What'll You Get Out of It?

Suppose you got serious about maintaining a spiritual discipline. You engage your practice daily; you do it mindfully, you do it with intention to cultivate compassion, connection, nonjudgmental curiosity -- self-forgetfulness, transpersonal identification, and acceptance; you get together regularly with a group that helps you maintain and explore the spiritual focus of your practice, and you develop your base with daily silence, journaling, and study. What then? What will happen? If you do everything to ensure that your practice is a true, bona fide spiritual practice, and you do that spiritual practice long enough – every day for a year, or 10 years, or 30 years – will you then exude equanimity and compassion while unperturbable calm inner peace and beauty continuously manifests as you gracefully, lovingly flow through your life? Maybe. I offer no guarantees.

Spirituality, as I mentioned in the previous post in this series, is not a matter of will. Strong muscles aren’t either. That is, you can’t just decide to bench press 500 pounds, and then go do it. But at least with muscles, there’s a fairly predictable timeline by which exercise increases strength. If you have a normal and healthy physiology, and you adopt a regimen of exercise, and stick to it, then you will get stronger. There’s a smooth curve by which you’ll progress toward the limit to which that regimen can take you. Spiritual strengthening doesn’t go like that. It’s not a reliable product of putting in the time doing the exercise. The spirit has its own schedule. Committed serious spiritual practitioners can go for years when their practice just seems void and useless. Then they can hit a patch where they actually seem to be regressing. They’re acting as cranky, unkind, disconnected -- as withdrawn, on the one hand, or as controlling, on the other – as they ever had before they started any spiritual practice. There is no smooth curve of progress.

The Worst Motive

I started my primary spiritual practice for the worst reason: because an authority told me to. Fourteen-and-a-half years ago I was in Chicago trying to pass muster to become a minister, trying to prove I was good enough. I had just finished my first year of divinity school, and I was meeting with the Midwest regional subcommittee on candidacy. "Do you have a spiritual practice?" the committee asked me.

Before starting seminary, I had spent two years as the congregational facilitator and preacher for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Clarksville, Tennessee. Before that, I'd served as a president of our Fellowship in Waco, Texas, as Vice President of our church in Charlottesville, Virginia and had worked as the church secretary for a year at our Nashville, Tennessee church. But did I have a spiritual practice?

I was a born-and-raised Unitarian Universalist. I had a Ph.D. I'd been a university professor of philosophy for four years. I could debate about metaphysics, metaethics, metatheology, poststructuralism, postindustrialism, and postmodernism. If it was meta-, or post-, I was all over it. But did I have a spiritual practice?

Well, no, I didn't.

“Get a spiritual practice,” the committee told me.

It is contradictory to take up a path of self-acceptance and trusting in my own inner wisdom because an outside authority told me to. Yet that’s what I did. It is contradictory to judge myself for judging myself too much. Yet that’s what I did, and still do, albeit somewhat more gently. Usually. I’ve now had a chance to talk with a number of people on a path of serious spiritual practice. All of us, or so it seems, began, as I did, in some form of contradiction. We felt broken, wrong, inadequate, and we thought spiritual practice would fix us. But spiritual practice isn’t about fixing anything – which is why there’s no smooth curve toward becoming fixed.

You're Not Broken and Don't Need Fixing

Spiritual awakening is about realizing that we aren’t broke and don’t need fixing. We aren’t broken and from the beginning never have been.

(Earlier, I listed some symptoms of developing spirituality -- increased this and decreased that -- and I mentioned Cloninger's measures of spirituality: self-forgetfulness, transpersonal identification, and acceptance. Do not, however, imagine that these are the goals of spiritual practice. Any practice that has a goal is not a spiritual practice. Yes, there is a role to play for intending to cultivate those qualities -- but it is a rather small role, and attempting to measure progress toward such qualities is delusion. A spiritual practice will tend -- naturally, on its own, but irregularly and unpredictably -- to bring fuller recognition that we are not broken, that we are whole and perfect just as we are and always have been; and fuller recognition of our intrinsic wholeness will tend -- naturally, on its own, but irregularly and unpredictably -- to bring the symptoms of developing spirituality.)

It’s hard to really believe that we are not broken and don't need fixing. Our culture constantly tells us we aren’t good enough, get better, buy this product, this treatment, this school, this exercise, this method.

Spirituality is about remembering the fact of abundance in the midst of the daily barrage of messages of scarcity. Will recognition of abundance happen if you do the practice? I can tell you there will be more ups and downs than the stock market. But over the long haul? Probably, yes. If you love just doing the practice, and you do it just because it is who you are, and not with any idea that you’re gaining something from it – if judgment about gain and loss, progress and regress, falls away and there’s just you, loving who you are and loving the way you, and the whole universe, manifest in and through your practice, then, yes. The fact of abundance will be clearer to you.

