Forgive me for retracing my steps here, because I can anticipate a thousand toes available to be stepped on and I’ve often restrained myself when it comes to writing about spirituality because I’ve got previous, and you might think I’m trying to slip a bit of surreptitious religion into a post. I’m not. Mainly because I’ve moved on and I’d like to move an insight forward a bit. It always seemed to me that spirituality is akin to a flowing stream and if it stops flowing it becomes stagnant and sometimes even poisonous. Trust me, when you’ve seen how poisonous a religious bureaucracy can be when it refuses to countenance change, you’ll want to cross the road and walk on by. I can’t claim any particular philosophical expertise except for discovering that I could never fit what I might once have been called a religious experience into a religious framework. However hard I tried I found myself hacking some really important components off in order to force it to fit.
Curiously enough this feeling came to a moment of crisis as I stood next to the River Wye under a bridge in Hay one day when it was in full flood and huge branches were being swept downstream past me. What overwhelmed me that day and still moves me as I remember it was the sheer relentlessness and awe inspiring power of the flow. The river passed the spot where I was standing, oblivious to my presence, and onwards to the sea. Completely unexpectedly I “knew” that I no longer believed in any kind of supernatural extraterrestrial being. It wasn’t necessary; it added nothing to understanding; all it achieved was to force submission to the censor of difficult thoughts like an anti-heresy shrink wrap constricting the circulation. That odd experience opened the doors of a cage and a thousand WTF moments flew back out into the grey, stormy sky into the world of the ten thousand things.
But this doesn’t mean at all that the roots I had grown down into all those old religious texts had to be abandoned. I could still (loosely) meditate on them because they’d all been written by other beings just like me out of numerous experiences just like mine. But the writings could be validated perfectly well by experience, ordinary human experience, and claiming that they’ve been signed off in some mysterious way added nothing to them. Years before the bridge moment I’d realised that religion doesn’t, can’t, change the facts – the everyday phenomena that sometimes – like a bush – could burst into flames. Spirituality can’t change the facts; it can only change the way that we see and relate to them. Spirituality – to put it in a simple phrase – is a perspective changing phenomenon.
Of course I’m by no means the only person to travel this path: there are many others better qualified than me to elucidate the gritty detail and join the dots. But the transformation of my perspective came when I realized that nature isn’t about anything; not an explanatory metaphor or visual aid for the theologians or a demonstration of supernatural power; it simply is! There’s no destination; no culmination; no rapture; no sheep or goats; no judgement and no heaven or hell; no reward and no punishment.
In short, non-theistic spirituality is about experiencing the sacredness of reality as it is, grounded in human experience and the observable universe.
“a commitment to investigating the nature of one’s own mind, and experiencing states of consciousness that are transformative, without accepting unfounded claims about the nature of reality.”
Sam Harris
Here’s a cobbled together list from a Gemini AI search on a non-theistic “Green Spirituality which spells out a number of human attributes and dispositions that don’t need any theological scaffolding to hold them up. States we can all experience without validation from an invisible God. I find this list a bit abstract but it means well as long as we don’t have to take it too seriously. For me the truest joys are in the awkward and chameleon everyday when a bush suddenly seems to burn without being consumed or a blackbird seems to be singing just to me or when the moon rises over the sea on the Lleyn peninsula. Here’s the faintly academic list:
- Awe and Cosmic Connection:
- Mindfulness and Presence:
- Ethical Interconnectedness:
- Meaning-Making:
- Transcendence:
“In short, non-theistic spirituality is about experiencing the sacredness of reality as it is, grounded in human experience and the observable universe.” In moments of flow, of ecstasy, of vision; but also in the more mundane moments on the allotment; out foraging for blackberries and as the unexpected beneficiary of a glorious smile from a stranger. No dressing up required but we could use more storytellers, artists, poets, troupes of actors and dancers and more time to slow down and take it all in.
