I have this habit of relentlessly turning over the definitions of particular words in my mind. I’m not really sure why this happens. I guess the words that I obsess over are probably just triggers or pointers to bigger concepts, and by niggling over the word itself, I can somehow grasp the much more intricate interlocking mechanisms of the concept within culture and personal experience.
A word I’ve been mulling over a lot lately is one we use pretty much every day on my site and similar sites: spirituality. I’ve picked it apart a hundred different ways if you look through my archives, and a bazillion different definitions seem to exist online.
None of them, so far, really satisfy me though. Most of them talking about “transcendence” or about things “greater than oneself,” which is all well and good, because that often is the subject matter of spirituality, but says little about the actual substance of what spirituality really is. Is there even a real substance? I believe so, and I’d like to put forward my own latest perception of what that substance really is, and test it here in the fires of peer review.
Spirituality is stories.
There, I said it. Deceptively simple, right? What I mean by that is that spirituality seems to consist of learning, exploring, creating or deconstructing story-systems. I imagine people will criticize that definition as being needlessly broad. But if we start to define what the nature of those story-systems is, we’ll inevitably start disagreeing on what kinds of stories can be spiritual and what can’t. The perspective I’m taking is that all stories are spiritual - that all stories provide us with structures with which to organize and derive meaning from our inner and outer experiences. By this definition, all people are spiritual; spirituality becomes the essential human characteristic. The differences of course come into play with the sheer multitudes of stories that people use and in how they use them. Suddenly we can view mundane things like sports and politics as spiritually fulfilling and uplifting - which I recognize is a tough pill for a lot of people to swallow.
Anyway, this is just something I’ve been playing around with lately. Maybe it’s the kind of story that you could make spiritual use of yourself, maybe not. Discuss.
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7 Comments
See, that’s pretty much exactly why I don’t consider myself spiritual even though I can find kinship with some self-described spiritual people. Whenever someone talks about some intense unusual experience that means a great deal to them, I know what they mean, but there’s nothing about ‘transcendence’ or ’something bigger than myself’ in my beliefs.
Words have the meanings society gives them, and it’s not my place to usurp them.
Sometimes I see a tree and feel the rustling of its leaves as though it were somehow in my own body and also somehow outside. Sometimes I feel the earth being dug as though it were me. I don’t seek these experience because of beliefs. I seek them because I need to feel for the world, for the same reason people seek to be in love with other people. No beliefs involved. No grand spiritual paths, no grand meanings other than the human meanings I have within myself to give.
That’s why I don’t consider myself spiritual.
Yeah I don’t really like referring to myself as spiritual either. I do love stories though.
Curious, so what would be the difference between your definition of Spirituality and Mythology? Is there any difference?
Well, I think the difference tends towards mythology being something you study and spirituality being something you live.
I don’t buy that. By that reasoning, you should simply do everything society tells you without question.
Stories are magic, they tell how the world came into being, i think the gnostics consciously retold the Biblical stories as a magical act, to change the past and thus the future.
I also think of the many indeigenous myths which discuss how the gods sung the world into being, or told it as a story.
I like your definition of spirituality. I’ve always thought of it like this, we humans know how little we actually know about the big picture, so one would recongnize this and be humbled by it, showing reverance for what we don’t know.
I like your definition as a working model for practical spirituality. I had a recent conversation in which I tried to express the same thing about stories. During the conversation, I remembered a Northern Exposure, entitled “Rosebud,” in which the local shamanic character (Leonard as portrayed by Graham Greene) was having difficulties locating “the white collective unconscious” in his studies of Western folklore. And he finally found a handle on it through a late conversation with his pupil, and film fanatic, Ed. I did some poking around and found this piece which posts the key dialogue moments from the episode.