What is "spirituality"?

I’ve always regarded “spirituality” as one of those words that is so broadly defined, it’s useless.

In practice, I see it being used a lot by people who reject organized religion, but haven’t made the leap to atheism (or agnosticism). Folks who cherry pick what they believe in – sometimes from multiple religions and otherworldly beliefs.

I think you described it very well in your third paragraph of your question. I see it as a connection….being capable of understanding the complex totality of thoughts and emotions, in ourselves and in other people. Others like to break down thought and emotion into chemical reaction and synaptic firing, and tho I am educated in biology, I have neither the need nor desire, to do so. Quite a number of spiritual people have called me a shaman immediately upon meeting me, and tho I claim no special ability, I appreciate their recognition of my spirituality. See ya…..Gary/wtf

I’m gonna go ahead and click “Great Question” on account of the word rigmarole.

To answer your question, though: cynically I tend to associate the concept of ‘spirituality’ sans religion with either uncommitted or uncertain people who still want to believe in the proverbial higher power. It’s not always a negative connotation (I was such a person once) but I admit I sometimes have trouble taking people seriously when they call themselves ‘spiritual’. As @cprevite said, it feels amorphous. So amorphous it can often define entirely different people—pagans and Christians, religious pragmatists and seance-goers, Tarot readers and the Miss Cleo sort of phonies, etc. The term’s adaptability suggests to me that everyone demonstrates at least some kind of spirituality.

Lately I’ve been interested in the ways one reconciles amorality with spirituality.

If I had to define it I’d say it’s something in the aether; a Brahman, a Spiritus Mundi, a Jungian oversoul or collective unconscious—all terms no less vague than spirituality itself.

finding wonder and awe with life which creates a sense of something more than physicality and leans towards concepts that we can’t and don’t yet fully understand

Are we taking about single malt or blended?

Why is it that first guy out the chute has to declare the central concept of this discussion “useless” and essentially smother the subject in negativity before it even gets going?

Essentially, his (implicit) opinion that there really is no such thing as spirituality, and that it is only a confusion that misguided religious types who, being untrue to their own religions fall back on this muddled idea before abandoning anything and everything “spiritual” along with one’s belief in God.

Apart from answering the question in bad faith, he takes a hot steaming dump on everyone who might take the idea of spirituality seriously—showing us, in the process, that as a nonspiritual person, he has little regard and respect for others, that he is neither generous nor constructive, and that what he is about is disparaging, disheartening, undermining and demeaning others. In short, he shows us his lack of spirituality.

Perhaps we should call it “character” in his case, so as not to offend his agnostic sensibility, but either way, spirit or character, there is je ne se qua quality to it, as well as a kind of moral arc. Spirituality, in the sense I am trying to get at has nothing to do with whether one believes in God or other spooky seance nonsense; it has to do with who you are as a moral being.

I am talking about what makes a person authentic and morally alive. I am talking about things like having moral courage, acting in good faith, being constructive, loving, generous, and kind. I am talking about one’s willingness and readiness to see and affirm what is good in others. I am talking about one’s commitment to social justice. I am particularly interested in the spirituality of atheists, agnostics, and other nonbelievers, since I am a non-theist myself.

If the subject of spirituality seems too broad and amorphous to define, start with what it means to you, and what makes you worthwhile knowing, or a positive force for good in the world.

@Zuma I am talking about what makes a person authentic and morally alive. I am talking about things like having moral courage, acting in good faith, being constructive, loving, generous, and kind. I am talking about one’s willingness and readiness to see and affirm what is good in others. I am talking about one’s commitment to social justice. I am particularly interested in the spirituality of atheists, agnostics, and other nonbelievers, since I am a non-theist myself.

None of these things are what I would describe as spirituality. They are character. Spirituality – to me – is a little more ethereal.

@Zuma
I’m going to have to agree with @DarkScribe here. I’m not an atheist yet, though I foresee atheism in my personal future everyday. I am also not spiritual by your definition(s). I am amoral; my morality is in its final throes of moribundity. You might count me already morally dead. By your definition(s) (myriad and amorphous, ahem), reconciliation with any kind of spirituality doesn’t seem possible.
I just disagree.
You asked us to describe spirituality in our own words—what it means to us. It means to me only ontological dubiousness. ‘Negative’ though it may seem, that’s the best answer I can give you. For now.