Woooo-Hoooooo!

At the end of “Dr. Strangelove,” the bomber plane is set to release its nuclear payload, which will set off a nuclear conflagration to end civilization, but the release mechanism jams. Slim Pickens climbs down into the bomb-bay to fix the jam. He succeeds, and the bomb is released -- while he’s still sitting on it.

In the film’s most memorable shot, Slim Pickens is waving his cowboy hat and whooping as he rides the bomb down to his – and what will ultimately be the planet’s – destruction.

“Woooo-hoooo!”

Maybe that’s what learning to stop worrying and love the bomb looks like. He does seem to be living in the moment.

That was such a striking shot when I first saw it because I knew if I were falling out of the sky riding on a nuclear bomb, I’d be freaked out in fear and despair: “My god, my god, my god, I’ve only got maybe one minute to live.”

But look at what Slim Pickens’ character is doing with his minute! Woooo-hooooo.

All of us are riding that bomb. Our time is so short before life blows up on us.

There’s something very pure about this – just one chance at every minute. This is it.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Spirituality"
See also:
Part 1: Atheist Spirituality vs. The Family Business
Part 2: What Is Spirituality?

What Is Spirituality?

What Is Spirituality?

So what is spirituality? It's a term that encompasses transcendent love, inner peace, “all-right-ness,” acceptance, awe, beauty, wonder, humility, gratitude, a freshness of experience;
a feeling of plenitude, abundance, and deep simplicity of all things; “the oceanic feeling,” Sigmund Freud spoke of, calling it “a sense of indissoluble union with the great All, and of belonging to the universal.”

In moments of heightened spiritual experience, the gap between self and world vanishes. The normal experience of time leaves us, and each moment has a quality of the eternal in it. Symptoms of developing spirituality include:

• increased tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen;
• more frequent attacks of smiling from the heart;
• more frequent feelings of being connected with others and nature;
• more frequent episodes of overwhelming appreciation;
• decisions flow more from intention or spontaneity and less from fears based on past experience;
• greater ability to enjoy each moment;
• decreased worrying;
• decreased interest in conflict, in interpreting the actions of others, in judging others, and in judging self;
• increased nonjudgmental curiosity;
• increased capacity to love without expecting anything in return;
• increased receptivity to kindness offered and increased interest in extending kindness to others.

By orienting toward the elevated – whether in compassion, ethics, art, or experience of divine presence – we transcend the ego defense mechanisms by which most of us spend our lives governed.

Psychologist Robert Cloninger and his team at the Center for Well-Being of the Department of Psychiatry of the School of Medicine of Washington University in St. Louis sought a way to define spirituality more definitely, empirically, and measurably. Their 240-item questionnaire called the "Temperament and Character Inventory,” includes spirituality (they call it self-transcendence), as one of the dimensions of character. As Cloninger measures it, spirituality is the sum of three subscales: self-forgetfulness; transpersonal identification; and acceptance.

First, self-forgetfulness. This is the proclivity for becoming so immersed in an activity that the boundary between self and other seems to fall away. Whether the activity is sports, painting, playing a musical instrument, we might sometimes lose ourselves in it, and the sense of being a separate independent self takes a vacation.

Second, transpersonal identification. This is recognizing oneself in others -- and others in oneself. If you have ever found yourself looking at another person -- or another being -- with a feeling that you are that other, their body embodies you -- or if you have looked at yourself with a sense that your being embodies others -- then you have experienced transpersonal identification. Spirituality involves connecting with the world's suffering and apprehending that suffering as our very own.

Transpersonal identification goes beyond "there but for the grace of God go I.” It's not that grace saves you from the unfortunate circumstances others endure. Nothing saves you because, in fact, you are not saved from those circumstances. If anyone is hungry, then you are hungry, for the hungry are you. That's transpersonal identification.

Third, acceptance. This is the ability to accept and affirm reality just as it is, even the hard parts, even the painful and tragic parts. Spiritually mature people are in touch with the suffering of the world, yet also and simultaneously feel joy in that connection. "Acceptance" does not mean complacency about oppression, injustice and harm. Indeed, the spiritually mature are also often the most active and the most effective in working for peace and social justice. They are energized to sustain that work because they can accept reality just as it is, even as they also work to change it. Because they are not attached to results of their work, they avoid debilitating disappointment and burn-out and are able to maintain the work for justice cheerfully. Because they find joy in each present moment, they avoid recrimination and blame. They see that blame merely recapitulates the very reactivity that is at the root of oppression.

Add together your scores for self-forgetfulness, transpersonal identification, and acceptance. The sum is your spirituality score.

Spirituality Is Not Volitional -- but Practicing Is

Here's the thing, though. It's not a matter of will. It's not a matter of volition. It's not a matter of weighing the pros and cons and making a decision. You can't decide to be more spiritual or more spiritually mature.

If you are low in spirituality -- that is, as Cloninger finds, you are practical, self-conscious, materialistic, controlling, characterized by rational objectivity and material success -- you can't wake up one morning and decide you are no longer going to be that way. It's who you are, and your own rational objectivity will very sensibly point out to you that you don't even know what it would mean to not be that way.

What you can decide, what is a matter of will and volition, is whether to take up a certain kind of discipline called a spiritual practice -- and just see where it takes you. I know that these days all kinds of things get called a spiritual practice. But let's differentiate spiritual practice from just something you do.

What Makes a Practice a Spiritual Practice

Quilting, piano-playing, or hiking might or might not qualify as spiritual practice – that is, might or might not tend to produce the symptoms of developing spirituality. An activity is more likely to work as spiritual practice if you seriously treat it as one.

First, treating a practice as a spiritual practice means engaging the activity with mindfulness -- focusing on the activity as you do it, with sharp awareness of each present moment.

Second, treating a practice as a spiritual practice means engaging the activity with intention of thereby cultivating spiritual development – reflecting as you do the activity (or just before and just after) on your intention to manifest those symptoms of spiritual development in your life.

Third, treating a practice as a spiritual practice means sometimes engaging the activity with a group that gathers expressly to do the activity in a way that cultivates spirituality – sharing each others’ spiritual reflections before, during, or after doing the activity together.

Fourth -- and most of all -- it requires establishing a foundation of spiritual openness. There are three basic daily practices for everyone that over time develop a foundation upon which some other practice can grow into a real spiritual practice.

• Silence. 15 minutes a day being still and quiet, just bringing attention to your own amazing breathing.
• Journaling. 15 minutes a day writing about your gratitudes, your highest hopes and your experiences of awe.
• Study. 15 minutes a day reading “wisdom literature” – the essays of Pema Chodron or Thomas Merton, the poems of Rumi or Mary Oliver, the Dao de Jing, the Bible’s book of Psalms – just to mention a very few examples of wisdom literature.

With these three daily practices building your foundation of spiritual awareness, then gardening, yoga, or throwing pottery are much better positioned to truly be spiritual practices for you.

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Spirituality"
See also:
Part 1: Atheist Spirituality vs. The Family Business
Part 3: What'll You Get Out of It?

Atheist Spirituality vs. The Family Business

This Is It

Set aside the illusion of your past, the gossamer dreams of your future. Return to right now, this place: your body, your surroundings. After all, this is it.

The point was whimsically expressed by poet James Broughton:

This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It
and That is That

O it is This
and it is Thus
and it is Them
and it is Us
and it is Now
and Here It is
and Here We are
so This is It 

Atheist Spirituality

I recently became aware of a phenomenon called atheist spirituality, which may sound like an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp or plastic glasses. Let me give you a couple samples. First, here’s Andy Walters describing "My Spiritual Atheism" on his blog:

"As a spiritual atheist, I mean that I reject the supernatural but affirm the reality and value of what most people usually mean when they say 'the divine.'... [The divine is transcendent love, and] Transcendent love is valuing others’ interests above your own.... Practicing respect, humility, compassion, and altruism, for example, is intensely gratifying.... It is the divine -- the part of me that “transcends” my ego.... Second, by “divine”, people also mean inner peace -- being unafraid of what is, has been, or will be.... When I experience it, I am flooded with a sense of “all-right-ness” with myself and my circumstances. Although it is a sense of acceptance, it does not rid me of the desire to better myself and my circumstances.... Awe is the final component of what people usually mean when they speak of the divine. Divine awe is a sense of utter astonishment and wonder at the mystery of existence...the degree of awe that can come from observing the mystery of existence.... For thousands of years, humans have mapped out the divine and many have explained it in terms of the supernatural. With the advent of modernism, however, that language no longer makes sense. But that doesn’t mean that the divine isn’t real -- it only means we need a different vocabulary to describe the same reality. I call it spiritual atheism." (CLICK HERE)

The second sample is from a video I found called, “My Spirituality as an Atheist”

"...I’d have to consider myself a spiritual person. I’m not talking about some ghostly, ethereal soul...inside my body.... I’m talking about the essence of human...: the action or ability to see beauty, to feel wonder, and to be in awe.... The Grand Tetons.... A pile of stars...still and perfect.... At times I can be so overwhelmed by the sensation of being alive that I cry or I laugh or I scream or I just breathe deeply. Being humble is simply the feeling of recognizing the reality of one’s small significance to a universe so massive. Being grateful to be alive doesn't require a person to be grateful toward.... I am one with the universe. I am as much the universe as a supernova: made of the same particles, governed by the same forces. I am genes that mutated randomly then were selected naturally based on their success in survival. And I love apple butter on a biscuit. I collapse in awe at the magnificence of this place.... I breathe appreciation for it all. I have to – with all my essence, with all my spirit."

Yup. "It is now, and here it is, and here we are, so this is it." There’s something very pure about each moment, just one chance to experience it: blossoms and sunshine and one morning’s journey together. This is it.

The Family Business

I’m the first-born child of rationalist humanist academic parents. I grew up and went into the family business: being a rationalist humanist academic. I was in fourth grade in a small town in Georgia when I first heard the word “atheist” – and asked what it meant. Shortly afterward, I decided I was one.

This was a scandal to my classmates. The scandal died down after a week or so, but from then on through high school I was “the class atheist.” Even so, apart from a few kids who were hostile, and a few others who undertook to try to save me, my classmates by and large politely ignored our differences of theological opinion. If there was a disconnect between us because of religion, looking back, I’d say the distance-making, the wall-building, came more from me than from them. As a child and teenager, my sad heart hardened and chose contempt as its protective strategy.

I was not the sort of atheist that went for “spirituality” – did not use that word for my experiences. Nor did I think in terms of sacred, divine, transcendent. Wasn’t so keen on awe, mystery, or wonder either. So what I want to tell you this morning is how I learned to stop worrying and love spirituality.

Strange Love

Some of you might remember Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie, “Dr. Strangelove.” It was a black comedy satirizing the prevalent fear of the time: nuclear bombs. How many of you have seen the movie? The subtitle was, you may remember, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

Life sometimes hits like a bomb, blows up the world as we have known it: the loss of a loved one, traumatic tragedy. Bombs are fearful things: the nuclear bombs with which nations threaten whole populations, and the little explosions inside handguns that propel bullets for neighbor to kill neighbor, and all the varieties of in-between bombs that terrorize our hearts, that shake and sadden our souls.

Life also explodes in beauty: the birth of a child, the arrival of spring, an act of kindness.

How do we learn to ease the worry and bring love to the bombs we fear? How do we learn to stop worrying and love: everything; even the hard parts? It calls for development of such virtues as equanimity and compassion. Those are spiritual virtues – and even if they are entirely a matter of getting our neurons wired a certain way, the circuitry of spirituality draws on but is different from purely cognitive intelligence – draws on but is different from the emotional circuitry.

Native disposition – genetics – accounts for some of a person’s spiritual virtue. Can you cultivate the spiritual virtues beyond your native disposition? Maybe. Sort of.

But first, what is spirituality? To that question we will turn in Part 2.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Spirituality"
See also:
Part 2: What Is Spirituality?
Part 3: What'll You Get Out of It?

Woooo-Hoooo!

I’ve now had a chance to talk with a number of people on a path of spiritual practice. All of us, or so it seems, began, as I did, in some form of contradiction. We felt broken, wrong, inadequate, and we thought spiritual practice would fix us. But spiritual practice isn’t about fixing anything. It’s about realizing that we aren’t broke and don’t need fixing. We aren’t broken and from the beginning never have been – at least, not in a way that needs fixing.

We live in culture that constantly tells us we aren’t good enough. Get better, buy this product, this treatment, this school, this exercise, this method. It's difficult in such a culture to really believe that we aren't broken, that there is, in fact, nothing wrong with us. Spirituality is about learning how to remember the fact of abundance in the midst of the daily barrage of messages of scarcity.

Even when intentional spiritual practice begins in self-contradiction, as it usually does, staying with it, slowly smoothes our rougher edges, and, like bird-watching, yields unpredictable glimpses of beauty. We don't get "fixed." We just gradually grow comfortable with who we are and always have been.

At the end of Dr. Strangelove, the bomber plane is set to release its nuclear payload, but the release mechanism jams. Slim Pickens climbs down into the bomb-bay to fix the jam. He succeeds, and, unfortunately, the bomb is released while he’s sitting on it. In the film’s most memorable shot, Slim Pickens is waving his cowboy hat and whooping as he rides the bomb down to his – and what will soon be the planet’s – destruction.

"Woooo-hoooo!"

Maybe that’s what learning to stop worrying and love the bomb looks like. He does seem to be living in the moment.

That was such a striking shot when I first saw it because I knew if I were falling out of the sky riding on a nuclear bomb, I’d be freaked out in fear and despair: “My god, my god, my god, I’ve only got maybe one minute to live.”

But look at what Slim Pickens’ character is doing with his minute!

Woooo-hooooo!

That’s us. We’re all riding that bomb. Our time is so short before life blows up on us. There’s something very pure about this – just one chance at every minute.

This is it.

* * *
This is part 6 of 6 of "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Spirituality"
Part 1: "This Is It: Atheist Spirituality"
Part 2: "Spirituality and Types"
Part 3: "The Class Atheist"
Part 4: "Self-Transcendence, Huh? What Is It Good For?"
Part 5: "But Do You Have a Spiritual Practice?"

But Do You Have a Spiritual Practice?

The Temperament and Character Inventory developed by Robert Cloninger assesses self-transcendence as the sum of three sub-scores:

• Self-Forgetfulness
• Transpersonal Identification
• Acceptance

There’s a fly though, I think, in Cloninger’s ointment for measuring spirituality. My complaint is not so much with the particular reliability and/or validity of his measure. My complaint is with the idea of measurement itself when it comes to spirituality.

The implicit message of any measurement is: "measure up!" With measurement comes judgment – as most of us know from the last time we measured – and judged – ourselves on the bathroom scale. When it comes to physical fitness, or cognitive fitness, or emotional-social fitness, judgmentalism about ourselves or other people might sometimes provide short-term motivation. It can also often be counter-productive. When it comes to spiritual fitness, judgmentalism is flatly contrary to the very spiritual fitness we are judging inadequate.

There is an appropriate, limited role for judgment. With spiritual development we learn how to also at the same time hold in our awareness the wider context within which judgment has its little corner. That wider context transcends our petty assessments of better and worse.

Your spirit is the part of you that understands that you are good enough – that you are, in fact, (as mentioned in the "Blessed Affliction" series), perfect, exactly the way you are.

Moreover, you can’t make yourself spiritually mature. Yes, there are practices that will tend, over time, to strengthen the spiritual virtues: equanimity, peace, compassion, wisdom, presence. Spiritual practices do tend to do that, though not with the kind of predictable timeline that benchpresses strengthen the upper body. Rather spiritual practice cultivates spiritual virtues on the spirit’s own schedule, in its own way, on a path with irregular ups and downs.

"So, Meredith," you may ask me, "why would I undertake a practice of such uncertain payoff?”

And why would I want spiritual development if I'm already perfect?"

Those are logical questions. I can only say I began a spiritual practice because I didn’t feel perfect. In fact, I started my primary spiritual practice for the worst reason: because an authority told me to.

Twelve years ago I was in Chicago trying to pass muster to become a minister, trying to prove I was good enough. I had just finished my first year of divinity school, and I was meeting with the Midwest regional subcommittee on candidacy (which is a subcommittee of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. The path to professional ministry is gaily festooned with committees.)

"Do you have a spiritual practice?" asked a member of that subcommittee.

Before starting seminary, I had spent two years as the congregational facilitator and preacher for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Clarksville, Tennessee. Before that, I'd served as a president of our Fellowship in Waco, Texas, as Vice President of our church in Charlottesville, Virginia and had worked as the church secretary for a year at our Nashville, Tennessee church.

But did I have a spiritual practice?

I was a born-and-raised Unitarian Universalist. I had a Ph.D. I'd been a university professor of philosophy for four years. I could debate about metaphysics, metaethics, metatheology, poststructuralism, postindustrialism, and postmodernism. If it was meta-, or post-, I was there.

But did I have a spiritual practice?

Well, no, I didn't. Nothing I regularly did was centering or cleansing, or put me much in touch with myself, or interconnected me with all beings, or produced a luminous sense of joy and peace flowing throughout the world, or made me feel lighter as I went about subsequent tasks -- or even inclined me to smile more. “Get a spiritual practice,” the committee told me.

It is contradictory to take up a path of self-acceptance and trusting in my own inner wisdom because an outside authority told me to. Yet that’s what I did.

It is contradictory to judge myself for judging myself too much. Yet that’s what I did, and still do, albeit somewhat more gently, usually.

* * *
This is part 5 of 6 of "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Spirituality"
Part 1: "This Is It: Atheist Spirituality"
Part 2: "Spirituality and Types"
Part 3: "The Class Atheist"
Part 4: "Self-Transcendence, Huh? What Is It Good For?"
Part 6: "Woooo-Hoooo"

Self-Transcendence, Huh? What Is It Good For?

As the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) measure it, "self-transcendence" is the sum of three subscales: self-forgetfulness; transpersonal identification; and acceptance.

First, self-forgetfulness. This is the proclivity for becoming so immersed in an activity that the boundary between self and other seems to fall away. Whether the activity is sports, painting, playing a musical instrument, we might sometimes lose ourselves in it, and the sense of being a separate independent self takes a vacation.

Second, transpersonal identification. This is recognizing oneself in others -- and others in oneself. If you have ever found yourself looking at another person -- or another being -- with a feeling that you are that other, their body embodies you -- or if you have looked at yourself with a sense that your being embodies others -- then you have experienced transpersonal identification.

Spirituality involves connecting with the world's suffering and apprehending that suffering as our very own. The sentiment, "there but for the grace of God go I," can be a start toward a compassionate response. Transpersonal identification goes further. It's not that grace saves you from the unfortunate circumstances others endure. Nothing saves you because, in fact, you are not saved from those circumstances. If anyone is hungry, then you are hungry, for the hungry are you. That's transpersonal identification.

Third, acceptance. This is the ability to accept and affirm reality just as it is, even the hard parts, even the painful and tragic parts. Spiritually mature people are in touch with the suffering of the world, yet also and simultaneously feel joy in that connection.

"Acceptance" does not mean complacency about oppression, injustice and harm. Indeed, the spiritually mature are also often the most active and the most effective in working for peace and social justice. They are energized to sustain that work because they can accept reality just as it is, even as they also work to change it. Because they are not attached to results of their work, they avoid debilitating disappointment and burn-out and are able to maintain the work for justice cheerfully. Because they find joy in each present moment, they avoid recrimination and blame ("Those evil oppressors!") They see that blame merely recapitulates the very reactivity that is at the root of oppression.

Add together the scores for self-forgetfulness, transpersonal identification, and acceptance. The sum is the self-transcendence – or spirituality -- score.

Would you want to grow or change toward being the sort of person whose scores in these areas were higher?

Answer carefully, because there are trade-offs.

Cloninger says self-transcendence is disadvantageous in most modern societies where idealism, modesty, and meditative search for meaning might interfere with the acquisition of wealth and power. People who are low in self-transcendence, Cloninger finds, are described by themselves and others as practical, self-conscious, materialistic, and controlling. These are people well adapted in most Western societies because of their rational objectivity and materialistic success.

So maybe, like Otto Ringling, you have all the spiritual development you’re inclined to want.

Or maybe not.

Those low in self-transcendence may be geared for materialistic success, but they consistently have difficulty accepting and adjusting to suffering, loss of control, personal and material losses, and death. When people are confronted with these bombs that explode the long-crafted illusions of control and success, as we all inevitably will be if we live very long, self-transcendence then is, as the psychologist Cloninger puts it, “adaptively advantageous.”

If living in peace in the midst of tragedy, without shutting out the tragedy, is what you’d like to be able to do, then cultivating spirituality might be, for you, worth the disadvantage that you’ll be less interested in acquisition of wealth and power.

* * *
This is part 4 of 6 of "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Spirituality"
Part 1: "This Is It: Atheist Spirituality"
Part 2: "Spirituality and Types"
Part 3: "The Class Atheist"
Part 5: "But Do You Have a Spiritual Practice?"
Part 6: "Woooo-Hoooo"

The Class Atheist

I just love being a Unitarian Universalist. We’ve got such a full spectrum here. The chance to be a part of a community of such diversity is an enormous joy, blessing, and grace. Twenty years ago, Cecelia Ringling (a fictional character whose business is "Tarot and palm reading, past life regressions, and spiritual journeyings") typified what I thought of in connection with “spirituality,” and I was pretty much an Otto (Cecelia's practical-minded, no-nonsense brother), so I saw the Cecelias as interesting, often lovely and wonderful people, but with these interests that just seemed, well, flaky as a good spanakopita crust.

In 7th grade: Year 4 of being the Class Atheist. Oh,
the existential angst of breakfast! My sister Alizon
is clearly oblivious to the unbearability of it all.

It goes back to when I was in fourth grade, and I first heard the word “atheist” – and asked what it meant. Shortly afterward, I decided I was one. This was a scandal to my classmates in that rural Georgia school. From then on through high school I was “the class atheist.” But, you know, after awhile they got over being scandalized. Apart from a few kids who were hostile, and a few others who undertook to try to save me, my classmates preferred to ignore our differences of theological opinion. If there was a disconnect between us because of religion, looking back, I’d say the distance-making, the wall-building, came more from me than from them. As a child and teenager, my sad heart hardened and chose contempt as its protective strategy. I did not go for “spirituality” – did not use that word for my experiences. Nor did I think in terms of sacred, divine, transcendent. Wasn’t so keen on awe, mystery, or wonder either.

It was several years after college before, very slowly at first, I began to find a place – to want a place -- in my life for transcendent love, inner peace, “all-right-ness,” acceptance, awe, beauty, wonder, humility, gratitude, a freshness of experience; a feeling of plenitude, abundance, and deep simplicity of all things; “the oceanic feeling,” Sigmund Freud spoke of, calling it “a sense of indissoluble union with the great All, and of belonging to the universal.” These are ways of describing the spiritual. In moments of heightened spiritual experience, the gap between self and world vanishes. The normal experience of time leaves us, and each moment has a quality of the eternal in it. There is no better name for this than “spirituality,” and it turns out that it does not require theism or any of the things Cecelia Ringling is into.

Psychologist Robert Cloninger and his team at the Center for Well-Being of the Department of Psychiatry of the School of Medicine of Washington University in St. Louis sought a way to define spirituality more definitely, empirically, and measurably. Their 240-item questionnaire called the "Temperament and Character Inventory,” includes, as one of the dimensions of character, something they call "self-transcendence" – and I’d call spirituality. Self-transcendence is an orientation toward the elevated, whether that is experienced as compassion, ethics, art, or whether it is experienced as a divine presence.

By orienting toward the elevated, we transcend the ego defense mechanisms by which most of us spend our lives governed. Self-transcendence means conceiving oneself as integral to the universe as a whole. Self-transcendent individuals are spiritual, unpretentious, humble, and fulfilled. This self-transcendence, as Cloninger measures it, is the sum of three subscales: self-forgetfulness; transpersonal identification; and acceptance.

Self-forgetfulness. Transpersonal identificaltion. Acceptance. Are these qualities on which you'd like to improve your scores?

* * *
This is part 3 of 6 of "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Spirituality"
Part 1: "This Is It: Atheist Spirituality"
Part 2: "Spirituality and Types"
Part 4: "Self-Transcendence, Huh? What Is It Good For?"
Part 5: "But Do You Have a Spiritual Practice?"
Part 6: "Woooo-Hoooo"

Spirituality and Types

Let me tell you how I learned to stop worrying and love spirituality.

Some of you might remember Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie, “Dr. Strangelove.” It was a black comedy satirizing the prevalent fear of the time: nuclear bombs. The subtitle was, you may remember, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

Life sometimes hits like a bomb, blows up the world as we have known it: the loss of a loved one, traumatic tragedy. Bombs are fearful things: the nuclear bombs with which nations threaten whole populations, and the little explosions inside handguns that propel bullets for neighbor to kill neighbor, and the in-between bombs that ripped the Boston Marathon – and our hearts. The bombshell of violence shakes and saddens our souls.

Life also explodes in beauty: the birth of a child, the arrival of spring.

How do we learn to ease the worry and bring love to the bombs we fear? How do we learn to stop worrying and love...everything...even the hard parts?

It calls for development of such spiritual virtues as equanimity and compassion, the cultivation of which beyond our native dispositions is a slow and unsteady business in the best of circumstances.

This spirituality, though, might be itself the bomb we fear. It was for me. I’m the first-born child of rationalist humanist academic parents. I grew up and went into the family business: being a rationalist humanist academic. If you’d said “spirituality” to me 20 years ago, the image that would have come to mind would have been of someone like the fictional character, Cecelia Ringling.

In a recent Roland Merullo novel, Otto and Cecelia Ringling are siblings. Otto is 44, competent at his job, common-sensical, no-nonsense, straightforward, and upbeat, devoted to his family: a wife and two teenagers. Otto makes a comfortable living. But his sister Cecelia, four years younger, barely scrapes by in her line of work. Cecelia’s line of work is indicated by the lavender and cream sign in front of her house:

“Cecelia Ringling, Tarot and palm readings, Past-life regressions, Spiritual journeyings.”

“’Journeyings,’” mutters Otto. “What kind of word is that?” Otto describes his sister as: “a nice enough woman who is as flaky as a good spanakopita crust.” Otto has all the spiritual development he is inclined to want, and has little interest in “the types of things my sister was always talking about: synchronicity, psychic wavelengths, auras, healing energies.” And the aforementioned tarot and palm reading and past-life regressions. We might add things like astrology, reiki, healing touch, séances, psychic powers, astral projection, crystals, pyramids, channeling – what Otto calls, “all the frizz-frazz of people who couldn’t deal with solid reality.” Cecelia has a penchant for “floppy, too colorful dresses” and “sandals that were supposed to massage your acupuncture points and keep you free of illness.”

You recognize these types, don’t you? These characters are archetypes of the contemporary scene. We Unitarian Universalists have our Otto types who think of themselves as oriented toward dealing with solid reality and not escaping into magical thinking and woo-woo, new-agey stuff. We also have our Cecelia types here. What seems to Otto to be dealing with solid reality seems to our Cecelia-types to be limiting oneself to a very narrow, restricted portion of reality.

We also have a lot of folks who are kinda in-between, I guess you could say. These are the folks who would never pay good money for an astrological forecast, but in their medicine chest is a bottle of herbal pills the benefits of which, the asterisk explains, “have not been verified by the FDA.”

* * *
This is part 2 of 6 of "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Spirituality"
Part 1: "This Is It: Atheist Spirituality"
Part 3: "The Class Atheist"
Part 4: "Self-Transcendence, Huh? What Is It Good For?"
Part 5: "But Do You Have a Spiritual Practice?"
Part 6: "Woooo-Hoooo"

This Is It: Atheist Spirituality

Gentle Reader, take a few minutes with this post to set aside the illusion of your past, the gossamer dreams of your future. Take this moment to return to right now, this place: your body, your surroundings.

After all, this is it. The point was whimsically expressed by poet James Broughton:

This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It
and That is That

O it is This
and it is Thus
and it is Them
and it is Us
and it is Now
and Here It is
and Here We are
so This is It

I recently became aware of a phenomenon called atheist spirituality, which may sound like an oxymoron. Here’s how it is explained in a video called, “My Spirituality as an Atheist”

"...I’d have to consider myself a spiritual person. I’m not talking about some ghostly, ethereal soul...inside my body.... I’m talking about the essence of human...: the action or ability to see beauty, to feel wonder, and to be in awe. The Grand Tetons.... A pile of stars...still and perfect.... At times I can be so overwhelmed by the sensation of being alive that I cry or I laugh or I scream or I just breathe deeply. Being humble is simply the feeling of recognizing the reality of one’s small significance to a universe so massive. Being grateful to be alive doesn't require a person to be grateful toward.... I am one with the universe. I am as much the universe as a supernova: made of the same particles, governed by the same forces. I am genes that mutated randomly then were selected naturally based on their success in survival. And I love apple butter on a biscuit. I collapse in awe at the magnificence of this place.... I breathe appreciation for it all. I have to – with all my essence, with all my spirit."

Andy Walters described his Atheist Spirituality on his blog, "The Journey":

"As a spiritual atheist, I mean that I reject the supernatural but affirm the reality and value of what most people usually mean when they say 'the divine.'...[The divine is transcendent love, and] Transcendent love is valuing others’ interests above your own....Practicing respect, humility, compassion, and altruism, for example, is intensely gratifying....It is the divine -- the part of me that “transcends” my ego....Second, by “divine”, people also mean inner peace -- being unafraid of what is, has been, or will be....When I experience it, I am flooded with a sense of “all-right-ness” with myself and my circumstances. Although it is a sense of acceptance, it does not rid me of the desire to better myself and my circumstances....Awe is the final component of what people usually mean when they speak of the divine. Divine awe is a sense of utter astonishment and wonder at the mystery of existence...the degree of awe that can come from observing the mystery of existence....For thousands of years, humans have mapped out the divine and many have explained it in terms of the supernatural. With the advent of modernism, however, that language no longer makes sense. But that doesn’t mean that the divine isn’t real -- it only means we need a different vocabulary to describe the same reality. I call it spiritual atheism." (Walters' whole blog post: see here)

Walters, too, videotaped himself offering his reflections:

Yup. "It is now, and here it is, and here we are, so this is it."

There’s something very pure about each moment, just one chance to experience it: blossoms and sunshine and one morning’s journey together. This is it.

* * *
This is part 1 of 6 of "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Spirituality"
Part 2: "Spirituality and Types"
Part 3: "The Class Atheist"
Part 4: "Self-Transcendence, Huh? What Is It Good For?"
Part 5: "But Do You Have a Spiritual Practice?"
Part 6: "Woooo-Hoooo"