My World View – Spirituality And Transcendence
The term spirituality lacks a definitive definition, although social scientists have defined spirituality as the search for “the sacred,” where “the sacred” is broadly defined as that which is set apart from the ordinary and worthy of veneration.
The use of the term “spirituality” has changed throughout the ages. In modern times, spirituality is often separated from Abrahamic religions, and connotes a blend of humanistic psychology with mystical and esoteric traditions and eastern religions aimed at personal well-being and personal development. The notion of “spiritual experience” plays an important role in modern spirituality, but has a relatively recent origin.
Clearly we humans have some difficulty defining spirituality. Those of you who have read many of my other world view posts will know that I’m a mechanical atheist, materialist, nihilist, monist and have a grand interest in how we think, what that implies, and what consciousness is.
I’ve seen a few posts lately of people talking about what spirituality means both for theists and atheists etc. None of these definitions match my understanding so I wanted to put it out here. I don’t expect that you’ll understand it nor appreciate it.
Some background, Jill Bolte-Taylor wrote a book called My Stroke Of Insight where she describes having a major brain stroke. She is a neuroscientist so understood a lot of what was going on. You can also find her TED talk. It’s inspiring.
She describes the two hemispheres of the brain acting out different functions, one experiencing data input and one putting all that data in a time ordered construct or understanding. She lost the time order to the data and describes what that feels like. I urge you to watch her TED talk.
Yeah, that IS a real human brain… much like your own, or used to be.
What she is describing, in my inestimable opinion, is what we glimpse when we see a sight that falls outside our time ordered construction of a model of the world around us. The data is overwhelmingly present in our senses but it is something we cannot place neatly into a time order or structured model of the world as we know it. This feeling is often described as awe, transcendence, and other such words. The feeling is what is going on in your head with all the inputs and outputs for the simulation of the world that you run there is that the data does not match your brains ability to construct a model – it is experience without constraints of construct and attributes for manipulation in the simulation, Such things as a beautiful sunset are without description and defy us when we try. This is because even though the data is ‘in your face’ there is only the opportunity to experience it without being able to construct a model of it in your head – that is you cannot find the attributes necessary to construct a copy of this data as a model in the simulation that runs in your brain (consciousness). You simply do not have the modelling data to do so so this ‘experience’ of data gives us a transcendent feeling, that the experience is beyond simple understanding and outside our ability to explain or describe.
We all have brains that run a simulation of the world around us (consciousness) and despite world views we will all find experiences which simply don’t slip into place in that simulation. We will ALL experience awe or transcendence or spirituality feelings.
We know that with meditation and practice we can affect how the simulation functions. We even have tricks to cause a dissonance between the simulator and reality (often this is no more than a recreational activity) but there are meditative techniques (meditation and religious activities as well) which cause this loss of sync between experienced data and simulator ability.
Spirituality is the result of a ‘glitch’ in the simulator in your head. There are no external ‘forces’ involved unless you attribute ‘force’ to the experience of sensory data such as the ‘force’ of a wondrous sunset. It’s a good glitch most of the time, but we can cause a similar glitch to happen as well when we ‘feel’ like there is a ghost in the room, and that is not so pleasant.
Do robots dream? Yes we do… and we experience and love and wonder…