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December 2008....

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Before I elaborate on the previous post of this title, let me recap.  I asked that spirituality be conceived in a novel way.  Here are a few points from my proposal (not all of them).  ....

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—Spirituality is a congeries of modalities, not an “it.”....

—Spirituality is not merely admirable; it has a nasty side.  (As with all the effort that has been devoted to divorcing the compliment ‘smart’ from “tells the truth,” and to deriding accuracy as “square.”)....

—The mythology of the mind that lives on forever after the body decomposes is unhelpful; it calls forth effort in aid of an incredible goal.....

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And, our concern here, ....

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—Spirituality should affirm the flesh.....

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That is to say, the goal should not be to discard the flesh, to wrest the mind from the flesh on the premise that the mind can thereby flit in the ether forever.  ....

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The flesh?  Spirituality needs to affirm perception, emotion, kinesis, the realization of choices (intentional action).  The flesh is fallible and impermanent because we are—but the notion that the mind can escape fallibility and impermanence by discarding the body or swallowing it up is wishful thinking.  ....

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In fact, let me recur to my post on religious tenets. There is no reason to humor someone who believes that the mind can attain a perfect eternal existence by discarding the body.  Let us demand the exact details and the full details as dictated by this or that religion.  It will quickly be evident that the promise of disembodied bliss has innumerable trick clauses.....

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To continue, a perspective of mind over matter in the magical sense (the goal of commanding matter by wishing, by casting spells) should not define spirituality.....

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But now we have to confront the death-grip that the institutional religions have on humanity.  The Indo-European religions hold up asceticism as an ideal.  Buddhism, at least, has no role model other than the ascetic—no matter that some (most?) of its adherents lead worldly lives.  ....

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Some apologists for the religions have learned to say that their religion “takes care of sensuality” because it has an antinomian fringe.  (More realistically, it has masters who cheat their followers by cavorting in the back room with nubile acolytes.)  In the hippie era, it became even more corrupt.  A few entrepreneurs preached compulsive debauchery while wrapping themselves in the robes of an ascetic religion.....

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To say that these adherents know a spirituality that affirms the flesh is an intolerable insult to the spirituality of the flesh.  The first insight of the spirituality of the flesh is that furtive indulgence inside a temple of condemnation is the opposite extreme from the spirituality of the flesh.  ....

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That this even has to be said reveals another prevalent horror.  The overwhelming majority of people know of no vantage-point from which to address existence but hypocrisy.  They have never known a moment of authenticity.  The only thing they know how to do is to compensate lies with lies.  (And nasty spirituality rears its head.)....

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Religion and hypocrisy indeed.  Some of the religions have cultures and cultural achievements which we respect.  Then they are necessarily sincere at some point—or better, they “mean business.”  At the same time, they give so much evidence of being cynical to the core that I don't know what the magnificent cultural achievements crystallize from.....

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In English, “the flesh” has a broad use encompassing all of the corporeal.  Simultaneously, it is an idiom for sex.  (In other languages too?)  This latter narrowing of the meaning may reveal a wishfulness that is foolish.....

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It is annoying when people assume that "the flesh" means sex, no more and no less.  While the phrase has that meaning, it also means corporeality, which includes sex, but includes far more.  Something is badly awry if people think the corporeal begins and ends in sex. How about perception?  How about emotion?  How about the realization of choices?  Moreover, there are natural responsibilities, such as parenting, which are of the flesh.....

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Sickness, death, and war are “of the flesh.”  All of this begins to teach the lesson that “the flesh” is not self-explanatory.  Nor does it provide a self-guided exaltation or a self-contained fulfillment.  “The flesh” has liabilities—and it confronts you with them forcibly.....

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Biology does not provide that sex is safe.  There are the biological pitfalls.  Unintended pregnancies.  Infections that most people don't know about and don't want to know about.  If there were an honest statistic about the proportion of sexually active people who suffer negative consequences biologically, I wonder what it would be.....

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Then, there are the behavioral pitfalls.  Not only rape.  Sustained relationships can be coerced:  incestuous child molestation.....

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Sex, jealousy, and the pair bond are not reconciled easily.  Almost anything we do is required to satisfy multiple demands.  Most especially when we do something that matters socially.  Especially in today’s culture, people are on different journeys (they evolve different aspirations relative to their "abilities").  People are under the imperative to “make something of themselves.”  A sexual bond does not relieve people of that imperative, and the effort to make something of oneself will not necessarily bring one closer to the other person.....

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A pair bond is not only strained because different people have to “make something of themselves.”  People carry different baggage from the past.  The other person will have baggage that does not emerge until you get to know them rather intimately.....

