Scoping the idea of spirituality

Some Indian traditions define spirituality (Sanskrit: adhyatma) as that which pertains to the self or soul (Sanskrit: atman).

Certain forms of spirituality can appear more like philosophy: note in particular the scope of metaphysics. And Ursula King writes: “… spirituality is now understood anthropologically as an exploration into what is involved in becoming fully human”.^[1]

Due to the broad scope and personal nature of spirituality as a term in various usages, however, one can perhaps gain an overview of the field by focusing on key concepts that arise when people describe what spirituality means to them. Research by Martsolf and Mickley^[2] highlighted the following areas as worthy of consideration:

• Meaning – significance of life; making sense of situations; deriving purpose.
• Values – beliefs, standards and ethics that one cherishes.
• Transcendence – experience, awareness, and appreciation of a “transcendent dimension” to life beyond self.
• Connecting – increased awareness of a connection with self, others, God/Spirit/Divinity, and nature/Nature.
• Becoming – an unfolding of life that calls for reflection and experience; including a sense of who one “is” and how one knows.

The American magazine What is Enlightenment?, in its tenth anniversary issue, published an article which drew a distinction between what it called “feel good” or “translational” spirituality, and “transformational” spirituality, the former covering essentially the practices whereby a person feels better or changes approach, without in fact enhancing personal underlying spiritual centering (or ego-related viewpoint).

Osho, a controversial Indian teacher, comments of spiritual teachers that “[o]ut of one hundred masters, there is only one Master, ninety-nine are only teachers. The teacher is necessarily learned, the Master … it is not a necessity… The Master is a rebel. he lives out of his own being, he is spontaneous, not traditional…”^[3]

The spiritual and the religious

An important distinction exists between spirituality in religion and spirituality as opposed to religion.

In recent years, spirituality in religion often carries connotations of a believer having a faith more personal, less dogmatic, more open to new ideas and myriad influences, and more pluralistic than the doctrinal/dogmatic faiths of mature religions. It also can connote the nature of believers’ personal relationship or “connection” with their god(s) or belief-system(s), as opposed to the general relationship with a Deity as shared by all members of a given faith.

Those who speak of spirituality as opposed to religion generally meta-religiously believe in the existence of many “spiritual paths” and deny any objective truth about the best path to follow. Rather, adherents of this definition of the term emphasize the importance of finding one’s own path to whatever-god-there-is, rather than following what others say works. In summary: the path which makes the most coherent sense becomes the correct one (for oneself).

Many adherents of orthodox religions who regard spirituality as an aspect of their religious experience tend to contrast spirituality with secular “worldliness” rather than with the ritual expression of their religion.

People of a more New-Age disposition tend to regard spirituality not as religion per se, but as the active and vital connection to a force/power/energy, spirit, or sense of the deep self. As cultural historian and yogi William Irwin Thompson (1938 – ) put it, “Religion is not identical with spirituality; rather religion is the form spirituality takes in civilization.” (1981, 103)

For a religious parallel to the approach whereby some see spirituality in everything, compare pantheism.

Directed spirituality

“Being spiritual” may aim toward:

• simultaneously improving one’s wisdom and willpower
• achieving a closer connection to Deity/the universe
• removing illusions or “false ideas” at the sensory, feeling and thinking aspects of a person.

Plato‘s allegory of the cave in book VII of The Republic gives one of the best-known descriptions of the spiritual development process, and may provide an aid in understanding what “spiritual development” exactly entails.

Spirituality can comprise both inner growth, changing oneself as one changes one’s relationship with the external universe, and the outer process of transforming the physical reality around oneself as a result of the inward change.^{[citations needed]} Some authorities connect the two, suggesting that outer change arises through the inner realization that all is oneself; whereupon the divine inward manifests the diverse outward for experience and progress.^{[citation needed]}

Spirituality and personal well-being

Spirituality, according to most adherents of the idea, forms an essential part of an individual’s holistic health and well-being. In this respect, some supporters of the idea of spirituality see it as a supportive concept even in workplace environments.^{[citation needed]}

Spirituality and science

Analysis of spiritual qualities in science faces problems — such as the imprecision of spiritual concepts, the subjectivity of spiritual experience, and the amount of work required to translate and map observable components of a spiritual system into empirical evidence.

