Spirituality is a mess. Let’s clean it up.
A case for spirituality that’s less intimidating and more accessible.
I want to make spirituality more accessible. Specifically, I want to help people adopt spiritual perspectives and spiritual practices that are practical and rational.
Everything you can think of — every cultural mechanism, every primal impulse, every profundity, every mundanity, every birth and death, every breath and blink, plays out on a stage of spiritual consequence. Spirituality names our most precious, exalted contact with the very fabric of reality. It is the category under which we huddle our deepest passions, most humbling mysteries, and most universal sense of connection. Few concepts are more powerful.
Yet, with that power comes enormous capacity to intimidate, confuse and invite ridicule. Imagine you’re at a party and a friend wants to introduce you to someone. He’s genuinely spiritual, your friend says. It’s magnetizing, isn’t it? You can’t help but lean in. Then, you flinch. What if it’s not the exact kind of spirituality you like? What if it’s woo-woo? What if he’s self-righteous? What if you feel challenged? Just as fast as the spell is cast, it can disappear.
The subjectivity of spirituality is disorienting. Ask ten people what it means, you’ll get ten answers. It’s a concept so blown to pieces, we barely know how to talk about it (except on first dates where people declare themselves “spiritual but not religious” as code for “I’m not a shallow idiot”).
We need to grow out of this haze and find common ground. Unfortunately, our lack of shared definition isn’t the only problem. Many people find the experience of spirituality out of reach too, a distant abstraction seemingly incompatible with their ordinary lives.
Many think spirituality is esoteric, meant only for a few who live dedicated spiritual lives, like a monk in the mountains. Many think spirituality is exotic, found only in faraway lands — Tibet is spiritual, Cincinnati is not. And many think spirituality is ephemeral, something we only get to experience a few times in life, like being close to a birth or death. They don’t believe spiritual experience can be sought and repeated by ordinary people.
I reject all these notions and consider this a failure of education. We need to distill spirituality to its most basic, logical, indisputable elements, creating common ground for as many people as possible, including those who are confused, indifferent or skeptical. I believe fiercely that any person should be able to stand atop a secular, mechanistic view of the universe and still wrest from their consciousness feelings of enchantment, awe and devotion. Spirituality does not belong to any group, nor is access to it contingent on the character or fervor of beliefs.
This isn’t so complicated, but for many it requires a new perspective. We all want a healthy birth, a peaceful death, and in between, a world to love that loves us back. We have reliable maps and instinct when it comes to relationships and material comfort, but the scene blurs at the edge, where our small lives meet totality. We tend towards the parts, not the whole — we seek love in a dozen small dances before ever thinking to embrace the whole pulsing system, to take that pure, underlying state of consciousness as our partner and go spinning through time with an open heart and rapt eyes.
One of the most important things to understand about spirituality is, it’s much closer than you might think.
Spirituality is not about summiting a mountain to become something at its peak. It’s climbing the mountain, yes — but it’s also the breeze in the grass at your feet as you stand in the valley, looking at the mountain, wondering if you’ll be spiritual once you climb it. And as much as anything, it’s right there as you stand with your back to the mountain, having never seen it — that context in which the next moment emerges and you turn, look over your shoulder, and find a majestic mountain calling you.
We’re led to believe that spirituality is a distant state to strive for, a hard-earned triumph. It can be, but doesn’t need to be. In my experience, it’s just as often a mood, lingering over your shoulder, waiting to be realized with the slightest shift. I believe in the extraordinary short-term potential of nearly any person, to discover and benefit from these shifts. Waiting on the other side of softly-closed eyelids, a slow walk, a glance to the sky, a perfect color, or a childhood memory, is a place you can rest, a place to feel whole and free.
I find spirituality boils down to two elements, two prior conditions from which everything else flows: presence and self-transcendence. That’s where the magic is — a person who is present, beyond self.
Everything else you can think of traditionally associated with spirituality, from the alignment of chakras to the voice of God, is contingent on presence, self-transcendence or both. Everything sought in the name of spiritual traditions, and in the name of self-improvement, is contingent on presence and self-transcendence. Whatever we seek — stress reduction, moral guidance, abundance, a happy marriage, an inspired career — is contingent on these conditions. And that which we all seek, a reckoning with existential dread — the dark energy that dominates every dimension of human experience — is only possible when these two conditions are met.
My mission is to help people orient themselves, their relationships, and their work amidst the vast space and time of this human project, feel rapture in the simplest moments and most evident truths, choose a retreat into peace over pursuit of happiness, find inspiration in existential mystery, and build rituals to reliably access transcendent states of body and mind.
But it most certainly does not end there. Spirituality that does not produce community and altruistic action is a song written then left unsung. Spirituality is not an end unto itself, some badge of enlightenment. There is a legitimate concern, given the indulgences of certain practices, and some tones in the self-help industry, that modern spiritual seeking often devolves into a self-referential search for bliss (often spilling over the edge of an infinity pool in Bali). Personal fulfillment is not spirituality. Self-care is not spirituality. Happiness is not spirituality. Spirituality is the condition from which emerges an effortlessly compassionate person in harmony with the world around them.
As a younger person, I would fantasize about going in a spaceship that travels well into the future, at least a thousand years. I was willing to give up a lot for that chance, or so I thought. I was willing for it to be one-way, solitary, death-defying. Above all, I was desperate to see the human species unified, working together, a superorganism blushing at the foot of its magnum opus. I wanted to see if this animal, unrivaled in potential, could transcend its weaknesses and achieve its highest creative and moral ideals.
Turns out my fantasy was immature, escapist. It would be cheating to short-circuit the heft of real human experience and go skipping through time — I’d be a slack-jawed voyeur in a world I didn’t help create.
Things are different now. I’m married, I’ll be a father soon. I’ve worked hard to embrace connection over escape. Now I dream of a different kind of spaceship — one with the same dazzling destination, though it never leaves the ground. It’s not as fast as light, but slow as a tear on the cheek of someone who trembles and transforms, right there, under the power of her own imagination. It’s not a small canister built for a few heroes, thrust toward the frontier. It’s a spaceship with no boundaries and no seats. It’s wide as the sky, built for everyone. All you have to do is close your eyes and nod, I’m with you, I’m aboard.