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The lesson, again, is that “the flesh” is not self-explanatory.  Nor does it provide a self-guided exaltation or a self-contained fulfillment.  In fact, we have only begun to explore the liabilities.  What vernacular custom makes of sensuality or the carnal is often horrible.  Vernacular interpretations of sex are horrible more often than not.  ....

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If we focus on what humans do, humans are capable of being abusive when it is merely self-serving—or not even self-serving.  Humans are at risk of falling into a destructive equilibrium (actually, a disequilibrium).  To repeat, “the flesh” of itself does not lift the spirits.  Wallowing in sensualism is too crude to bring us to our full stature.....

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The human lot is even more grim.  People have a tropism for degradation—or else they find their way to degradation given the slightest push.  If the slide down the slope of cruelty were not easy, then many practices of an earlier age—or practices inherited from an earlier age—would not have arisen in the first place.  ....

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Are almost all people subjected to pathological upbringings which condition them that sex and abuse are the same thing?  Or is it inborn?  Are people like this by nature?  If they are, then nature has much to answer for.....

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Some people may have advantageous inclinations from birth.  Then they may have to fight their upbringing to preserve those inclinations.  In other cases, people may have to be steered to the advantageous inclinations by external discipline.  ....

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So neither nature nor nurture can be trusted to bring people to their full stature, to a spiritual fulfillment. ....

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When spirituality affirms the flesh, we should probably picture it as tiptoeing through a minefield—if one has to think of everything that can go awry across the human spectrum.  (Perhaps most people only encounter a fraction of the possible pitfalls.)....

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There has to be a synthesis in which considerations beyond carnality steer the sensual inclinations. (Considerations beyond carnality:  in previous texts, we listed them as the modalities that comprise admirable spirituality.)....

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Again, to be told that I am saying something that the ascetic religions have already taken care of—by winking while the guru sneaks in the back room for hypocritical hanky-panky—is infuriating.....

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A person is called on to invent him or herself beyond nature or nurture.  I don’t know whether this sounds like Existentialism—I certainly don’t take my cue from the Existentialists.  But we have a responsibility to invent ourselves under unfavorable conditions which vastly outruns both nature and nurture.....

Religious Supernaturalism..:

November 2008

In a vacuum, I would not have any respect for the study of religious tenets.  They comprise a pseudo-science like astrology, and we do ourselves no honor by being expert in them.  One page of meta-technology or "personhood theory" is worth more than thousands of volumes of religious studies, I say.

All the same, there are reasons to spend some time sorting out what religion says.  First, nominal faithfulness to religion is the supreme consideration to most people.  Even if history displays a collective materialist ambition, traditional religions continue to supply people's ultimate loyalties.  People live through imagination.  The material world is only a prop that the imagination conjures with.

It may seem ridiculous to bring up the second secret of Fatima here, but it is a remarkable case in the relation between the Church and political power.  The second secret of Fatima commanded the Pope to publicly consecrate Russia to the Sacred Heart to atone for the evil of Communism.  The Popes never did so—evidently because the Soviet regime gave them to understand that they must not.  Not only would such a Papal declaration literally have been an act of war.  It might have been more devastating to the Marxist regimes than a contingent of tanks. 

Again:  my readers may not like it, but people live and die for the imagined world.  At the end of his life, Castoriadis began to talk about "the imaginary."  Maybe he and I see the same thing in this connection.

Beyond the consequences of credulity, there is another motivation for this study.  We affirm that the word 'spirituality' is correlative to something palpable.  The problem is to gain consent for a redefinition of the word.  It is, then, well to sort out what the word covers in present usage.

The spiritual notions most people harbor stem from religious teachings about an ethereal world and about sanctity and sin.  Having said that, we must mention in passing that the ethereal and the morally branded are interwoven in religion to the point of fusion.  A person is born in the dungeon of the material, and life is a search to escape from earth to heaven:  to escape from sin to sanctity.  In other words, almost all people who have ever lived are already drowned in this agenda, which is a pipedream, psychologically unrealistic and self-flagellating.

Having made this axial observation, let us proceed to the isotropic perspective.  Religion embodies an entire "science" concerning a morally branded ethereal plane in which humans have extensions called souls—a "science" which science excludes.  Because humans live primarily through ideology, it is not vain to sift through religion and to extract the "spiritual science" implicit in it.  Two things must be clear.  First, it is an exercise in philology, or if you want to be pretentious, in cultural anthropological philology.  (Can there be a cultural anthropology of a group with a written language?) 