Opposition

Science takes as its basis empirical, repeatable observations of the natural world, and thus generally regards ideas that rely on supernatural forces for an explanation as beyond the purview of science. Scientists regard ideas which present themselves as scientific, but which rely on a supernatural force for an explanation, as religious rather than scientific; and may label such ideas as pseudo-science. In this context scientists may oppose spirituality, at least in the scientific sphere.

Integration

New Age physicist-philosopher Fritjof Capra has articulated connections between what he sees as the spiritual consequences of quantum physics.^{[citation needed]} Ken Wilber, in an attempt to unite science and spirituality, has proposed an “Integral Theory of Consciousness”.^[4]

Ervin László posits a field of information as the substance of the cosmos. Using the Sanskrit and Vedic term for “space“, akasha, he calls this information-field the “Akashic field” or “A-field”. He posits the “quantum vacuum” (see Vacuum state) as the fundamental energy- and information-carrying field that informs not just the current universe, but all universes past and present (collectively, the “Metaverse“).

History of spirituality

Until recent centuries, the history of spirituality remained bound up within the history of religion.^{[citation needed]} Spiritual innovators who operated within the context of a religious tradition became either marginalised/suppressed as heretics or separated out as schismatics. In these circumstances, anthropologists generally treat so-called “spiritual” practices such as shamanism in the sphere of the religious, and class even non-traditional activities such as those of Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being in the province of religion.

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, often opposed to clericalism and skeptical of religion, sometimes came to express their more emotional responses to the world under the rubric of “the Sublime” rather than discussing “spirituality”. The spread of the ideas of modernity began to diminish the role of religion in society and in popular thought.

Schmidt sees Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) as a pioneer of the idea of spirituality as a distinct field.^[5] Phineas Quimby (1802-1866) and New Thought played a role in emphasizing the spiritual in new ways within Christian church traditions during the 19th century.

In the wake of the Nietzschean concept of the “death of God” in 1882, people unpersuaded by scientific rationalism turned increasingly to the idea of spirituality as an alternative both to materialism and to traditional religious dogma.

Important early 20th century writers who studied the phenomenon of spirituality include William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)) and Rudolph Otto (especially The Idea of the Holy (1917)).

The distinction between the spiritual and the religious became more common in the popular mind during the late 20th century with the rise of secularism and the advent of the New Age movement. Paul Heelas noted the development within New Age circles of what he called “seminar spirituality” ^[6]: structured offerings complementing consumer choice with spiritual options.

The study of spirituality

Many spiritual traditions promote courses of study in spirituality which happen to culminate in the unflowering of their own world-view systems or practices.

More generally, building on both the Western esoteric tradition and theosophy,^[7] Rudolf Steiner and others in the anthroposophic tradition have attempted to apply systematic methodology to the study of spiritual phenomena.^[8] This enterprise does not attempt to redefine natural science, but to explore inner experience — especially our thinking — with the same rigor that we apply to outer (sensory) experience.

Overall, scholars in disciplines such as theology, religious studies, psychology, anthropology and sociology sometimes concentrate their researches on spirituality, but the field remains ill-defined.

Are you worried about looking like the hunchback of Notre Dame? Here’s a painfree and effective method for safely assuming a ‘correct’ posture and improving muscle tone.

