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.

Sense and soul in couple's therapy, Part II

I happened upon a somewhat recent article and wanted to post about it as a sort of follow up to my earlier one about meditation and science. Apparently in 2004, the Dalai Lama invited several neuroscientists to his home in Dharamsala, India, to examine brain scans of Tibetan Buddhist monks who engage in meditation on a regular basis. What scientists have found is that meditation actually does alter the structure of the brain. They call this effect neuroplasticity.

The term refers to the brain's recently discovered ability to change its structure and function, in particular by expanding or strengthening circuits that are used and by shrinking or weakening those that are rarely engaged. In its short history, the science of neuroplasticity has mostly documented brain changes that reflect physical experience and input from the outside world. In pianists who play many arpeggios, for instance, brain regions that control the index finger and middle finger become fused, apparently because when one finger hits a key in one of these fast-tempo movements, the other does so almost simultaneously, fooling the brain into thinking the two fingers are one. As a result of the fused brain regions, the pianist can no longer move those fingers independently of one another.

Weird. The external influence on the brain's structure led the scientists to explore whether or not purely internal, mental signals could likewise effect the structure. To do this, they gathered a group of novice meditators and compared the brain activity to that of the Buddhist monks who had spent more than 10,000 hours in meditation.

In a striking difference between novices and monks, the latter showed a dramatic increase in high-frequency brain activity called gamma waves during compassion meditation. Thought to be the signature of neuronal activity that knits together far-flung brain circuits, gamma waves underlie higher mental activity such as consciousness. The novice meditators "showed a slight increase in gamma activity, but most monks showed extremely large increases of a sort that has never been reported before in the neuroscience literature," says Prof. Davidson, suggesting that mental training can bring the brain to a greater level of consciousness.

On one hand this is awesome because science is now confirming meditative effects on the brain. On the other hand this is kind of lame because science is only confirming meditative effects on the brain. The really interesting effects of meditation don't happen in the brain; they happen in one's life. Meditation is truly transformative on a person's outlook regardless of physical effects. The difference is a matter of translative versus transformative. So they've translated spiritual awareness to physical brain activities? That's great. It's actually pretty awesome. But really, stop looking at the brain scans and go and meditate already. Experience the transformative side. That's so much more exciting.

Check it out: Meditation Alters Structure, Functioning

Sense and soul in couple's therapy

I'm re-reading two books by Ken Wilber. The first is One Taste, his personal journal kept over the course of a year (1997), and the second is The Marriage of Sense and Soul, which is his attempt to integrate, or at least find common ground between, the often at odds realms of science and religion. I'm not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, nor am I all that scientific. I am always interested in the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, however, and have more than a passing interest in how we actually come to know or believe in things. I don't think religion corners the market on that, and neither does science since it's always in process. Free thought is what I'm about, but in coming up with a consensual reality there has to be some agreement on what's valid ways of knowing something.

Typically in science a valid idea is one that has been put through the scientific method and arrived unscathed on the other side. It's been tested and confirmed to be true. That's an extremely simplified version of events, however. There's actually a lot of debate in the epistemology of science over what makes up the scientific method and what things can actually be tested. This is a pretty good question if we're setting out to discover the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. How do you test ideas that on the surface seem entirely subjective?

Wilber says it has a lot to do with having an injunction, an idea he borrowed from philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996). An injunction, as Wilber uses it, is some type of action that one can perform to test an idea. As he puts it: If you do this, you get that. I should point out that Ken Wilber is widely considered to be one of the leading philosophers of our age, working on what he describes as an Integral Theory of Everything. In the case of science testing spiritual beliefs, the injunction Wilber suggests is meditation. If you perform meditation or contemplative awareness, you get X. X, he feels can be confirmed by anyone who performs the injunction. In other words, something seemingly subjective becomes objective by comparing the results of the injunction with the experience of peers who have also performed the injunction. This technically satisfies the testability part of the scientific method (the injunction is the observation), and the repeatablity part of the scientific method (the confirmation of peers who have also performed the injunction). He explains it much better than I in The Marriage of Sense and Soul. It's not half as crazy as it sounds.

Hey, maybe it is a bridge between science and religion. If nothing else, it at least hooks sense and soul up for a one night stand, even if it doesn't go so far as marry the two. Sadly, though, it's unlikely to be adopted anytime soon. Those two camps have been at each other's throats since around the Middle Ages. If they were actually a couple, Dr. Phil would have advised them to part company long ago. The other problem is that most practitioners of contemplative awareness generally agree that you need to spend at least twenty years of daily reflection to see any major payoff. Buddhist monks shun the world for years at a time. What scientist is going to go through all of that on a hunch?