@DarkScribe By “ethereal” I presume you mean other-worldly, insubstantial, and irrelevant, and unreal. That is just a connotation, and not at all what the bulk of people mean by the term. “Spiritual” also means people of like mind acting in the same spirit. It can mean an affirmation or commitment to a collective understanding, and a substantive understanding at that.

If you have never had such a shared understanding that you might be inclined to say you shared a spiritual connection, then I suppose the word is going to seem pale and “ethereal” to you. But most people do have such a connection, and I would be willing to bet that you do too; you just think it is “soft” or “unmanly” or somehow disreputable to use the language of spirituality even though you know full well what it means.

“Character” doesn’t really cut it. You have folks on the Religious Right united around their own collective understandings, their own spiritual vision, and a whole set of authoritarian values that are inimical to our own. They see subordination and obedience as the highest human/spiritual values; and accordingly, they have no problem using punishment, fear, and coercion to shape “character” by instilling their spiritual vision in others. Trying to critique what they are up to or mobilize a defense simply by talking about “character” would be very difficult indeed.

The cultural wars are very real, especially to those on the Religious Right. They view it as a spiritual war, and it is. It is certainly not a character war. Their values are fundamentally different and inimical to the spiritual vision of the humanist Left—which is about respect for human rights and dignity, self-determination, rationality, self-actualization, social justice, etc., etc. Only we on the Left, in turning our back on spirituality not only deprive ourselves of a powerful vocabulary, we break faith with and abandon our allies among the religious humanists that compose the Religious Left.

@nxknxk Sorry to hear that you are a psychopath, that you have no spirituality and, therefore, that you have nothing further to contribute to this conversation.

It’s a thought provoking question, I have always considered myself a spiritual person, not religious but when you ask what it means, it is hard to put into words. I think to me it means the ability to look at the natural beauty of a field of sugar cane and feel my heart fill up. Or when I have to giggle at the antics of a litter of pups. Or the love I feel for those close to me. It is the compassion I feel when I see someone in pain. All of the non physical feelings I experience in my life.

I don’t think it has to be reliant upon a connection to others, it is something inside of me that helps to make me who I am.

@Zuma
Apparently neither do you, if all you have to say anymore is limited to calling others’ notions of spirituality ‘irrelevant’ and other posters ‘psychopaths’ to bookend your, what, largely tangential (but interesting, surely, surely!) discussion of religiosity in politics.

It seemed like an aggressive reaction to more or less innocuous responses, is all. This doesn’t need to be personal. But the question felt doomed from the start because it alienates an entire group of spiritual people by presuming their conceptions of spirituality are dependent upon naive cliches or tropes of the supernatural and religion. You also further dismiss answers (read: ‘take a hot steaming dump’ on them to borrow your wonderful language—where is that non-deprived vocabulary?) with which you disagree, even after asking for them. I assumed we were just offering our own ideas of what that undeniably vague word might mean, not arguing with someone’s preformed ideas on the subject. But as the saying goes, I have made an ass of you.

To attempt to cleave to the topic nonetheless, I must agree with @rooeytoo that spirituality is internal. It’s individual. It might be people acting in the same spirit for you, God or Tarot cards or seances for others, something simple like a profound appreciation for nature

@Zuma arkScribe By “ethereal” I presume you mean other-worldly, insubstantial, and irrelevant, and unreal.

Do you often presume inaccurately or is this a “one off”?

Strangely (to you it seems) I regard “ethereal” in much the way that most dictionaries regard it. Do you have access to one? I have yet to find “insubstantial or irrelevant” in a dictionary definition of the word.

@DarkScribe “Insubstantial” is the first entry in my dictionary. My thinking on “irrelevant” is that something that is “otherworldly” or “heavenly” would not be directly relevant to the moral struggles of this world.

ethereal
1. Characterized by lightness and insubstantiality; intangible.
2. Highly refined; delicate. See Synonyms at airy.
3. a. Of the celestial spheres; heavenly.
3 b. Not of this world; spiritual.
4. Chemistry Of or relating to ether.

