(Chris Clarke)

I’ve been grappling with this idea, with increasing intensity over the last few months - provoked by the "New Paradigms in Education" conference, by the co-operative enquiry into Walking a Sacred Path, by engagement with discussions in King Alfred’s college about the meaning of a "Christian Ethos", and by conversations with Robin. This is a sort of progress report for friends who seem to be on the same journey. It’s part personal, part organisational.

In 1993 the National Curriculum Council introduced a notion of spirituality as a cross-curricular topic "…not confined to the development of religious beliefs … to do with the universal search for human identity … with the search for meaning and purpose in life and for values by which to live." (quoted in Best, 1996, p 35). In response, a conference was held the next year under the auspices of the Froebel Institute, whose proceedings (ibid) provide a useful foundation for enquiry.

The papers produce a wide range of definitions of spirituality, following in the train of the above quotation. Some are so packed with metaphysical assumptions as to be almost useless, such as that of the working party of Christians and Humanists:

"Education in spiritual growth is that which promotes apprehension of ultimate reality through fostering higher forms of human consciousness" (p 34) (why should there be such a thing as "ultimate reality"? Why should it be possible to apprehend it? What does "higher" mean? and so on)

Others bring together a number of worthy approaches - ethical, psychological … - but finish with something that lacks any unifying ground. Why do we group these together and call them "spiritual"? What is the source of evidence or validity for these ideas? The NCC quote is itself an example of this. And the same problem is still present in the mega-definition of Kevin Mott-Thornton (though this contains pointers towards its solution)

"Spirituality is that quality of being, holistically conceived, made up of insight, beliefs, values, attitudes/emotions and behavioural dispositions, which both informs and may be informed by lived experience. The cognitive aspects of our common spirituality can be described, at any particular time, as being a ‘framework’ of ideals, beliefs and values about oneself, ones relations with others and reality/the ‘world’. Logically intrinsic to this framework, and rooted in a notion of what is real and ultimately significant, is some conception of the good life (possibly, but not necessarily, related to a supreme will and agency), which informs (implicitly, via a network of unexamined assumptions/prejudices or explicitly, via a rational justification), but may not determine, all action." (p 78)

This draws attention to "being" and "experience" - aspects which do indeed provide the basis for what is distinctive about spirituality and for its validation. This is developed further by Alex Roger, who writes with more of a phenomenological flavour (author’s emphases):

"Our spirit, then, whatever else it has to do with, relates to the basic orientation or disposition of our life: the way we are in the world, in terms of these things to which we are sensitive …" (p48)

"… in all of [these expressions of spirituality] human beings are giving expression to their awareness of features in the world of experience … It is an awareness in which something of personal engagement with, and a sense of personal significance of, what is in awareness, is present; together with a recognition of the real otherness of what is known in this way. … spirituality, I believe, is rooted in awareness." (p 51)

In this approached we have crossed a line, a surprisingly fine one, between the internal (ideals, beliefs, values) and the external (the Other). And in passing from behavioural dispositions to awareness of the Other we have passed from a third person perspective to a first person one ¾ or even a second person one, since the wonder of knowing a "thou" lies in the other-than-me combined with total awareness.

Spirituality, on this view, is indeed all that the other writers have said it is; but it is united and grounded in this inchoate awareness of the external, in an awareness that confirms and validates at the second-person level our intimations of meaning and value. There is strong psychological evidence (Teesdale and Barnard, 1993) that this in turn depends on a basic universal mode of human experiencing which uses quite distinct mental systems (the "implicational subsystem") from construed experiencing (the "propositional subsystem"), a distinction that may have a neurological basis. Isabel Clarke (2000) extends this idea to the concept of spirituality (as well as to psychosis).

For me, spirituality is best expressed by the title of our enquiry "Walking a Sacred Path." It is a part of my life which, like walking, I am sometimes conscious of, sometimes not - but all the time a process is continuing: the patterns of meaning, the values, my sensibilities, are changing. Sometimes it’s deliberate: at the moment I’m spending 30 minutes each morning which is a dedicated time for responding to what I feel matters most. In practice some or all of this is spent in meditation, stilling the inner dialogue, often attending to breathing, or to ideo-retinal images, or using a mantra as a way of bringing back my wandering attention. I may also chant a little or do a body-prayer. Usually the mental image I carry about my intention is that of entering into an open, empty space inside myself in order to become, in some confused way, that characterless source of my identity that I think of as residing in this space. I may write a little at the end to record words, insights or intentions that arose. Quite often (not as often as I used to) I ring a pair of symbols as I leave the house with the intention of reminding myself of the connection that I felt in meditation and to carry this out with me as a sense of connection with the world as a whole - usually this doesn’t last very long after leaving the house.

The "unaware" part of it is also reflected in a very occasional touching with what some call "the imaginal" - significant dreams (in my case sometimes precognitive), events in life which take on symbolic significance (animals identified as helpers, people as guides). This feeds the growing sense of being enfolded in aspects of meaning, even when I am quite unaware of it.

I include more personal experience later; but at this stage it seems to be about the state of being, conscious or otherwise, that influences my path; some of it is about awareness in various forms; and its about connection.

