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I am atheist and a spiritual naturalist (i.e., I don't believe that the supernatural exists, but I do value what are traditionally referred to as "spiritual" experiences - transcendence, awe, elevation, peace, connectedness, etc - I just believe that they are products of natural psychological and physiological processes).
The spiritual experience - the experience of meaning, connection and joy, often informed by philosophy or religion - is, from a naturalistic perspective, a state of the physical person, not evidence for a higher realm or non-physical essence. Nevertheless, this understanding of spirituality doesn’t lessen the attraction of such an experience, or its value for the naturalist. We naturally crave such feelings and so will seek the means to achieve them consistent with our philosophy.
Although naturalism may at first seem an unlikely basis for spirituality, a naturalistic vision of ourselves and the world can inspire and inform spiritual experience. Naturalism understands such experience as psychological states constituted by the activity of our brains, but this doesn't lessen the appeal of such experience, or render it less profound. Appreciating the fact of our complete inclusion in nature can generate feelings of connection and meaning that rival those offered by traditional religions, and those feelings reflect the empirical reality of our being at home in the cosmos.
If you look up the etymology of the word "spiritual," you’ll find that it derives from the Latin "spiritus," meaning "wind" or "breath." Standard dictionary definitions of spiritual contrast it with physical or material, so dualism is more or less built into the ordinary conception of spirituality. But I will argue that just as we can be good without God, we can have spirituality without spirits. Even within the monistic view of the cosmos entailed by a commitment to scientific empiricism, we can avail ourselves of spiritual experience and take an authentically spiritual stance when appreciating our situation as fully physical creatures embedded in a material universe. I hope to show that in its dualism, the traditional notion of spirituality in effect sets up problems of existential alienation and cognitive dissonance that religions have wrestled with, more or less unsuccessfully, for millennia. At a stroke, naturalism cuts these problems off at the root, providing an emotionally satisfying and cognitively unified basis for feeling completely at home in the world.
This is the thing that I think is most problematic about Sam Harris's writings (at least the one book that I've read). I just think it's completely soft-headed for an atheist to think about spirituality. Once you get to the point, as I have, and as many atheists eventually do, that you conclude that there is no evidence not only for god, but for any spiritual or non-material stuff, the idea of spirituality becomes meaningless.
This is the thing that I think is most problematic about Sam Harris's writings (at least the one book that I've read). I just think it's completely soft-headed for an atheist to think about spirituality. Once you get to the point, as I have, and as many atheists eventually do, that you conclude that there is no evidence not only for god, but for any spiritual or non-material stuff, the idea of spirituality becomes meaningless.
I want to make sure we are not misunderstanding each other due to the terms I am using. I absolutely do not believe in the supernatural. I don't believe in souls, spirits, demons, or ghosts. I don't believe in new age forces that are not physical. I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe there is anything magical or that consciousness comes from outside our brains. I believe only in the natural, the physical (atoms, quirks, cells, photons, the strong and weak magnetic forces, etc).
When I say spiritual, I am using the word because of its historical use to describe certain experiences that have erroneous been thought to be exclusive to religion. I am talking about the feelings of transcendence, awe, elevation, peace, hyper-awareness, a feeling of connectedness, altruism, brotherly love, peace, etc.
I believe what I formerly called the "Spirit" is actually several different discrete emotions as natural as every other human emotion. Those emotions are produced when certain cognitive requirements are met. For example, anger is an emotion with negative valence produced when the person is highly aroused, has its amygdala stimulated, believes it is in control of the situation, and perceives deprivation of what it believes is rightfully due to them.
The different emotions that are labeled "the Spirit" by Mormons include: elevation, transcendence, awe, peace, compassion, confidence, etc. At varying times, these emotions can be paired with the following physical sensations: warmth in the chest, tingling along the spine, sense of being filled to overflowing, sense of depth and "realness". Now, many different experiences can illicit these experiences. When I watch LOTR: Return of the King, I cry, feel filled to overflowing, awe at the beauty that the King can be united to his elvish lover, and a sense of being drawn closer and a yearning for this to happen more often in real life. I can feel depth and peace and harmony when I am alone in nature. I feel these feelings all the time now that I am learning what they are predicated on, and I am an atheist that doesn't believe in the supernatural. I find it unfortunate that religion has tried to claim these experiences as their own and produced by some supernatural force.
