Abstract
Practical spirituality involves transformation of both science and religion. In the field of religion, practical spirituality emerges in varieties of transformative movements and seeking in self, culture, and society which interrogate existing structures of domination and strive for new modes of self-realization, God-realization, and world-realization. Practical spirituality seeks to transform religion in the direction of creative practice, everyday life, and struggle for justice and dignity. Practice here is not just practice in the conventional sense, for example, in traditions of American pragmatism or anthropological conception of practice as offered by Clifford Geertz, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jürgen Habermas. These conceptions suffer from an entrenched dualism such as theory and practice and immanence and transcendence and work with a notion of subject which is predominantly “techno-practitioner” and cut off from its inescapable and integral links with transcendence. But practice in practical spirituality is simultaneously immanent and transcendent and the actor here is simultaneously a “techno-practitioner” and “transcendentally real self.” Practical spirituality embodies immanent transcendence, as for example in music or in the experience of transcendence in our various moments of everyday life—love, meditations, scientific engagements, and other activities of life and in society.
Practical spirituality emphasizes experience and realization—self, God, and world—in and through practice but at the same time nurtures the humility not to reduce these only to practice. In its emphasis upon experience and realization practical spirituality has close kinship with the spirit of science which embodies, in the words of Albert Einstein, a holy spirit of inquiry. In its emphasis upon practice, practical spirituality stresses that without taking part in practice we cannot realize truth—religious or otherwise. Practical spirituality involves manifold experiments with Truth as well as truths where truth is not a thing but a landscape of meaning, experience, and co-realization. This chapter describes such visions and movements of practical spirituality.
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Notes
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For an outline of such a notion of practice in the field of development, please see Quarlese von Ufford and Giri (2003).
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Consider here the following lines of Luc Ferry: “[…] When I hear a musical passage, it does not reduce to a series of related notes with no connection between them (actual immanence). On the contrary, it contributes—in an immanent way, apart from any rational operation—a certain structure that transcends this actual immanence, without being imposed on me from the outside like an argument from authority. This ‘immanent transcendence’ contains within itself, par excellence, the ultimate significance of lived experiences” (Ferry 2002: 26).
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This is not an exhaustive list but only a pointer.
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As E.H. Cousins (1985: 7) tells us in his Global Spirituality: “people of faith now rediscover the material dimensions of existence and their spiritual significance.”
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Though the dialogical dimension in Vivekananda’s practical Vedanta seems to be imprisoned in fundamentalist interpretations of his work who would like to see his work only from a Hindu point of view.
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Even Swami Vivekananda (1991: 382) writes in his Practical Vedanta: “Perfect balance would be our destruction. Suppose the amount of heat in this room, the tendency of which is towards equal and perfect diffusion, gets that kind of diffusion, then for all practical purposes that heat will cease to be. What makes motion possible in this universe? Lost balance […] It is this difference, this differentiation, this losing of the balance between us, which is the very soul of our progress, the soul of all our thought.” This has profound implication for many domains of our lives including thinking about relationship between God and Man. This helps us to acknowledge the significance of disjunction and antinomies in our life in general and spiritual quest in particular. From a different point of view sociologist of religion Robert Bellah also helps us understand this in his Beyond Belief: “For me the search for wholeness from then on had to be made without totalism. A critical stance towards every society, ideology and religion was henceforth essential” (Bellah 1970: xx).
- 9.
Here what David Loy (1988: 12) writes deserves our careful consideration:
Today we are so impressed with the progress of the physical sciences—originally derived from metaphysics—that we return the compliment and derive our metaphysics from natural sciences. But the scientific worldview has its own metaphysical presuppositions which originated in ancient Greece in way of looking at the world that came to fruition in Plato and especially Aristotle. This dualistic view stands almost in dramatic opposition to a worldview based on the non-duality of the seer and the seen.
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Let us not forget here Buddhism which is silent about God and many atheists who do not believe in God.
- 11.
In their work on critical realism and transcendence, Archer et al. (2004) prefer to use He when talking about God. The use of she here is an invitation and it draws inspiration from traditions such as India’s where God is thought of as Brahma which is gender neuter.
- 12.
As Tutu (2004: 62) tells us:
God calls on us to be his partners to work for a new kind of society where people count; where people matter more than things, more than possessions; where human life is not just respected but positively revered; where people will be secure and not suffer from the fear of hunger, from ignorance, from disease where there will be more gentleness, more caring, more sharing, more compassion, more laughter, where there is peace and not war.
- 13.