Steps

1. Know what good posture is believed to be. Most people think that to “stand up straight” means tensing your back to heave your chest ‘in and up’, and pulling your head back in to your chest. This is not so. The spine has two natural curves that you need to maintain called the ‘double C’ or ‘S’ curves, these are the curves found from the base of your head to your shoulders and the curve from the upper back to the base of the spine. When standing straight up, make sure that your weight is evenly distributed on your feet. You might feel like you are leaning forward, and look stupid, but you don’t.
2. Using a mirror, align your ears, shoulder, and hips. Proper alignment places your ears loosely above your shoulders, above your hips. Again, these points make a straight line, but the spine itself curves in a slight ‘S’. You’ll find that this doesn’t hurt at all. If you do experience pain, look at your sideview in a mirror to see if you’re forcing your back into an unnatural position. If so, stop it!
3. Do exercises that strengthen the muscles across your upper back and shoulders. These do not have to be strenuous! Try the following, with or without handweights:
   • Align your ears over your shoulders. Raise both arms straight up, alongside your ears. Remember to keep your ears aligned! Bend forearms toward shoulders to touch your shoulder blades. Do 10 repetitions with both arms, then alternate 10 reps for each arm singularly.
   • Align ears with shoulders. Raise both arms out to sides at shoulder length. Hold for a slow count of ten. Slowly lower arms to sides, counting ten as you lower. Slowly raise arms back to shoulder height, counting to ten as you raise arms. Do ten reps, constantly checking your alignment! If ten reps are too many to start, do as many as you can. You should at least feel a slight fatigue in the shoulder muscles.
   • Be a penguin. While you wait for a webpage to load, toast to pop, or the microwave to beep, place elbows at your side, and touch your shoulders with your hands. Keeping your hands on your shoulders, and your ears aligned, raise both elbows (count one, two) and lower them back to your waist (count one, two). Do as many reps as your wait allows. You’ll be surprised how much exercise fits into 30 seconds.
4. Do stretches. This can greatly help if you find that you have a sore back or neck after a while.
   • Tilt (stretch) your head in all four directions over your shoulders (forward, back, left, right), and gently massage your neck. Avoid rolling in a circle, as it may cause further strain.
   • On your hands and knees, curl your back upwards, like a cat, and then the opposite. Think about being able to place a bowl in the hollow of your back.
5. Repeat the exercises a few times each day. Doing them in the morning helps your body stretch out the muscle lethargy of sleep, and periodically throughout the day helps raise your energy level without a heavy workout.

Tips

• You can have someone tape a giant X on your back from one shoulder to the opposite hip. Then put a straight line of tape across your shoulders closing the top of the X. Wear this during the day, to help retrain your back. This works really well if you hold shoulders back before taping, use wide non stretch tape and ideally change tape each day
• Don’t tighten up your muscles when you are assuming a straight posture. It will only stress the joints and muscles themselves and this affects the skeleton, therefore your posture and even the way you move and breathe. Try to eventually relax into it but if you experience back pains, stop it! You are probably causing unnecessary muscle tension.
• If your head is hanging, you can’t be properly aligned. Keep your head at the level that allows you to look directly ahead without having to turn your eyes up. If you cannot do this without feeling tension in your neck, this means you are causing unnecessary muscle tension.
• A great side benefit of keeping your head straight, and your ears/shoulders/hips aligned is an improvement in your self-esteem and attitude. If you walk with your head up, you appear more confident, and feel more confident, which improves your attitude and mood, making it easier to walk with your head up.
• Try these steps to get in alignment: push your shoulders forward, then bring them straight up, then bring them straight back, then bring them staight down. Feel good? If your shoulders feel slightly stiff or tense you may have unnecessary muscle tension.
• If you feel pain, especially back pain when trying to attain ‘correct’ posture you could consider learning the Alexander Technique with a qualified teacher , this is a proven learning technique which helps drop unneccessary muscle tension, regain natural posture and also adds a quality of ease to the way you move and work.
• If you need help remembering to keep your posture, think of a unique object or color. Everytime you think of that object, check your posture.

INGREDIENTS

• 2 cups Dark Chocolate
• ¼ cup Milk
• 10 Drop Vanilla Essence
• Marshmallow
• Assorted Fruit

Method

1. Place chocolate, vanilla and milk in a saucepan and heat gently over a low heat, stirring all the time until melted
2. Transfer to a fondue set and arrange bite size fruit or marshmallows around the outside, place on the skewer and dig in!

• Acceptance, Agitation, Alarm, Amusement, Anger, Angst, Annoyance, Anticipation, Apprehension, Apathy, Awe
• Bitterness, Boredom
• Calmness, Comfort, Contentment, Confidence, Courage
• Depression, Disappointment, Discontentment, Disgust, Desire, Delight.
• Elation or Euphoria, Embarrassment, Ennui, Envy, Ecstasy
• Fear, Friendship, Frustration,
• Glee, Gladness, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt
• Hate, Happiness, Homesickness, Honor, Hope, Horror, Humility
• Impatience, Inadeqacy, Irritability
• Joy, Jealousy,
• Kindness
• Loneliness, Love, Lust, Limerence
• Melancholy, Modesty
• Nervousness, Negativity, Nostalgia
• Pain, Patience, Peace, Phobia, Pity, Pride
• Rage, Regret, Remorse, Resentment
• Sadness, Schadenfreude, Self-pity, Shame, Shyness, Sorrow, Shock,^{[disambiguation needed]} Suffering, Surprise, Suspense
• Terror
• Unhappiness
• Vulnerability
• Worry
• Yearning
• Zest

Emotion is complex, and the term has no single universally accepted definition.^[1] The study of emotions is part of psychology, neuroscience, and, more recently, artificial intelligence.

According to Sloman,^[2] emotions are cognitive processes. Some authors emphasize the difference between human emotions and the affective behavior of animals.

In Paul D. MacLean‘s classic Triune brain model, emotions are defined as the responses of the Mammalian cortex. Emotion competes with even more instinctive responses from the Reptilian cortex and the more logical, reasoning neocortex. However, current research on the neural circuitry of emotion suggests that emotion is an essential part of human decision-making and planning, and that the famous distinction made by Descartes between reason and emotion is not as clear as it seems.^[3]

[edit] Emotion, Meta-emotion, and Reason

Emotion is generally regarded by Western civilization as the antithesis of reason. This distinction stems from Western philosophy specifically stoic and Cartesian dualism approaches, and is reflected in common phrases like appeal to emotion or your emotions have taken over.

Emotions can be undesired either to the individual experiencing them, but also can be undesired to the other persons, groups of persons, organizations, sub-cultures, and civilisations such as Western civilization, which can be viewed as the emotion being subjected to the individual’s or someone else’s discouraging meta-emotion about the undesired emotion or can be even repressed by the meta-emotions. Thus one of the most distinctive, and perhaps challenging, facts about human beings is this potential for entanglement, or even opposition, between emotion, meta-emotion, will, and reason.

Some state that there is no empirical support for any generalization suggesting the antithesis between reason and emotion: indeed, anger or fear can often be thought of as a systematic response to observed facts. In any case, it is clear that the relation between logic and argument and emotion is one which merits careful study.

Emotion as the subject of scientific research has multiple dimensions: behavioral, physiological, subjective, and cognitive. Sloman argues that many emotions are side-effects of the operations of complex mechanisms (e.g. ‘alarm’ mechanisms) required in animals or machines with multiple motives and limited capacities and resources for coping with a changing and unpredictable world, just as ‘thrashing‘ can sometimes occur as a side-effect of scheduling and memory management mechanisms required in a computer operating system for purposes other than producing thrashing. Such side effects are sometimes useful, but sometimes they are dysfunctional. Other theorists, often influenced by writings of Antonio Damasio argue that emotions themselves are necessary for any intelligent system (natural or artificial).

Psychiatrist William Glasser‘s theory of the human control system states that behavior is composed of four simultaneous components: deeds, ideas, emotions, and physiological states. He asserts that we choose the idea and deed and that the associated emotions and physiological states also occur but cannot be chosen independently. He calls his construct a total behavior to distinguish it from the common concept of behavior. He uses the verbs to describe what is commonly seen as emotion. For example, he uses ‘to depress’ to describe the total behavior commonly known as depression which, to him, includes depressing ideas, actions, emotions, and physiological states. Dr. Glasser also further asserts that internal choices (conscious or unconscious) cause emotions instead of external stimuli.

According to Damasio, feeling can be viewed as the subjective experience of an emotion that arises physiologically in the brain. ^[4]

Many psychologists adopt the ABC model, which defines emotions in terms of three fundamental attributes: A. physiological arousal, B. behavioral expression (e.g. facial expressions), and C. conscious experience, the subjective feeling of an emotion. All three attributes are necessary for a full fledged emotional event, though the intensity of each may vary greatly.

Robert Masters makes the following distinctions between affect, feeling and emotion: “As I define them, affect is an innately structured, non-cognitive evaluative sensation that may or may not register in consciousness; feeling is affect made conscious, possessing an evaluative capacity that is not only physiologically based, but that is often also psychologically (and sometimes relationally) oriented; and emotion is psychosocially constructed, dramatized feeling.”^[5]

In pop culture there are sub-cultures which cultivate the expressions of anger and rebelliousness even when they are not really angry, its members encouraging each other to express the anger by internalizing meta-gladness about it. Encouragement (i.e. meta-gladness) and discouragement (i.e. psychological repression) of selected emotions – instead of mere awareness and equal interest in all emotions – can be considered as additional source of organizational climate, family dynamics, psychodynamics, personality traits, and of mental disorders, including depression among others.

Progressive Relaxation

This technique is often most useful when you tape the instructions beforehand. You can tape these instructions, reading them slowly and leaving a short pause after each one.

• Lie on your back, close your eyes.
• Feel your feet. Sense their weight. Consciously relax them and sink into the bed. Start with your toes and progress to your ankles.
• Feel your knees. Sense their weight. Consciously relax them and feel them sink into the bed.
• Feel you upper legs and thighs. Feel their weight. Consciously relax them and feel them sink into the bed.
• Feel your abdomen and chest. Sense your breathing. Consciously will them to relax. Deepen your breathing slightly and feel your abdomen and chest sink into the bed.
• Feel your buttocks. Sense their weight. Consciously relax them and feel them sink into the bed.
• Feel your hands. Sense their weight. Consciously relax them and feel them sink into the bed.
• Feel your upper arms. Sense their weight. Consciously relax them and feel them sink into the bed.
• Feel your shoulders. Sense their weight. Consciously relax them and feel them sink into the bed.
• Feel your neck. Sense its weight. Consciously relax it and feel it sink into the bed.
• Feel your head and skull. Sense its weight. Consciously relax it and feel it sink into the bed.
• Feel your mouth and jaw. Consciously relax them. Pay particular attention to your jaw muscles and unclench them if you need to. Feel your mouth and jaw relax and sink into the bed.
• Feel your eyes. Sense if there is tension in your eyes. Sense if you are forcibly closing your eyelids. Consciously relax your eyelids and feel the tension slide off the eyes.
• Feel your face and cheeks. Consciously relax them and feel the tension slide off into the bed.
• Mentally scan your body. If you find any place that is still tense, then consciously relax that place and let it sink into the bed.

I start this exercise by holding cable attachments in each hand. I keep my arms straight, fully extended and parallel with the floor. Then I hit a double biceps pose and, in the fully flexed position, I squeeze the muscles for a maximum burn. Finally, I slowly release the weight to the starting position. Again, the biceps are under pressure throughout the whole set, and as you eke out the reps, you’ll find you get a great pump.

The execution is along the same lines as that used with one arm cable curls; I maintain pressure on the biceps throughout the completion of each set and hold the weight in the midpoint position for a peak contraction. However, for the concluding tow sets, but only at every other session, I go past failure and finish the set with two or three forced reps. Just for the sake of variety, I’ll substitute rope cable curls for the bar cable version twice a month.