@rooeytoo I think there may be a sense of connection to others when one feels beauty, or delights in puppies, or empathizes with someone in pain; or at least an affirmation of our common humanity when you feel these things.

I understand “spirituality” to be a particular mode of consciousness.

The mode of consciousness by which we typically define our reality is a discriminatory one: we engage the intellect as an analytical tool to compartmentalize the world of experience into subject and object, self and other. Then the discriminatory consciousness further subdivides the objective world into discreet things. It’s a process of division and differentiation. This is the mode of consciousness that is the basis for science. It seeks to know by encapsulating reality conceptually.

The mode of consciousness that we call “spirituality” works differently. This mode doesn’t distinguish between subject and object, inner and outer, self and other. Its experience is holistic and non-conceptual. It’s the unfiltered experience of the moment, without even so much as separating that experience into “experiencer” and “that which is experienced”. It’s all “just this”, whole. It embraces not-knowing.

Our everyday experience is actually always an amalgam of these two modes, running in parallel. At various times, one or the other may come to the forefront, and certain people may default more to one than the other. We tend to be more aware of the function of our discriminating consciousness because it’s the mode responsible for thought and our inner discourse. But the holistic mode is always functioning too in its quiet way tempering the excesses of the discriminating consciousness. When the thought and inner chatter occasionally subside, the undivided mind/world is clear. These moments of clarity and wholeness are our insights into spirituallity.

The various outer trappings of spirituallity—religion, doctrine, myth, scripture, metaphysics, etc.—are just attempts by the discriminating consciousness to get a conceptual handle on what the holistic consciousness is doing. We have some degree of awareness that reality can’t be so neatly divided into a little self amidst a universe of discrete things, because we intuit this other, holistic perspective. On some level, we know that that both of these ways of seeing have to be accounted for. So the discriminatory consciousness devises narratives to account for those otherwise inexplicable intuitions of unity. God, and everything people claim to know about God, is just such a narrative.

@Harp Interesting… and GA! There are some people I just want to take a shower after encountering, but after reading one of your answers, I feel fresh and purified. All my best to you.

Spirituality means embarking on a lifelong journey of learning and searching for a purpose and a deeper meaning of our cosmos and our own life, while acknowledging that some sources of knowledge are beyond science and scientific method.

Religions are not a prerequisite for spirituality – For example there’s spiritual atheism as well

I agree with @Harp.

Yesterday I went to a department store with my father and my sister. I drove.

And then I parked, and then I walked through the store. I was looking for a canvas drop cloth, and I made my way the section where I thought they would be.

My family members were still in the store when I walked out. It was raining. I happened to look up at the sky, and watched the clouds for a while. They were dark and huge and moving very quickly.

Instead of making a run to the car to keep out of the rain, I walked slowly to an abandoned rail line that runs next to the store that I had never looked at before. I looked at the people walking in and out of the store, and at the cars and the highway and the garbage littered on the side of it. There was something spiritual about it.

When I’m driving I’m in ‘driving mode.’ I pay attention only to what I need to in order to get where I’m going without crashing into someone else. When I’m in a store looking for something, I have a one-track mind. I’m couldn’t tell you what items were right next to the canvas drop cloths, or on the shelf above or below them. I didn’t notice.

I think of spirituality as the turning off of the part of the brain that filters out information that is unnecessary to survival. The times when I feel most spiritual are when I stop looking through the normal tunnel vision of daily life, and instead stop and take in everything around me unfiltered. Spirituality is the mode of thinking that deals with the immediate, awe inspiring right now that you feel whenever you break out of the tedium of everyday routine.

I don’t apply the term spiritual to myself but a lot of what others will define it as applies to me…does that make sense? a lot of people would label me as an atheist, as well but some days I don’t feel completely comfortable with that label either…I am pissed off at organized religions a lot and I think religion as it stands is completely unnecessary in my life, but I allow for it in others lives…in that it seems to be necessary to others during hard times and the such, so fine…

right back to the discussion…I really don’t understand usually what people mean by “I’m not religious but don’t worry, I’m spiritual” and generally I ask them to clarify for me what they mean…as it is different for everyone

The mindful endeavor to practice spiritual principles.