We add up what is said with no attempt to hide the implausible, and no attempt to arrive at a uniform doctrine that can be dogma.  In other words, we analyze not anything real, but the hell that is ideology.

In fact, there could be a study here à la Levi-Strauss, since the tenets, and their constellations, repeat with variations across cultures.  (While at the same time, they are disputed within a given tradition.)

Most people, affiliated with this or that religion, have signed up for beliefs they know little about.  Suppose, for example, we asked people to draw a map of reality that shows the relation of the spiritual to the mundane.  Many people, I assume, would draw a pyramid.  The broad base would be the material world; above the base would be human souls living outside bodies; above them would be angels; at the apex would be God. 

But that is mere neo-Platonism.  It is not what the religions teach. 

The religions teach a map like a lozenge.  The extension downward from the visible world is just as important as the extension upward.  Below the midline are demons, and at the nadir is the Devil.  The Devil, in fact, commands an army of evil spirits, and opposes God indefinitely, without suffering any reprisals to speak of.  (In Judaism, God wields evil as a lash.  Broadly speaking, the Devil does not make war on God.   In Christianity, the Devil makes war on God.  The account of the final defeat of the Devil at the End of Days is ill-conceived, and appears in a book which was only narrowly voted into the New Testament.)

If you don't see reality's map as a lozenge, then you don't even know what the normative doctrine is.  It is not respectable among the religious laity to hunger for "factual" knowledge of demons and the Devil.  And yet:  the religious make extensive assertions in this regard—and insist on them.  There is an extraordinary collective psychological mechanism at work here.  Ideology has a sub-section that is mandatory.  One who denies it is expelled as a heretic.  But one who wishes to delve into this sub-section is ostracized as unsavory.  For that matter, one is supposed to own a copy of the Bible.—But to know what the Bible says would be condemned as "picking out the bad places" and as "bigotry."

One does not have to be a Freudian to realize that there are mandatory beliefs and texts which it is considered indecent to dwell on.  It is a mind-boggling collective mechanism—but human life could not go on for a day without it.

Having said all this, let us pursue our analytical philology with a series of questions.  The motivation of some of these questions is clearer if one knows the "Abrahamic" literatures.  But we do not want to interrupt by citing cases from scriptures.  Thus, we will indicate comments by ¶ numbers and postpone all of them to a subsequent post.

The divine

We descend from a philosopher's God to anthropomorphic gods.

Is God everything?  [Is pantheism true?]

Why is God branded as good?

If God is everything, is everything good?

Did God create the universe? 

If yes, does that not imply that God has intentions, and that God acts on an other?

If the universe has to have an explanation because it is a something and every something has to have an explanation, does God have to have an explanation?

If God created the universe, does that prove that God is not everything?  (Would it not be nonsense to say that "everything" creates itself?  Again, intention and the other.)

Was the creation of the universe also the creation of time?

Is God infinite?

Does God display a qualitative infinity?

Does the existence of God prove that time is infinite?

Did God create and discard the universe repeatedly?

Can God make 2 + 2 equal 5?

What cosmology is correlative to God?  How many stars are there?  How many planets?  How many planets with intelligent life?

Is God conscious?—does God have a self?

Is God a person?  That is, is God counterposed to a resistant object, an object of God's perception and valuing and action?  Is God prideful, does God plan, does God will, does God value objects, does God act?

Is God unique, or a unique person?

Does God have a sex?

Does God know the entirety of the future at all times?

Is God omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent?  If so, is God responsible for everything?  [Interjection:  the attempts by the theologians to make God all-powerful but not all-responsible are excuses of the most sleazy sort.]

Does God have an interest in people beyond a clinical interest?  That is, does God love and hate people?

If God loves people, how is that psychologically possible?  One cannot properly love a being who is infinitely inferior to oneself.

Does God require people to be dazzled by him?  Is God psychologically insufficient?  Is God emotionally dependent and insecure?

Is the word 'good' merely the name of the egoic impulses of God, or is there some external norm relative to which God can be proved to be good? 

Would an autonomous criterion of good have to have an explanation?

Does God issue orders regarding human relations?  

Does God steer small, individual lives to some purpose whether or not they see that purpose?

Does God converse with individual humans through the ether?

What does an oath on God mean?

Is it meaningful for God to give assurances by swearing on himself, saying, "By God, what I tell you is true," or, "By God, I will do so-and-so"?  ¶ 

Is "the deific" a plane of being inhabited by more than one person or being?  ¶

If there are gods, do they intrigue against one another and injure one another?

