Abstract
This chapter addresses the crucial notions used, such as
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experience
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spirituality
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spiritual experience
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religious experience
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religion
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religiosity
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faith
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doctrine and dogma
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God
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spiritual practice
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meditation, contemplation and prayer
As a foundational chapter, it tries to also integrate and cross-link these notions to other understandings.
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Notes
- 1.
If the emotion becomes too stressful, the memory trace is weakened, which seems to be a protecting mechanism, protecting us from traumatic experience; See Het et al. 2005.
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The German psychologist Julius Kuhl has collated a lot of findings and proven experimentally that there are two complementary systems in the brain that generate representations of our inner and outer environment and that can become conscious. One is explicit and propositional, i.e. is represented in sentence-like structures, and it is analytical. The other is rather widely distributed, and connects many different episodes of past memories to a felt and emotional sense of what it is to be “me”. This is not necessarily explicit and ordered in logical-analytical or propositional structures, but rather visual-emotional or even visceral. The anatomical substrates are not completely clarified as yet, but in a broad approximation one can say that the self-system that operates more in a holistical-emotional way is correlated with right-hemispheric activity, and the analytical-propositional system is correlated with left-hemispheric activity (always in right handers; for left handers things are different). (Kuhl 1996; Baumann and Kuhl 2002). But there are also other developments that point into that direction (Anderson et al. 2004; Gray 1991; Rydell et al. 2006). A very interesting and competent overview of this research can be found in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (McGilchrist 2009).
- 3.
Johannes Duns Scotus, Opera Omnia; Editio Nova Juxta Editionem Waddingi Xii Tomos Continentem a Patribus Fransicanis De Observantia Accurate Recognita; Reprint of the Original Edition, ed. Lucas Wadding (Westmead; origin. Paris: Gregg International; orig. Vivés, 1969; orig. 1891). Vol 9, In librum primum Sententiarum, Dist. IIIa, Quaestio IV.9, p. 176: “De secundis (a) cognoscibilibus, scilicet de cognitis per experientiam, dico, quod licet experientia non habeatur de omnibus singularibus, sed de pluribus, nec quod semper, sed quod pluries, tamen expertus infallibiliter novit quod ita est,… – Regarding what we can know in the second sense, i.e. what we can know through experience, I say that, even though we cannot have experience about all singular things, but only about many, and also not always, but only most of the time, so it is still true that who has made an experience has flawless knowledge, i.e. he knows that something is so…” To my knowledge this is a singular quote in the history of ideas after Aristotle, who is the exemplar. Duns Scotus produces, in this quaestio (translated “question”; this was the medieval form of a formal disputation in which arguments and counter-arguments were weighed and then a novel and often creative solutions produced), a veritable sketch of a phenomenological science. I am quite sure that Franz Brentano knew this text and started from there with his own program of a psychology based on experience. But I have not had time to verify this from biographical information. Be this as it may: This is the historical source for the phenomenological movement in Europe.
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Psychoanalytic object theorists, such as Kernberg or Kohut, following Bowlby and others have pointed out how important early attachment experiences and later mirroring of self-activities are for children to build up stable structures of self that are again important for mental health. It is important to understand that any spiritual practice presupposes such functioning self-structures. See Kernberg 1985; Kohut 1977.
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as it does in Switzerland, where I was at the time of writing, or in some other countries in Europe.
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Robert Forman has challenged this relativist argument powerfully by pointing out that there are phenomenological constants of spiritual experiences across ages and cultures. Such an experience is, however, pre-verbal. He calls it “pure conscious event”. I have not seen good arguments against Forman’s position and if I am correct then the majority of religious scholars in the American Academy of Religion seems to accept this argument (Forman 1998, 1999).
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“synoptic gospels” are those gospels that share similar stories and structures. These are the gospels by Mark, Matthew, and Luke. They all use a similar source called “S”. The gospel by John is different. The gospels are called “synoptic” because they can be juxtaposed and looked at in parallel, the Greek term being “synopsis”. I found this interpretation of the baptism of Jesus in Tantra Vidya. Wissenschaft des Tantra (Hinze 1983).
