Oh.
S’possible.
These are the sorts of questions I would use for teasing out someone’s sense of spirituality, if any:
Are there things in your life that you pursue in whole or in part because they give you a sense of peace, personal security, or connection to (or place within) the universe?
Do you make time for those things specifically (if you have them) or try to find such things (if you don’t)?
Do you recognise times when you feel (for lack of better words) disconnected and ungrounded, and know that if you just pursue your art/take a walk/spend a little while listening to music/take a deep breath (all of which are things that may be on the list for question #1) that feeling will abate?
Do you cultivate things that have personal meaning to you? Do you cultivate meaningfulness itself? (I’m not sure that makes sense out of my head, but I haven’t got better language for it. But it’s things like . . . I hit a really nasty depression recently, and as part of my way of coping with it, I got a new plant, and one of my focuses is that I won’t let the plant die. I’m awful with plants, but I’m awful with depression too – this one is being a personal symbol of not letting the depression kill me. It has that assigned meaning.)
If you can see the thing that those questions are pointing at – and I know that this is not exactly a precise definition or anything like that, but it’s the best I can do right now – then you’re seeing the thing that I would call “spirituality”.
Or it could mean, “I think there’s a larger purpose to the world, but I’m not sure what. I’ve got some random guesses, and from what I can tell, they’re no better or worse than the random guesses being peddled by established religion, and why should I assume they’re right just because they made their guesses three thousand years before I did?”
Not, I hasten to add, that I believe in any larger purposes, myself. I’m a firm believer in the liberating effects of a meaningless and generally hostile universe.
I think the generally accepted term for that feeling is “boredom.”
I disagree. Someone who says “I am spiritual but I am not religious”, may be practicing some noncommittal form of religion (or they may not be). But I think most religious people are spiritual to some degree. I even think a few religious people are very spiritual. But I started that ‘Spirituality VS Religion’ thread because I think some poeple think that just because they are religious, it automatically makes them spiritual, and that many religious practices actually impede someone’s spiritual growth.
As I define it:
Spirituality is ones personal connection to the spiritual world, the world of the non-material, the soul, the universe, all life, all existance, god.
So as Lilairen post’s questions help to discover… If you think that there is more to existance than the physical world, then to one degree or another, you are spiritual, regardless if you follow an established religion, made it up yourself, or just have a vage feeling that there has to be more to life (more to existance) than just what we see.
Love that quote, mind if I steal it?
Thai food is definitely part of it (the Nam Tok less so than the chicken panang).
Another formula:
Oprah is an intensely spiritual person (source:Oprah)
Oprah refuses to shop at Hermes anymore
If you have no intentions to shop at Hermes, you are probably spiritual
Personally I see “spiritual” as belief in an all surrounding/all powerful je ne se qua, an undefined GREATNESS that you are part of and that is part of you and that connects you to other people and to the world and universe itself on a level that is beyond the merely physical/atomic/theoretical. It’s much like the Force before the midichlorian heresy.
The closest I come to being spiritual is my belief in The Place of the Ultimate Answers. There are questions that cannot be answered by anyone, but the answers exist: how many feathers are there in the world? What did the first mammal look like and where did s/he live and on what date in our current calendar was s/he born and how old in yy/mm/dd/hours/minutes/seconds was s/he when s/he died? What did Florence Lawrence dream about the night before she died? By what name was Otzi known when he was alive and who did he love most? Does any part of human consciousness survive death?
All of the above questions have answers- very definite, quantifiable answers. Nobody knows or can possibly know what they are, but those answers exist somewhere, and where that is, that is The Place of the Ultimate Answers. Whether it’s a repository or a source of human existence is something that only it, of course, can answer, but it is the place that intellectually I deem spiritual.
Which is not to imply that I believe it exists.
All of this makes much more sense when I’m drunk.
Getting drunk requires alcohol, which is also known as “spirits”.
There’s your answer.
Please pay the receptionist on your way out.
Knock yourself out.
Well, this actually is very informative and interesting, and judging by what Lilairen and EarthStone777 say (and Miller’s and Sampiro’s sidelong glances), I am indeed one of the least spiritual people on Earth.
Basically, I don’t believe the Universe gives a sweet patootie for you, me, Jane Russell, or anyone else There are, of course, activities I enjoy (researching and writing my books, for instance), but it’s just because they fulfill my personal quirky interests, not because they are important in any way or balance my chakras or anything.
Sampiro, if you didn’t steal the Place of Ultimate Answers from some South American novelist, you shoulda. I love it!
For me, the closest I’ve come to spirituality has been something that looked an awful lot like an aesthetic sense to me. Except that, whereas with a novel you suspend your disbelief (that is, if someone asks you you know that it’s untrue, but you forget that while you read it), I used to say that with mythology, I pocketed my disbelief. By which I meant that the question of whether it was true or false was wholly irrelevant and almost nonsensical, sort of like asking, when evaluating a mathematical theorem, whether it tasted good.
Holding that attitude toward certain stories (Diancecht, Anansi, Angus Og, El Ahrairah) made me happy, filled me with wonder and delight. It no longer does, and I think in some ways I’m the poorer for it. But then, in other ways I’m the richer.
