicate. About anything.

It also doesn’t help when unbelievers become extremely condescending to religious and spiritual people and assume that our beliefs are essentially the same as what various religions teach their five-year-old children. Or that we’re in it for the afterlife, even if our religion doesn't have beliefs about the afterlife.

The funny thing is, when it comes down to skeptics versus new age belief systems, I always come down on the side of the skeptics. I get a lot out of reading skeptic websites, whether I agree with all of what they have to say or not. (They seem unwilling to examine certain of their own biases, especially about things like disability.) The only thing is, I’m also spiritual or religious or whatever you want to call it.

Of course, there are plenty of spiritual atheists and agnostics out there (yes it’s a thing), and some versions of some religions don’t require deities. I’d consider myself to be an atheist (or almost-atheist) in some senses of the word, and absolutely not an atheist in other senses of the word.

See how confusing everything can get even for one person trying to decide how to use words for things like this?

Anyway, I’m not really looking for a debate as to whether gods are real, or whether spirituality has merit, or anything like that. I’m just trying to throw out there the fact that people having these conversations are often literally not speaking the same language. We’re using the same words to mean totally different, even opposite, things. And this can lead to not only confusion, but also a feeling of being insulted or belittled. Imagine you had a word that meant the most important thing in your life, and it also had a definition that meant something fairly insulting, and you tried to talk about it in your sense and everyone else thought you were talking about it in the insulting sense, and it just spirals downwards from there.

TL;DR: It’s really hard to talk about religion and spirituality when people aren’t even using the same words to mean the same things.

Notes: