You are 100% right, but it is not just something between you and me: I think there is good evidence that it is a world historical situation we are living in and we need the patience of dealing with it to get the best of it. Now I am going to try a description of this situation.Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Mon Dec 25, 2023 5:16 am Your Spirituality -Inner Life is too broad and I am quite lost with it.
A simple reference point to understand spirituality is emotions. Both spirituality and emotions are something that touches us, takes our heart, makes us feel that something is moving, living inside us, something that can be extremely beautiful or full of sadness, or just deep. The limit of emotions as a reference point to understand spirituality is that they are mostly considered as separate, individual moments, occurrences. But there are moments when we can realize that certain emotions are so deep, so important, so involving, that it would be a shame to waste such a treasure without dealing with them in more systematic, organized ways. In this perspective, spirituality is a work on organizing and dealing with emotions, to make this tremendous resource fruitful at its best. This way we connect emotions with unifying reference points, such as meaning of life, our whole personality, or a whole understanding of life and the world.
We know that psichology is the specialist about emotions, so that today we cannot think of dealing seriously and properly with emotions without all the scientific and human contribution that psychology is able to give us. As you said, in this context psychology looks identical with spirituality. An essential difference from spirituality is that psychology lacks all the critical and radical questions and perspectives where philosophy is the expert. This way, Hitler is just a patient to a psychologist, but we feel that this is too limited. In this context, philosophy is able to provoke our understanding by suggesting that the Holocaust is not just an unpleasant consequence of the patient Hitler that is being treated by a psychologist; rather, it is a historical phenomenon that challenges our entire understanding of this world, of our life, existence. Spirituality welcomes this perspective, because spirituality is not just about well being and emotions: it wants to deal with the deepest problems about our understanding of existence and even our understanding of understanding. In this horizon psychology is inexpert. Philosophy is the specialist, but, on the other side, philosophy is too ignorant about the deep mechanisms of our emotions, human relationships, if compared to psychology. Spirituality takes both of them under the unitary comprehension of what we want to do with our lives, how we can exploit our emotions under a more organized view that can become the reason why we live and how to live.
Such a unitary view existed already in ancient philosophy and ancient Christianity, but it was lost over time.
Philosophy lost its connections with emotions because it needed to be serious, manageable, understandable, communicable; in the middle of this concern, philosophy reduced itself to reasoning, logics, criticism and now it is wavering between seriousness and systematicity (analytical philosophy), that actually are the specialty of science, and radical criticism (postmodern philosophy), that ends up into an emptiness, where everything is demolished, where we feel the need to build something positive, but we have absolutely no idea how such positivity can be built. Spirituality is able to build this “something” positive because it can exploit its wider horizon that includes attention to emotions, humanity, subjectivity, art, rather than just reasoning and understanding.
Christianity lost its connections with emotions for a reason that is very similar to what happened in philosophy: Christianity felt the need to determine things that are the essential, the points that make the radical difference. Emotions are too unreliable, they cannot be considered the essence of Christianity, so Christianity found the essence in cult and morality: you are a Christian if you practice a specific cult and you behave according to specific moral rules. It doesn’t matter what emotions you feel, or you like, or you cultivate. The word “spirituality” was born in Christianity and it meant “your life according to the Holy Spirit”, which meant, in this context, “your life according to the cult and moral rules of Christianity”, plus an additional, slight, tiny, quite invisible, reference, to your feelings and emotions about your practice of Christianity, that was just a residual of what spirituality was in ancient times, when the word didn’t actually exist yet.
Between the 19th and 20th century, Western culture started discovering Oriental religions and practices. Since these practices were perceived as dealing with what is invisible, inner, immaterial, in the experience of our human life, they were called spiritualities. People didn’t need much time to realize that Oriental religions and practices filled a serious gap in Western philosophy and religion: connection with emotions and the body. In Western culture, both philosophy and religion had become just “intellectual” practices. Actually I don’t like at all this meaning of the word “intellectual” as something that is cold and disconnected from emotions and the body, but this is what happened and how most people perceived these things. In this context, “spirituality” has become a synonim of practices and religions connected to the Oriental world. That’s why you feel certain practices, such as breathing control, as essential to spirituality: attention to breathing is essentially absent from Western philosophy and religion, but it has a vital importance in many Oriental practices and religions. This way you are just using the current understanding of spirituality, that is largely based on the Oriental culture.
I think that, in this context, philosophy has a vital contribution that can fill the gap that is, instead, in Oriental spirituality. This contribution is its heritage of work on criticism, reasoning, debates, logic. In this context, Oriental spiritualities, compared to Western philosophy, look quite naive, inexpert, easily exposed to criticism, easily accused of building metaphysics. On the other side, as we said, philosophy doesn’t have the depth, emotional connection, bodily connection, that we can find in Oriental spirituality.
I think that now, today, a hard work on spirituality can make a treasure of all of these resources; I think that, if we don’t do this hard and long work, we are just going to loose a tremendous and rich treasure and resource, that currently is scattered in fragments that live separated among the fields that I have mentioned: psychology, philosophy, religions, Oriental culture, science, emotions.
This explains why today this unitary idea of mine about spirituality cannot be understood: it cannot be understood because actually it doesn’t exist as a unitary category, as a concept. Currently, at present, we are in a stage where a lot of people are working, more or less directly, on fields related to my description, where nobody has a clear idea about where the problem is, what we can build, how we can build something organized, understandable, feasible, complete, balanced, positive. When I say “spirituality”, 99% of people think of Oriental spirituality; only a very little percentage of people are working on a wider and more critical understanding of the concept, but even those people are quite confused.