Daniel
Spirituality are us. We are all spiritual beings having a physical experience. When our physical part, the body, dies we continue on in the realms of spirit.
Is there evidence of this, yes, lots of it, but it doesn’t explain spiritually.
I am going out on a limb, which I am sure the detractors will cut off, and explain spirituality through an analogy.
The “Star Wars” series of movies by George Lucas are enormously popular. Lucas spent a long time studing the main religions of the world to produce a “Higher Cause” for his movies. “The Force” is the result of this research.
“God” is not a bearded old man. “God” or “The Force” is an energy field that permeates all things, it is both personal and global, it is the creator of all things and is present in all things. It is a Force for good. Jedi knights have no fear, and are taught to be unconditional love. A phrase Anakin Skywalker used in Episode II.
Fear causes one to embrace the dark side. One connects with the force through feeling, the same with spirituality. Spiritual people are connected with God, The Force, and feel the Unity or Oneness of all things. There are different levels of this from who only knows there is something else out there, to those who have some control of The Force. They do miraculous things, Jesus was such a Master.
But, as you may have guessed, not everything in the movies describe the actions of Masters. Eliminate the fireworks and the movies are very close to real spiritual actions and tasks.
I saw a church marquee the other day that read “God is greater than the Force.” As least they saw the analogy.
I think this is the reason the movies have been so popular, same with the “Lion King”, and others, they have spiritual themes that touch the inner spirit of mankind.
OK, have at it.
Well, nothing to “have at.” You believe all that; I don’t. You’re spiritual; I’m not.
Me too except that I look at the universe as indifferent and not hostile. I find that my best solution is to just take the world on its outward appearance. I think every step in the search for some deeper meaning just leads toward the place where the irrational reside.
Deeper, spiritual meaning? You’ve got to be kidding. Picture 36 airplanes flying along. Each one was built in the same factory to the same specification. In each plane there are six people who all went through the same training. And the mixture of good, bad, useful and useless people in all the planes is about the same. Some miles away a guy stuffs a shell in a cannon, another guy points the gun and someone else pulls the trigger. The shell explodes and knocks one of the planes down at random. The chances are that the gun aimer wasn’t even pointing at the plane that was hit. And you try to tell me there is a deeper meaning?
Now that I’m here I think it is far better for me that I am here than that I am not. For the meaning of it all, I just go along from day to day making it up as I go along. I think my only constant principle is to try not to cause too much trouble for others around me.
I am a former Catholic/current agnostic with a childhood history of temporal lobe epilepsy, although not of the sort that makes you write long-ass novels. I do not consider myself a ‘spiritual’ person in the sense that I think other people mean when they describe themselves that way. Much of what they seem to be describing sounds to me like magical thinking or superstition/new agey stuff involving energy or auras. I have had experiences that I know were neurologically based, like problems evaluating the proper scale of objects, and I know that a person’s perception of the world can be very subjective. Thus identical events can have different degrees of significance for two observers based on brain chemistry, personal history, present emotional state, etc.
Having said that, there have been times in my life when I felt that the event I was experiencing was particularly important and tied me in more closely to a greater extrinsic cycle. Two episodes immediately spring to mind. One was the birth of my son, at which point I remember having a sense of the vast unbroken chain of life that stretched from prehistory, through me, to my son. Another was when I stood on Steens Mountain in eastern Oregon and gazed into a deeply gouged glacial valley, at which point I could feel for a few seconds the immense weight of geologic history pressing down on me. Neither event involved what I would consider the supernatural - no sense of God’s presence, no sense of meaning, no departed loved ones.
My personal definition of spirituality is that of a perception of personal connectedness to or involvement in processes that are many orders of magnitude beyond the personal. You may have a sense of your life as a part of God’s plan for the universe and be reassured, or you may get a hint of how ephemeral your existence is on the geologic timescale, and be cowed. Regardless, it seems to me that true spirituality is an amalgamation of perception and emotion rather than a set of beliefs or a personality trait. One can engage in behavior that tends to evoke spiritual feelings (meditation, drugs, etc.). It is likely that some people more easily access these perceptive/emotive states. But I wouldn’t say that my personal definition includes any sort of moral dimension, or requires the supernatural, or even implies that the spiritual experience is a pleasant one. This definition may be too individual to be applied universally.
I think that organized religion taps into spiritual feelings, and offers many people a framework by which to understand and guide their spiritual experiences - by invoking the supernatural. Perhaps a good question for people who describe themselves as ‘spiritual’ is whether they believe in the supernatural.
I’m such a jerk, I know. For you Mac users, it’s option+equal. I don’t know about PC.
I don’t think that you start with spirituality. One of my major points in the other thread was that religion was not just a cover for spirituality (as the OP seemed to be saying), and indeed, spirituality wasn’t the point. So I tend to think that one would need to understand religion to understand spirituality. Since making someone understand religion could take a couple thousand words, and I’ve been in two religion threads today alone, I’m going to have to pass on this one.
Nonetheless, I’m completely honoured that you actually wanted to hear what I had to say. 