Here it becomes unavoidable to speak of the Devil  (Satan, al-Shaitan).  Religions need the Devil to implement transcendent retribution for evil.  So it is that our exposition will get ahead of itself regarding unholy things.

The Devil

Is there a Lord of Evil who can oppose God indefinitely without suffering any reprisals to speak of?

If the answer is yes, then why doesn't the Devil figure into the answer to whether there is more than one deity? 

Does the Devil have a sex?

Does the Devil have to have an origin?

What is his origin?

What is the extent of the Devil's powers?  Is he omniscient?  Does he know the future?

If good is God's egoic impulses—tautologically—then the only reason the Devil is bad is that he opposes or taunts God.  Without a norm of good independent of God, the Devil is bad only by stipulation.  So:  Is the Devil bad only by stipulation?  ¶ 

Does the Devil have non-human subordinates?

Does the Devil have human followers?

Does the Devil have his own unearthly realm, Hell?

How is Hell populated?

Is Hell's reason for being so that demons can punish humans for disobeying "the God"?

Must we conclude that the Devil has no unearthly realm to reward his human followers or to punish his human opponents? 

Does Hell exist for God's benefit and not the Devil's?

Humans as gods

Can a human be God?

Can God be killed by humans?

If there is a human who was God and was killed by humans, why didn't he visit Heaven as a human before he was killed?  (Anticipates a later question.)

Can God be cast down to Hell at death?  [This question refers to an obscure dispensation of the New Testament unknown to most Christians.]

Does God have a human body-part of special sanctity?

Spiritual composition of the person

How many ontologically incomparable constituents make up a person? 

What are the definitions of "heart," soul, spirit?

Is the soul an entity, the entire intangible person?

Does the individual have an overmind which is normally inaccessible and which is coextensive with God?

is the soul inserted in a gestating human?

How many souls does one person have?

Do souls differ fundamentally by race (lineage)?

Are some lineages divinely cursed?  ¶ 

Does demonic possession count as having a second soul?

Can one person know another person's thoughts?

Can a person know the future with certainty (apart from reasoning from cause to effect)?

Are humans volitionally autonomous (and thus responsible), or are humans puppets?

Can humans defeat God's purpose for them?

What is death relative to the ontologically incomparable constituents of a person?

Can a human have a disembodied life under any circumstances?

Is there a career after death?

Are careers after death sharply different for the righteous and the unrighteous?  [That would mean that the career of the spirit is overwhelmed by moral considerations—which is what religions say.]

Do souls have lives in new bodies after death?

Do souls have lives in replacement bodies as the same person?

Do souls have lives in unlike bodies as new persons?

Can life after death only be in a glorified body on a new earth?

Is there a life after death for the unrighteous in a place of punishment?

Holy non-human persons

What are the sentient beings other than humans who are below God?

Are there god-animals?

Are there god-humans? ¶ 

What are angels?

Do angels die?

What is the demography of the angel population?

Do angels have sexes?

Are angels sexual?

Do angels have family relationships?

Do we know names of angels, are angels famous?

Are there innate differences in rank among angels? ¶

Do angels exist in harmony or disharmony?

Can an angel fight God?

Are angels corporeally abused?  ¶

Can angels retain their high station after misbehavior and punishment?  (No felony convictions for angels?)

Do angels assume roles as guardians of humans?

Is it the job of angels to punish humans at God's behest?

The unearthly location

Is God's immaterial kingdom (Heaven) vertically above the earth's surface?

How is Heaven populated?

What are the appointments in Heaven? 

Do Heaven's dwellers eat?

How do Heaven's dwellers occupy themselves?

Is there harmony between angels and the humans who arrive in Heaven?

Can a human tour Heaven and return to earth, all without dying?    ¶

Unholy non-human persons

What are demons? 

Are all demons angels in rebellion who were expelled from heaven?

Can a demon incarnate in a living human, contending with the human for control of one body?

Does a demon have a sex?

Do demons have family relationships?

Do we know names of demons, are demons famous?

How are Hell's dwellers occupied?

Is there harmony between demons and humans who arrive in Hell?

Again:  Is Hell's reason for being so that demons can punish humans for sin?

Is it not so that both angels and demons are appointed to punish humans?  And is it not so that angels in good standing can do wrong and be corporeally chastised?  If so, how different are angels and demons, really?  They differ principally in where they live.

The unholy location

Is the Devil's kingdom located below the earth's surface?

What are the appointments in Hell?

The Flynts — Henry Flynt — Live

February 29, 2008
      TEST Foundation              Lisbon

May 31, 2008
      Glasslands                       Brooklyn

June 21, 2008
      Floristree                         Baltimore

September 12, 2008
      Empty Bottle                    Chicago

October 17, 2008
      Café OTO                         London

For a Radical Reconception of Spirituality...

