In search of a spiritual consensus

I've been editing some fringe science articles on Wikipedia lately and it's been an interesting experience. Fringe sciences get a bit of a hard time on Wikipedia. I would say it's an appropriate hard time because as a mainstream encyclopedia, Wikipedia gives more weight to prevailing scientific models. Often fringe science hypotheses are contradictory to accepted models. The sliding scale goes something like this: mainstream science, fringe science, pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is a term introduced by philosopher Karl Popper to describe ideas that appear to be scientific, but actually aren't. They often use scientific jargon, but aren't backed by science. Think diet pill commercials.

In any case, this post isn't about science. It's about spirituality. I'm only mentioning the above because I want to steal the terms and replace the word science in them with spirituality. I want to explain the difference between mainstream spirituality, fringe spirituality, and pseudospirituality. Also, just as the prevailing scientific model is based on a consensus in the scientific community, I wanted to show that there may be a prevailing spiritual model, based on a consensus of the spiritual community.

Let's look at the terms I've introduced. To do that, we need a working definition of spirituality. Broadly speaking, spirituality is concerned with one's ultimate nature, typically marked by a connection to something greater than oneself. Note that this is very different from religiosity which also includes specific practices. Spirituality is a broader term and could include religion, but religion doesn't necessarily include spirituality. Religious fanatics showing complete disconnect (9/11) is not an example of spirituality.

In fact, it brings us to our first term: pseudospirituality. Pseudospirituality is something that poses as spirituality but actually isn't. It may use spiritual jargon, claim to have spiritual goals, or incorporate spiritual practices. It is not spirituality, however, if its defining characteristic is a profound disconnect. The example of religious fanatics above is an example of this, but also cults which disconnect from the world or serve some non-spiritual agenda, religious intolerance of other religions or lifestyles, religious notions of dominion over anything else, anything that severely disconnects for supposedly spiritual reasons. Some of these examples are actually properly labeled as religious, but they're not spiritual.

The next term is fringe spirituality. These are actual spiritual models, but I would characterize them as immature ones. By immature I don't mean "look I made a doody in my pants", or immature on a timeline (some of these philosophies go back thousands of years), but rather they don't comprehensively or universally answer the questions spirituality sets out to answer. These are reductive spiritual models that define spirituality in terms of a small set of universal truths and leave everything else up to subjective interpretation. Existentialism, for example, is a spiritual model that reduces everything to the universal truth that we do obviously exist, everything else is largely subjective. Atheism is a spiritual model as well. It starts with the assumption that there is no God, and often that there is no afterlife, and asks how do we remain connected to each other in spite of this? Each of these models are mature unto themselves, but immature in forming something resembling what they have over in science, a comprehensive model that answers most basic questions that someone might ask.

So is there a mainstream spirituality, something that isn't just subjective and has the consensus of the spiritual community as a whole? It's hard to say. The nature of spirituality is that it's hard to confirm. A spiritual idea is largely opinion and it's hard to pin down any real facts. Nevertheless, comparative religion researchers and philosophers have noticed some cross-culture overlaps between the various religious traditions. If, they argue, you jettison the specific mythologies (Moses parting the Red Sea, Buddha beneath the tree) and examine the actual spiritual values, an almost universal blueprint does seem to emerge. Aldous Huxley described this blueprint as The Perennial Philosophy (a term coined by Leibniz) because it shows up time and again regardless of the age or culture examined.

According to Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy is:

the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions (The Perennial Philosophy, p. vii).

Confirmation may be a stretch, but if various cultures arrived at the same spiritual conclusions, based on their own observations, independently of one another, that certainly sounds like consensus.