Sulak Sivaraksha speaks about Buddhism with a small b: “There is a need to practice Buddhism with a small ‘b’ (Engaged Buddhism). This means concentrating on the meaning of the Buddha’s teaching (nibbana or freedom) and being less concerned with myth, culture and ceremony” (Sivaraksa 2006: 1). Dallmayr (2005) urges us to understand the political and spiritual significance of moving from the big God and inviting “small” to our lives.
- 14.
For Swami Vivekananda, “A God who is partial to his children called men, and cruel to his children called brute beasts, is worse than a demon” (Vivekananda 1991: 297).
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Swami Vivekananda writes about it poetically: “[…] where the husband kisses the wife, he is there in the kiss; when the mother kisses the child, he is there in the kiss; where friends clasp hands, he the Lord is present as the God of Love. When a great man loves and wishes to help mankind He is there giving freely His bounty out of his love to mankind” (Vivekananda 1991: 394). For Tolstoy : “[…] but one thing only is needful; the knowledge of the simple and clear truth which finds place in every soul that is not stupefied by religious and scientific superstitions—the truth that for our life one law is valid-the law of love, which brings the highest happiness to every individual as well as to all mankind” (1997: 29). And Bhaskar (2002: 134) writes: “The ultimate is not freedom. The desideratum is freedom, the ultimate is unconditional love.”
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Creative theologian I.U. Dalferth (2006: 18–19) also helps us with a new hermeneutics of evil:
The problem is rather to construe God’s will as law, and God’s law in moral terms as a set of divine commandments as to what humans ought or ought not to do. The result is a misleading moral sense of evil: If evil is that which is contrary to God’s will, God’s will identified with God’s law, God’s law reduced to moral instructions of what humans ought or ought not to do, then doing evil is equated with trespassing God’s commandments and evil is everything that God prohibits us to do. But this is a misleading way of stating the point of the Torah, the gospel, and arguably also the Koran. They are not a set of divine prescriptions, commandments and prohibitions which humans must obey in order not to do evil. At least in the case of the Torah and the gospel they are better understood in terms of God’s gift of a blueprint of a good and just human life in community with God and one another, the presentation of what God has done for his people and all humankind, and the unfolding or unpacking of its implications for human life at its best—as it could and should and ought to be. They outline a way of life that responds in gratitude to the goods received from God rather than to a set of arbitrary divine commandments and prohibitions that are to be obeyed on pain of punishment.
- 17.
In the words of Agamben (1993: 44):
The recognition of evil is older and more original than any blameworthy act, it rests solely on the fact that, being and having to be only its possibility or potentiality, humankind fails itself in a certain sense and has to appropriate this failing—it has to exist as potentiality. [The only ethical experience is] the experience of being (one’s own potentiality). The only evil consists instead in the decision to remain in a deficit of existence, to appropriate the power to not-be as a substance and a foundation beyond existence; or rather (and this is the destiny of morality), to regard potentiality itself, which is the most proper mode of human existence as a fault that must always be repressed.
- 18.
Bocchi and Ceruti also help us understand the significance of non-duality in our spiritual quest: “The dialogical and dynergic cosmology symbolized by the union of Shiva and Shakti and manifested in yoga has given rise to many philosophical systems of the two great spiritual traditions of classical India: Hinduism and Buddhism. Beyond all their differences and disagreements, they express a principle of ‘duality within the non-duality.’ The ultimate reality of the universe, the ‘noumenon’ is defined precisely as ‘non-dual’: a-dvaita (a Hindu term) or a-dvaya (a Buddhist term)” (Bocchi and Ceruti 2002: 47).
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In our edited book, The Modern Prince and Modern Sage: Transforming Power and Freedom, I have explored this theme along with several of our co- collaborators.
- 20.
As Sri Aurobindo (1950) urges us to sing in his Savitri:Verse
Verse A lonely freedom cannot satisfy A heart that has grown one with every other heart I am a deputy of the aspiring world My spirit’s liberty I ask for all
- 21.
It is helpful here to remember lines from a novelist and a theologian. Writes Imre Kertestz (2002: 12) in his Kaddish for a Child Not Born: “Yes, my existence in the context of your potentiality […] Now I no longer have doubts—it is in the clouds where I make my bed. And this question—my life in the context of the potentiality of your existence—proved to be a good guide.” And for the theologian I.U. Dalferth: “In religious and in particular Christian contexts ‘hope’ has a strong meaning. It is not merely a wish but a way of ‘seeing’ the future, and one’s role in it, in a particular light” (2006: 15).
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Giri, A.K. (2018). The Calling of Practical Spirituality. In: Giri, A. (eds) Practical Spirituality and Human Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0803-1_2
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