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It is of course extremely silly and in fact quite uneducated to assume that a good old man sat in his office writing and somehow despatching those writings to humankind using a kind of celestial courier service of angels and winged animals. That seems sometimes the way both fundamentalists and atheists likewise understand the meaning. Both are actually not only missing the true meaning of this word, but are also making a laughing stock of themselves.
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This was a medieval movement that emphasised poverty and mutual sharing of property. It was outlawed, because it also threatened current structures of power and domination, and challenged the bishopric in their sole right to interpret the gospel.
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Two similar pieces of evidence support this: Smith and Orlinsky (2004) found in a representative survey of American psychotherapists that only 25 % call themselves spiritual and religious, i.e. they are able to fill religion with their own experience in the sense explained here. A little over 25 % call themselves neither spiritual nor religious, and less than 25 % religious, but not spiritual. The rest call themselves only spiritual. We have found a similar picture in a representative survey of German psychotherapists (Hofmann and Walach 2011). Psychotherapists are a good seismographic measure for cultural trends. They have received a complex scientific and practical training and are dealing with the mental problems of our current society. Although spirituality seems to be more favored by contemporaries than religion, and formal religion is on the retreat, this does not mean that the problems or questions are irrelevant, as data from large world-wide polls as collected in the so called “Religion Monitor” show (Huber 2007). This rather supports the contention made here: The topics that have been part of religion are crucial to people, because spirituality is an innate human condition that won’t go away, even if formal religion is retreating.
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Ex 20.2.
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This is often rendered in the simpler phrase “ama et fac quod vis” which has the same meaning, except that the Latin “diligere” has the connotation of spiritual-emotional love, while “amare” is more strongly linked with the sensual-sexual side of love. The whole phrase is from Augustine’s Commentary to the Letter of Saint John to the Parthians VII.8: “Sive taceas, dilectione taceas; sive clames, dilectione clames; sive emendes, dilectione emendes; sive parcas, dilectione parcas: Radix sit intus dilectionis, non potest de ista radice nisi bonum existere – if you are silent, be silent out of love; if you shout, shout out of love; if you chide, do it out of love; if you overlook something, overlook out of love: The root should be inward love, for out of this root only something good can come.” The phrase itself seems to be a later condensation and does not appear verbatim, to my knowledge (Augustinus 1961).
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John 20, 24 ff.
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See Neill Douglas-Klotz’ (1999) reconstruction of the original Aramaic meaning of Jesus’ notion of “Father” in The Hidden Gospel. Decoding the Spiritual Message of the Aramaic Jesus. See also other recent work by Douglas-Klotz (2002, 2003) in which he points out that, since the language used by Jesus and his followers was Aramaic, there was comparative closeness to similar Jewish groups of his time, and the experiential basis for the teaching becomes clear.
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This is the classical dogmatic formula that the Council of Chalcedon has arrived at in the year 451. K.H. Reich used it as an example of what he first called “complementarist thinking” and later on “relational-contextual reasoning”. Thereby he is referring to a mental operation that is beyond formal analytical reasoning in the sense of Jean Piaget, and for which he has provided evidence in the development of young adults. Some, but not all of them, arrive at such mental concepts that are able to integrate conflict and seemingly opposite and contradictory viewpoints. He assumes that such a form of thinking is necessary to solve complex problems and he sees dogmatic formulations like the one of Chalcedon as examples of such a type of thinking. Thereby, a complex spiritual reality is expressed. See Reich 1990a, b, 2003.
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The Latin original is “God est sphaera infinita cuius centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibi”. This is a sentence that stemmed originally from a collection of philosophers from antiquity (The so called Liber XXIV philosophorum) which was a source for many medieval writers. It was taken up and reported by many notable philosophers and scholars, such as Alanus ab Insulis (Alain of Lille), Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Bonaventure, and Meister Eckhart (in his commentary on ecclesiasticus) from where Cusanus, who owned a copy and studied it, likely took it. See van Velthoven 1977, p. 190, Note 252.
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Walach, H. (2015). Clarifications and Presuppositions. In: Secular Spirituality. Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09345-1_2
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