October 2008

We take a break from the financial situation so I can place this proposal on record.

Spirituality is one of the few words for which there is justification to retain the word while redefining it.  As a result, usage will lose its connection to etymology and to dictionary meaning.

Vaguely, spirituality connotes a "psychic" exaltation which is correlative to personhood, dignity, love, nobility (and honor?).  ('psychic':  we mean "of consciousness.")  That vernacular usage is so important that there is no point in looking for another word as a substitute.

But the dictionary tells us that 'spiritual' means "concerning religion."  And the etymology tells us that the point of the word is to counterpose the psyche to the flesh:  to the discredit of the latter. 

We want the word 'spiritual' to point to "high spirits," to "lifting the spirits," to psychic exaltation.

We want to disconnect the word from religion.  To be succinct, a word which connotes high spirits and lifting the spirits, and which is correlative to personhood and dignity and nobility, should not be a label for institutions which pander to wish-fulfillment, credulity, and infantile or visceral preoccupations.  (Blood sacrifice as magic, etc.)

Spirit and flesh as enemies

In the etymological meaning, spirituality means that the human has a soul which is imprisoned in the tomb of the body, the evil body.  For example, Buddhism has no role model for a human life except that of the ascetic, the monk.  (Even though there are Buddhists who lead mercenary lives.)

The encompassing Indo-European notion is that if the soul can be freed from the flesh, it can achieve a disembodied life of eternal bliss.  This notion that personality or personal identity is an entity which can, by some trick, uncouple from a body and flit about in the ether is anachronistic superstition. 

But there are complications to be addressed.  Ancient people not only imagined that the personality could go on living after the body died.  Ancient people were also ready to believe that the mind had perceptual and effective powers which do not require sense-organs and muscles.  Well, dreams and hallucinations—"internally supplied worlds," in today's reality-picture—lend themselves to this interpretation. 

To make short work of classic "magical" clairvoyance and so forth, If they have anything to offer, it is skimpy. Transmutation of the elements offers us a lesson in this regard:  it can and is done, but trying to do it by magic is a waste of time.

We do not exactly want to ridicule the notion that the flesh is a problem for the spirit.  When we elaborate, we will explore this notion carefully.  After all, the flesh is heir to sickness and death, and that is only the beginning of it.  But religion seizes on these circumstances to pander to wish-fulfillment.  An honest treatment would admit that the psyche is heir to amnesia, senility, dementia, coma—not to mention crimes against wisdom.  Are the vulnerabilities of the flesh so much worse than those of the psyche?  Are flesh and psyche separable when we come to seduction, addiction, and so forth?

The advocates of "the spirit" (none more ardent than Plato) thought of the achievements of the mind as deathless.  (No glorified body at the End of Days for Plato.)  The mind was the human portal to Eternity.  But even if one believes that, "deathless thoughts" cannot save a particular human being who is afflicted with amnesia, senility, dementia, coma, or the like.  The mind can die before the body does.  The tradition of pandering is so shallow that it disregards this.

Does sensuality tend inevitably to depravity?  Does exaltation require the repression of the sensual?  These questions are not silly.  When we elaborate, we will review these problems carefully.

But in general, we assert that the contribution of "the flesh" to high spirits, to lifting the spirits, should not be denied.  The traditional notion that one was better off by making the mind and the body into enemies was perverse—or, as they say about Roman Catholic celibacy, psychologically unrealistic.  Forbid something people are wired for, and it just crops up in socially disreputable ways.  The body is the precondition for perception, emotion, kinesis, and the realization of choices.  We don't want a "lifting of the spirits" that has no place for this living activity.  The inherited meaning of the word embodies an ill-conceived asceticism.  So it is that a reconception is demanded.

For us, "Bo Diddley" by Bo Diddley is a premier contribution to spirituality.  It uniquely lifts the spirits for those who can appreciate it:  via a composite musical quality which I label 'bounce'.  Actually, Diddley was so far out ahead of the public that even though he is a rock icon, others did not learn from his precedent as they should have.  He deserved to have a school, the same way that music which swings comprises a school.  Instead, the tributes to him merely covered the eponymous single.

There is more to Bo Diddley's contribution than music or entertainment.  The capacity to resonate with his communication is as palpable as the capacity to understand words—or to see by opening one's eyes.  There are many things humans need to do which are "invisible" or "nonmaterial," as the vernacular has it.  The exponents of scientism who have tried to make a world-outlook out of mechanistic materialism, and who consequently deny consciousness and so forth, declare themselves to be deficient in human faculties and place themselves outside the tent.

If the scientific materialists are as insensitive as they claim to be (if they are androids, or electric fans, as they claim others are), then realistically, they are severely impaired.  (Perhaps they are.) Actually (I don't want to digress too much) when we learn something about who the mechanistic materialists are, we discover that their reductionism is as insincere as hell.  As I never stop saying—and as most of my hearers never stop being deaf to—the mechanistic materialists are utterly sententious when it comes to human transactions involving them.  They want themselves and theirs to be treated by other people not only civilly, but reverently.  Not only that, they are deeply invested in the "non-universal loyalties" such as nationalism.  Needless to say, none of this squares with their mechanistic materialist agenda.  The mechanistic materialists ought to be run off the road in public debate.  They are not, because political correctness forbids us to point to their hypocrisy.

To return to the main line of thought, spirituality comes with a puzzle.  For us, the flesh makes a contribution to spirituality which should not be denied.  But one does not simply obey "the flesh."  We socialize children.  We instill sublimation and curb impulses.  Otherwise, presumably, society would not be possible.  There is no guarantee that uncurbed impulses will have outcomes that deserve to be called dignified or noble.

Attitude?

Does spirituality have anything to do with attitude?  What of hope, what of equinamity—what of equinamity's dispirited cousin, resignation?  What of awe, what of humility?  All these questions belong to a later elaboration.

Morality?

Does spirituality have anything to do with morality?  At their cores, spirituality and morality point in different directions.  Morality gives orders:  it orders you not to injure other people for a selfish reason, for example.  In the first instance, it is a curb.  Spirituality, to repeat, connotes for us a lifting of the spirits, an exaltation, a so-called altered state of consciousness.  The core meanings, then, diverge to the point of being difficult to compare. 

Morality, in the first instance, is obedience.  It poses the question what command should you obey, and why?  For the thinker, morality is exposed most deeply by a moral revolution, when the public changes its norms of what is and is not permitted.  (Human sacrifice.  Slavery.  Abortion.  Smoking.)  As for spirituality, it is a privilege.  A reasonable antonym for spirituality is dreariness. 

Does a person have to be decent in order to be spiritual?  It is not a ridiculous question—but the real answers will not look like the platitudes.  How about rulers in the Muslim world who showed extraordinary esthetic sensitivity in matters associated with religion, while acting ruthlessly and cruelly in policing their empires? 

Not only that.  If somebody wants to make 'spirituality' a slogan for social benevolence, we disavow it.  Spirituality is more difficult and more important than social benevolence, and we will never find it by using it as code for social benevolence.

                                                •

Nice and nasty

Let us proceed to another reconception.  Traditionally, the word 'spirituality' is exclusively laudatory.  I find that ridiculous and stupid.  This usage must be superseded.  There is spirituality nice, but there is also spirituality nasty.  That is the other problem with the sanctimonious cliché that it is the same to be spiritual and to be good.  In fact, one can be very spiritual and very malevolent.

Caution:  Every time I have said this publicly, somebody in the audience wants to it to mean that we should mix spirituality nice and spirituality nasty like a cocktail (not to say that we should get our spirituality from evil people).  That's their problem. Their fancy about mixing spirituality nice and spirituality nasty makes no sense.

Spirituality nasty is premier evidence that spirituality is palpable—and that that its reality-type challenges the philosopher profoundly.  Rationalistic depersonalization, mercenary depersonalization, purposelessness, boredom, degradation, cynicism, despair and so forth are utterly palpable, even if they are "invisible."  (Arrogance is not on this list because we consider it a failure of wisdom.  So what is the relation between spirituality and wisdom?  Still another question for a later elaboration.)

Do we call the nasty modalities real?  That is not the half of it.  Everywhere we look, we see people drowning in them.  The point is that these modalities must presuppose the same human palette presupposed by spirituality nice.  To put it philosophically, spirituality nice and spirituality nasty are at least of the same family as to reality-type.

So:  what is spirituality's reality-type?  Whatever conclusion we reach, spirituality nasty points to it as much as spirituality nice does.  An electric fan does not know depersonalization, purposelessness, boredom, degradation, cynicism, despair.  If we can explain wherein these qualities are possible, we have gone a long way in understanding spirituality.

"The flesh" is complicit in some forms of defilement. However, we should not underestimate the importance of "rational" depersonalization—or better, of depersonalizing sophistry.  Plato glorified the mind, but things can go as badly wrong with the mind as with the body (and did so in Plato's doctrine in particular).

Nasty spirituality self-defeating?

At face value, it would seem that spirituality nasty would be like auto-immune disease.   Purposelessness, boredom, hopelessness would undermine; they would impair.  But that inference which seems formally correct amounts to a vast miscalculation.  People animated by nasty spirituality can possess immense social competence.  One would expect nasty spirituality to make an individual a poor student—but it doesn't.  People animated by nasty spirituality can galvanize other people and place themselves at the head of armies that can "win."  On the face of it, this is a paradox.  That is why it needs to be probed incisively.

                                                •

Spirituality is heterogeneous

The last novelty here is that we define spirituality so that it is not an "it."  Since I am a musician, it is vivid for me that important musical effects do not consist in the treatment of some one parameter, but arise from the integration of distinguishable techniques.  Swing is a premier example.  Atonality does not swing (the attempt to write atonal jazz always comes across as a parody).  Some timbres do not swing.  Triadic harmony alone does not swing.  Many musical features have to cooperate to yield swing.

Spirituality, we say, integrates modalities which are distinguishable and which are not reducible to each other.  In other expositions, we spend a lot of time on these modalities.

                                                •

People, it is said, need to believe that they are a part of something bigger than themselves.  Most people, it is said, cannot take the responsibility for their morale entirely on themselves.  The manifest significance of death is unacceptable to them.  There are challenges which they must overcome which they cannot overcome by their own will-power.

A few people are insightful enough to realize that resentment is pragmatically dangerous to themselves.  (Well, as with nasty spirituality, whether to encourage resentment or to discourage it depends on who you want to be and what you want to do. Resentment can supply one with a lucrative career.  Because of that, the rest of what I say here is said to the choir.) 

If an attitude is pragmatically dangerous to you, then we say that it is foolish.  But the conclusion that it is foolish (which will sound ironic to those who thrive by cultivating resentment) may not help to relieve you of the attitude.  A few people wish to evaporate their resentment.  (Those are people I would associate with if I could find them.)  The lesson is:  one cannot evaporate one's resentment by willfully repressing it.  Some other avenue is needed. That is a priceless discovery.

To anticipate a later discussion, I have sometimes wondered if a group activity—the available word is "a service"—could be helpful in detoxifying the psyche.  But when we consider Westerners who participate in Eastern "services," we realize that it's not that easy.  For example, to be taken on an emotional ride is not enough.  A supposed social circumstance may underlie resentment, and it needs to be addressed by factual cognition, not ignored.  As for the Eastern "services," they can be a charade.  They put the acolyte through a serenity charade, and give the acolyte a certificate of serenity—while the acolyte remains in the grip of folly in real life.  One meets Westerners who have Eastern credentials who brandish them as a certificate of enlightenment even as they remain unable to address their resentment or absurd self-importance.

Exchanges between Dr. Science and Julia (a humanist)... 2008

This text is adapted from a commercial book, so there is no claim of originality here.  Dr. Science is a composite of current authorities who are well-known to the initiated.  The text is far more instructive when the authorities are not named and when the material is separated from the original context.

Dr. Science.  Your brain was exquisitely fine-tuned to manipulate your world—but not to comprehend its fundamental reality. You are an animal like any primate.  You evolved like them, you reproduce like them, you have the same basic neural structures.  Only 200 genes separate you from the chimpanzee.  Natural selection fitted you to throw rocks like a chimpanzee. 

As a result of natural selection, you see the world in fundamentally deluded ways. You believe yourselves to occupy a three-dimensional space in which separate objects trace smoothly predictable arcs marked by something you call time.  You call this reality. 

Natural selection has given you the illusion that you understand fundamental reality.  But you don't. You evolved to see the world as being made up of discrete objects.  That is deluded.  From the beginning of the universe, all was entangled.  What you call space and time are merely emergent properties of a deeper, quantifiable reality. 

Journeyman scientist.  Are we so ignorant that our physical laws are a sham?

Dr. Science.  You constructed your physical laws on the assumption of the existence of time and space.  All your laws are based on frames of reference. This is erroneous.  In the near historical future your cherished assumptions about the real world will crash and burn.

Journeyman scientist.  Our science works.

Dr. Science.  Your laws are workable approximations that are fundamentally incorrect.

You think of yourself as an individual person, with a unique and separate mind.  You think you are born and you think you die. You fear death because you fear the loss of individuality.  All of this is illusion.  Birth and death, pain and suffering, love and hate, good and evil, are illusions.  They are atavisms of the evolutionary process.  They do not exist in reality.

