Sensing the Spiritual
Light and Dark
My experience of the spiritual comes and it goes. I remember and I forget. At this time of year here in North America, the sun is low on the southern horizon, so everything glows with hero light and the shadows are acute. Dark and light, remembering and forgetting. This contrast of the light and dark is embedded deeply within us and celebrated in many festivals and practices. Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains have Diwali, Christians have the birth of Jesus Christ, Judaism has the lights of Hanukkah, Yule is important to Paganism, and many Buddhists have Bodhi Day. In Scandinavia, St. Lucia celebrations bring light. As Victor Hugo wrote in Les Misérables, "Even the darkest of night will end and the sun will rise."
There is also something here that connects the religious with the secular. There is rich unconscious material and emotional energy in this intersection of contrasting views. There is no solid thing here, just a sense of something that is highly evocative of our human essence. Perhaps it is here in this creative space that we will discover a lasting peace where the secularists and the religious directly experience something we all understand and which we no longer need to explain or argue about. As Jonathan Rowson points out (1), we can take our fundamental spiritual concerns into public spaces and share them appropriately.
What we need is a purposive vision of individual and collective spiritual growth and renewal that emerges in response to the world as we find it, and evolves in response to the world we seek to create. Questions about the nature, value, meaning and purpose of life as such are matters of fundamental concern and should be aired publicly, which means those who value spiritual sensibility need to find their voice, and their power.
What Jonathan Rowson has called a "spiritual sensibility,” furthers our discussion, so I will borrow his term and break it down in my own way while begging his pardon as I wrestle with all of this. First, there is the idea of sensibility which I will define as an aesthetic clarity that includes information from the emotions and the body as well as information and insights that come from reason. Spirit is an animating principle that also has awareness of itself and the world. With that I define the spiritual as anything related to the consciousness and animation of human beings rather than our concerns with inert material things and non-human living beings. This means spiritual concerns are necessarily human-centered for the purposes of this discussion.
This yields a meaning for a spiritual sensibility as: the direct and transformational experience of our animating principle which includes an awareness of itself and the entire cosmos. This awareness has an aesthetic clarity that integrates information from rational knowledge, the emotions, the body and the mind. This is a whole body-and-mind experience that welcomes back embodiment from the banishment inflicted by narrow rationalism. This understanding helps us to elevate our discussion of spiritual matters out of the secular shadows and to engage in robust discussions that build bridges. There are many existential questions we face today and it will be beneficial to develop a much deeper understanding of how spiritual matters inform society. In the endnotes of Spiritualise, Rowson offers a comment that nails it for me:
We should use spiritual when we need to say something that we cannot say otherwise, usually about how we perceive and experience reality as a whole through its myriad forms. Having spiritual sensibility is therefore a bit like having a sense of humour; it is not self-evident when or why it manifests, but everyone should value it and few would want to say they don’t have it at all.
This leads me to another proposal: the spiritual may be understood as a “bisociation” of the secular and the religious mindsets. Bisociation is a word coined by Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-born British novelist, journalist, and critic, who was best known for his novel Darkness at Noon. Bisociation was a concept he introduced in his discussion of how humor works. Koestler’s use of bisociation represents an impressive contribution to the theory of creativity from his book titled The Act of Creation (2). Bisociation is the simultaneous mental association of an idea with two domains seen as opposed (in this case the secular and the religious) which then generates a creative response. The spiritual then is the domain where the secular and the religious intersect and spark our creativity.? Imagine two planes intersecting in a line, so that the line represents “the spiritual” as depicted in this graphic.
Koestler also used his general notion of bisociation to explain an example of humor, the pun. A pun is a simple form of bisociation. Puns are rhetorical devices that use the double meaning of a word to create a subjective human response; such as “A boiled egg every morning is hard to beat.” In our case, there may be some humor and an apparent paradox when I claim that the secular and the religious are both spiritual. Using Koestler’s words and formulations then yields an added dimension for this spiritual sensibility as “a transitory state of unstable equilibrium where the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed.” Within this disturbance, one can “define the character of the emotive charge and make a guess regarding the unconscious elements that it may contain.”
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A description of a spiritual sensibility as an unstable equilibrium is provocative as it beckons us toward complexity theory and how complexity plays at the edge of order and disorder. There is a creative balance and tension that emerges and is difficult to sustain, particularly if? we are limited to strictly rational means.? A spiritual sensibility is always an act of creativity. It arrives as a fresh start that pops up at this moment; the ever-present origin that brings us back to ourselves.
This uplifting experience is the energy and intelligence within each of us that empowers higher states of awareness where we experience ourselves with clarity and congruence. Whatever words you may choose to describe these experiences, this is where all citizens may meet and celebrate the meaningfulness we share. Meaningfulness is the light in which meaning is discovered and expressed. We each have specific ways of illuminating the transcendent and spiritual functions of life and our unity will grow as we celebrate our bright intentions and sensibilities rather than any limiting ideologies.
Sociologists often speak of social capital but here we are considering more than that. There is a vital spark that represents a common experience and which brings us together with even greater unity. This represents a kind of social capital that might be called “spiritual capital.” Our resilience in the years ahead must be based on more than what we normally think of as social capital. We must develop an unshakable sense of the strength of our collective heart, mind and spirit that arises through our interconnectedness. This will spark a sense of community and fellowship that is rooted in a shared worldview that naturally encourages the formation of common goals. This meta-worldview is founded in various forms of contemplative practice, collective deliberations and common visions that generate a better future. This spiritual sensibility is the impulse to embody higher principles and deepen our connections so we may live in more loving, compassionate and wise ways.
(1) Jonathan Rowson. Spiritualise, PDF , RSA (the royal society for arts, manufactures and commerce)
(2) Koestler, A. (1964). The act of creation.