Spirituality is a term that’s being thrown around more than most words in modern society. While at face value it may seem like this is a good thing (After all isn’t it good to pursue a spiritual journey?), we run into a concern where we lose sight of what people are referring to when they talk about spirituality. This is because most people don’t really know what spirutuality is, and it gets muddied up by dogmatism and emotion, despite the latter being a necessary component of spirituality.

How can there be so many definitions of spirituality? This is largely because the spiritual experience is predominantly anecdotal, and so subject to the individual’s experience which is predicated on their perception of reality, which is further predicated on the past experiences they’ve had. With so many factors, it can be very difficult to get a grasp on what spirituality actually is. This is a very big problem because it can lead us to believe that all we need to do is be “spiritually in tune”—whatever that means—when there’s physical and mental work to be done.

However there are a few comminalities between people who undergo spiritual experiences that I think allows us to realize that spirituality isn’t purely anecdotal metaphysically. There are multiple components to its identity. How can an entire religious congregation feel “spiritually connected” to something? How can masses of people feel in tune with one another, gaining a deep sense of compassion for all things? One may cry out placebo; however I find this outcry to be intellectually lazy. Consider for a moment the power of the human mind to improve the body through power of belief. Knowing the mind’s strength over the body in this aspect, as well as its ability to elicit physical change in the body without movement should give us pause before we write off spiritual experience as something of lesser value that we can learn nothing from.

In my pursuit of understanding spirituality, I wanted to make sure I was extremely careful in my reasoning. As a student of philosophy, I wanted to make sure that the deductions I made were realistic, rational, had a level of scientific backing, and related the commonalities found between each person who said they had a genuine spiritual experience.

Spirituality Defined

I define Spirituality as: The intuitive connection we experience on both a physical & emotive level upon fully surrendering our mental identity to a purpose greater than ourselves and our own self-interest.

Intuitive is synonymous with arising from the internal, and our mental identity you can think of as the sum of our beliefs, values, desires, and preferences.

Depending on your beliefs, you may think this either short sighted, or too much of a stretch. I would like to challenge both, however.

To those who would say my definition doesn’t cover the radically diverse sensations we experience in spiritual states, I challenge you by bringing up that our experience is metaphysical in the context of duality. We experience a physical and emotional change at a level that is significantly stronger than we typically experience on our day to day. And even if we undergo spiritual experiences on a daily, the sensation we experience tends to be significantly more intense because we are in sync with what it is we’re connected to.

To those who would say my definition is not conducive to rigourous reasoning and is unrealistic, I would argue that the emotional and physical changes we experience are, in fact, supported scientifically, as there have been studies where individuals had their emotional regulation and white-matter composition of their brains measured. In both of these studies, meditation was the primary vehicle for emotional regulation, which is what is required prior to a full spiritual experience, as described by my definition above.

Spirituality Demystified?

Now that we have a definition we can refer to, does this eliminate the mystery of spirituality? Of course not, the subjective experiences we have when we’re in spiritual states remain mysterious, and no less valuable.

This definition can also expose a lot of posers who claim to be spiritual yet in moments they claim to be spiritual have egos higher than the stars themselves.

Hopefully now I have given a definition of spirituality that resonates with you. This is what what I refer to when I discuss anything regarding spirituality. In my next post, I will discuss the possibility of being spiritually connected to multiple things which exist in ordinary reality and non-ordinary reality.

How do you define spirituality? Do you agree with my definition? Let me know.

Much love.