The idea that spirituality was grounded in the world beyond the personal, and was a human faculty in its own right, not reducible to other aspects of our being, had previously led me to define it as "a faculty of intuitive participation in the universe not reducible to the bodily, emotional, intellectual and communal aspects of the human person." By this I wanted to convey through "participation" the idea, not merely of awareness of the external, but of active engagement and connection with the external. I also wanted to express through "intuitive" the idea, contained in the previous definitions, that we are talking about something that has its roots in the non-conscious parts of our being

This element of action was also present as "inquiry" in the definition in the business vision of Mike Eales and Regan von Schweitzer of Spirituality as "A deep and passionate inquiry into the meaning and mystery of life, founded on principles of integrity and compassion." This definition encapsulates the ethos of the co-operative enquiry process, and takes it as normative for the spiritual response. I tried to synthesise the two as:

"The exercise of a basic human faculty of intuitive compassionate response, as a whole person, to the meaning and mystery of the whole world, involving but not reducible to our intellectual, physical, emotional and social faculties, and stemming from a state of connectivity with the world."

All these approaches are clear in dissociating spirituality from a merely religious activity. On the other hand, there are grounds for using a description of the experience/activity/response that draws on language ("God", "higher self") with religious or transpersonal associations. This might be the case where access to the subjective experience has a definite "feel" to it, which might be described as a "turning" of attention, or as being like the moment when a stereoscopic picture "clicks" into awareness.

Isabel writes "In my way of looking at it, there is always going to be a tension between the description and the experience in this area, because the linguistic, analytic part of the human brain is separate from the part that apprehends the spiritual experience; the attention mentioned earlier makes the switch, and when in this mode of experiencing, the individual is, to a greater or lesser extent, in relationship with the whole, and out of contact with boundaries and separation. The numinosity and certainty that cloaks this way of knowing has a way of enveloping the language that the returning person uses to attempt to communicate the experience, but I would suggest, that because of the underlying separateness of the ways of knowing, this certainty is spurious, and our formulations are necessarily provisional - after all, that is what St. Paul said in the bit about dark mirrors!

"To relate this to my own, extremely modest, experience of the spiritual; my morning practice on weekdays takes place as I walk to work. I relate to the trees etc. along my way in that full, unbounded sort of relating, full of love and joy, which is in my limited understanding, becoming aware and embracing my underlying relating with God."

Andrea White, who teaches spirituality through Art at years 9-13, is clear that

"It is possible and essential within a secular society to enable students to access their spirituality within a non religious framework. Although spirituality overlaps religious beliefs, ethics. values and emotional experience it is essentially a discrete area of human experience…"

But for Andrea this is no reason for eschewing transpersonal language:

"In these schemes spirituality is OVERT rather than implicit making use of spiritual vocabulary e.g. spirit, soul, higher self, truth, beauty and wonder, awe …"

and in her course materials "higher self" seems to be a term that students can learn to associate with a well defined area of their own experience.

For myself I find two separate difficulties with these usages.

1. In my own experience I find the activity of meditation (where I do often use as aids religious symbols and concepts related to the word "God") different in "feel" from the activity, say, of becoming spontaneously aware of the numinosity and meaning of the beings that I am encountering on a walk in the country - although both satisfy all the criteria already examined for "spirituality". For this reason I don’t, for instance, find it helpful to describe all of my own personal experience of spirituality in terms of the single term "God".
2. The words we are considering here are used not only as a way describing, or eliciting, personal experience, but also as theoretical (psychological or theological) explanatory constructs for what is going on in spirituality. Considered in this way, I am not convinced that either God or Higher Self, as these words are often used, are supported by enough empirical evidence to justify their use. I think it is this problem that most stands in the way of a wider acceptance of the notion of spirituality when presented in religious terms.

The second of these touches on the huge area of what is "empirical evidence" which would take us far beyond my intentions here, so I’ll only sketch what I think. I include as evidence, of course, subjective experience compared over large populations, which abundantly supports the notion of a general spiritual faculty. But for a general explanatory construct (as opposed to an individual personal symbol) to be useful I require it to be part of a falsifiable theory that is adequately supported by consistent evidence/experience reported by the general population or by competent persons with a more specialised insight. And in the case of "God" I feel that all the theoretical usages of the word are either (i) so general as not to be falsifiable, or (ii) restricted to a deistic creative principle not relevant to the experience we are talking about here, or (iii) not supported by adequately consistent evidence (or some combination!)

I don’t think it’s necessarily helpful to try to get a single definition of spirituality. But maybe we could reach some kind of rough check-list that might enable comparison of different usages of the term; so that we could say of one writer, that they using it very narrowly, or of another that they were pretty off-beam. I think work towards something like this could be useful in an organisational context, when we are talking about selling spirituality to businesses, or including it in the curriculum.

Best, Ron (Ed) Education, Spirituality and the Whole Child, Cassel, 1996

Clarke, Isabel "Madness and Mysticism: clarifying the mystery" in Network No. 72, pp 11-14, April 2000

Teesdale, J.D. and Barnard, P.J. Affect, Cognition and Change Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hove, UK 1993

Next: Old and New Paradigms in Science and Spirituality

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