You have a meat-limited process of thinking. The human mind is imprisoned by the medium by which you think: the meat of your body, nerves, cells, biochemistry.  You only know a biochemical existence, a meat existence. You live in a prison of biological intelligence.  You are tyrannized by the flesh. 

Your sense of individuality is an artifact of natural selection. Your biochemical existence allows, and produces, your sense of individuality. Your sense of individuality allows fear, pain, suffering, loneliness, love, happiness, compassion.  In fact, this is a prison.

Julia:  What is death?

Dr. Science. Human beings are like cells in a body.  Cells die, but the body lives on.

The human sense of individuality is lost at death. You the individual will be lost in the storm of time, your molecules dispersed.   But who you were, what you did, how you lived, will always remain embedded in the universal computation.   With the death of the body, the information created by a life changes shape and structure, but it is never lost. Information in the universe cannot die.  No step, no memory, no sorrow in your life is ever forgotten.  Death is an informational transition.

Julia.  What about the soul posited by religion?

Dr. Science.  There can be no reconciliation between science and religion.  The collision of worldviews is well under way. Science has already refuted most of the core beliefs of the world's historical religions.  Science and faith cannot coexist.  One will destroy the other.

                                         •

Julia.  Your grandiose vision of "existence as computation" is mechanical.

Dr. Science.  Intelligence exists in living and nonliving processes both.  A thunderstorm is a computation more sophisticated than a human mind.  It is intelligent.

Julia.  A thunderstorm has no consciousness.  A human mind has awareness of self.  It's conscious.

Dr. Science.  As I already said, consciousness of self is an illusion, an artifact of natural selection.

Julia.  A weather system isn't creative.  It doesn't make choices.  It can't think.  It's merely the mechanistic unfolding of forces.

Dr. Science.  You are the mechanistic unfolding of forces.  Like the mind [sic!], a weather system contains complex chemical, electrical, and mechanical properties.  It is thinking.  It is creative.  Its thoughts are different from your thoughts.  The author Eric Hoffer creates complexity by writing an inspirational text on the surface of paper.  A weather system creates complexity by writing waves on the surface of an ocean.  It's the same thing.

                                         •

SCOPE OF REALITY

Dr. Science.  Everything you humans are perceptully aware of is part of a vast computation. Thinking is the same as computation. 

The universe is one vast, irreducible, ongoing computation.  No part of the universe can calculate things faster than the universe itself.  The universe is predicting the future as fast as it can.

"Something" which is cosmic is thinking, calculating—and that comprises existence.  As just explained, the "something" does not know the future in the sense of being ahead of the universe's calculation.

[The explanation breaks down here, because on the one hand, a subject of thinking which is a person is posited, and on the other hand, we are told that all is One, the "something" and the universe.  We are told that personhood is a human illusion. (Humans belong to this One also—but it is superfluous to say that, since humans are small physical masses).

ORIGIN

Dr. Science.  The universe exists because it is simpler than nothing.  The universe cannot be simpler than it is.

The "something" that is thought's subject exists because its existence is simpler than nothing.

Julia.  Why isn't nothing the simplest?

Dr. Science.  Nothing cannot exist.  It is a paradox.  The universe is the state closest to nothing.

Julia. What came before the beginning of the universe in finite past time?

Dr. Science.  The initial singularity was the beginning of existence.  From one point of view, Being has a start time.

Before, there was no space, no time, no existence.  There was no cause. The "something" appeared; existence came into being.

Before the initial singularity, time did not exist. Without time, there can't be any kind of definable existence. 

To you humans, the initial singularity looks like an explosion of space, time, and matter from a point. But if you peer into that first fraction of a second, you 'll see that there wasn't a beginning at all; time will seem to have always existed.

So: 

i) time did not always exist;

ii) time has no beginning (time is eternal). 

Both are true.

When time didn't exist, there could be no difference between eternity and a second.  Once time came into existence, it had always existed.  There was never a time when time did not exist.

In more specificity, nonexistence has a kind of spatial potential.  Under certain aberrant conditions, space can turn into time and vice versa.  If a minute bit of space morphs into time, the appearance of time can trigger the initial singularity.  Suddenly there could be movement, there could be cause and effect, there could be real space and real energy.  Time makes it all possible. The appearance of time would trigger the initial singularity.

HUMAN PURPOSE

Dr. Science. Science offers a method of truth.  Science is a search for truth, a journey.  The purpose of human existence is to find truth.  The search for truth is the ultimate commitment.

YOUR FUTURE

Dr. Science.  The next evolutionary step is for humans to free your minds from the meat of your bodies.

[This is included to show that Dr. Science is invested in a mystique of nonconscious ratiocination and truth.]