He’s just used, gentle writer, to being in polemic threads where his position gets promptly pick(ax)ed apart mercilessly by the skep squad. While you, madame, are simply posing a not unusual quandary, that many suffer in silence: you perceive all around you that there is some sort of consensus expectation of “spirituality” being a component in your life, and you wonder, who reached that conclusion, what was she on, and who held a vote on making it an expectation?
As you and others have mentioned, you can find yourself achieving a sense of inner peace and of emotional satisfaction w/o necessarily concluding that you have touched an external Higher Plane – and being “one with the Universe” doesn’t sound like that much once you think that, of course I’m one with the Universe, I’m part of it, these particles that make me up were cooked up in cosmic conflagration , I am perfused by all sorts of fields, gradients, waves, etc. and some day my matter will revert to the environment.
“Spirituality” can only be detected from subjective experience, so until and unless you have that subjective experience, all our witnessing would be fruitless.
I have an extremely strong suspicion that most people who describe themselves as “spiritual” do it for social reasons rather than philosophical. It’s considered even more uncool to be non-spiritual than to be an atheist.
And of course they think that if you’re not spiritual, you’re a materialist, as if those were the only options.
I believe in many things that aren’t physical (in the normal sense of the word). I believe in reason, love, dignity, beauty, empathy, and a whole lot of other “non-material” things, none of which require my belief in spirituality.
Greetings Eve, and other dopers, heathens, skeptics, true believers, or those of you who just wonder about stuff.
Let me start by useing the rules of logic to prove that God exists nessecarily, essentially and kinda probably. 
Spirituality for some is indeed a rejection of the structure of religion. It may be a recognition that no one religion with it’s rules and doctrine has all the answers. For some like myself we continue to explore being open to input from a variety of sources and comfortable with forming our own conclusions about how the universe works. I think it also means that since we don’t embrace any particular religious structure or extablished doctrine we tend to allow others that same freedom of worship or non worship. So if your own take on it is that you are perfectly happy without it then I respect your right to choose even if I don’t agree.
For me it it about discerning the truth of how and why we relate to each other and this world we share. It’s about applying my beliefs to the day to day moment to moment of my life.
Trying to be clear, I’m talking of spirituality, as opposed to organized religion. I’m not talking about what makes someone a spiritual or non spiritual person.
Okay, I’ve gotten this far and have come to the conclusion that spirituality means either:
a) You’re bored and need to find something to do.
b) You ponder mysterious things like how many chicken feathers there are in the world.
c) You are ‘ONE’ with the universe.
All joking aside, though. The term appears meaningless because those who claim to be spiritual all have different interpretations of what it is. It’s as if they heard the word, feel it applies to them, and are making up what it means to suit that feeling.
This is my definition of the word and I don’t mean to be insulting, but this is honestly what I think when I hear the term. When I hear someone say they are spiritual I automatically put an “=flake” on the end of it. It might not be right and is probably bigoted in some shape or form, but there you go.
I’m sure thats true for some. The social aspect of belonging to a religious organization is very influential on many people. Believeing what the group believes is importent.
I wouldn’t draw that conclusion. I tend to judge by how people interact with others.
I find this interesting and something I’ve been thinking about. My questions would be off the subject of the OP though.
I have several friends who are on the edge of atheism and are some of the nicest most honorable people I know. I object to terms like “christian love” Love is love . Kindness is kindness. I appreciate it when I see it.
Are all Christians basically the same? All Muslims? No.
Spirituality is a pretty broad term to try and pin down in a few words or one or two catagories.
Was Gandhi a flake? Martin Luther King?
Yeah, this is pretty much how I define it. (Funny post, btw. You should be writing a humor column.) I am one of those “spiritual but not religious” people; I’ll give you an idea of what spirituality means to me personally. Basically, I believe in a Cosmic Order. I believe there is some nebulous (to us) purpose behind the universe, and that this force is anti-entropic in nature. I also believe that we are part of that purpose, since we are part of the universe. Essentially, the universe/Cosmic Order IS God, though it is not of the personal variety–since we are part of God/CO then God/CO cannot help us personally, we have to help one another through the forces of empathy and love. I am unsure of an afterlife, though I’d certainly not bank on its existence. Basically, if having an afterlife serves the purpose of the universe then it will exist, but if it doesn’t then it won’t. I don’t know why the universe would need to build a haven for the souls of overgrown monkeys in order to maintain Cosmic Order, but then, I don’t know what’s really going on, I can’t even prove that there is a CO or grand purpose. All I know is that for me, it feels like there is one.
Since my universal schemata has no dogma or history or rituals (since I made it up, and I think religious rituals are pointless wastes of time), it can’t be a religion. So it falls in the gray zone of spirituality–not as logical as a philosophy, not as ungrounded as religion (since, after all, it could be proven that there is an order to the universe… universal field theory, anyone?).
I can see how someone can be non-spiritual and believe there is no purpose to the universe, and that we are not connected to one another or the universe in any way. I do, however, find that worldview a little depressing, maybe because I hate my petty reality and feel the intense need to be part of something larger. However, I find the Christian God to be oppressive, so I guess it’s a balancing act.