Psychologists are studying the emotion of elevation. Elevation appears to be the opposite of social disgust. It is triggered by witnessing acts of human moral beauty or virtue. Elevation involves a warm or glowing feeling in the chest, and it makes people want to become morally better themselves. Because elevation increases one's desire to affiliate with and help others, it provides a clear illustration of B. L. Fredrickson's broaden-and-build model of the positive emotions.
Psychologists are also studying the emotion of awe. "Awe is a distinct emotion, and specifically an aesthetic emotion (Loew, 1997). And though it might seem that awe is more likely the result of positive stimuli such as a sunrise at sea, rather than the result of negative stimuli such as a tsunami wave, awe does in fact occur in the face of both pleasant and ominous stimuli. Dangerous stimuli such as volcanic eruptions, battles, or extreme electrical storms can produce awe. However, the experience of awe cannot occur if the percipient is in actual danger. A direct threat of harm produces an emotional response of fear, overriding awe. To experience awe rather than dread in the face of forbidding stimuli, one needs to be an observer at safe remove."
And also, "In this paper we present a prototype approach to awe. We suggest that two appraisals are central and are present in all clear cases of awe: perceived vastness, and a need for accommodation, defined as an inability to assimilate an experience into current mental structures. Five additional appraisals account for variation in the hedonic tone of awe experiences: threat, beauty, exceptional ability, virtue, and the supernatural. We derive this perspective from a review of what has been written about awe in religion, philosophy, sociology, and psychology, and then we apply this perspective to an analysis of awe and related states such as admiration, elevation, and the epiphanic experience."
I have been working on the following post for a while. I was going to wait until I finished reviewing each of the distinct classes of spiritual experiences, but I want to go ahead and post what I have so far.
When I was a true believer, I experienced many wonderful sensations that I was taught to attribute to God. When I came to no longer believe in God, I still had the desire to have those wonderful experiences because I enjoyed them so much and they enriched my life. Due to the particular path that led me to no longer believe in God, I had become fairly sure that those phenomena were produced and experienced solely by my physiology despite the strong impression that they were caused by some external source. The key to illiciting those internal experiences was to find what the necessary conditions were that led the body to produce those mental states. Or, to be more specific, how do we activate the neurons responsible for producing the phenomena?
As fascinating as these studies are, they do not show that something supernatural is not involved, only that the brain is involved in producing these phenomena. I have other reasons to suspect that nothing supernatural is in play. But, what I was really interested in were the cognitive and environmental conditions that led to spiritual experiences without artificial stimulation. What follows are my results thus far. I first list the experience and the way I interpreted it as a believer, then what I believe is happening psychologically and how one might experience it without a belief in God being a prerequisite.
Warmth in my chest
This particular sensation is already being investigated by psychological researchers. They refer to it as “elevation”. This is what they have to say about it: Elevation appears to be the opposite of social disgust. It is triggered by witnessing acts of human moral beauty or virtue. Elevation involves a warm or glowing feeling in the chest, and it makes people want to become morally better themselves. Because elevation increases one's desire to affiliate with and help others, it provides a clear illustration of B. L. Fredrickson's broaden-and-build model of the positive emotions.
http://tinyurl.com/7gmlb (broken link)
Looking back at the times I felt the warmth in my chest as a believer, I felt it when I thought of the sacrifice Christ made for me, or when I imagined life in heaven, or thought about a particular verse that illustrated something I thought I should be striving for, or when serving others. All of these are examples that which is noble, the opposite of that which is base and defiled. So, whenever I want to feel the warmth in my chest, I focus on that which is aspirational, noble, exemplar, virtuous, pure, etc.
I realize that some people have never felt warmth in the chest. I am not sure why it would be so with them. Out of curiosity, since elevation is theorized to be the opposite of social disgust, for those of you who never feel a warmth in the chest, do you ever feel disgusted by morally reprehensible behavior, such as the behaviors of con men?
Brightness and clarity in thought
Sometimes we just experience epiphanies in which everything just clicks and suddenly makes sense. They are those “ah-ha” or “oh, yeah” moments. Typically, they occur when we have been thinking about something for a while, sometimes with and sometimes without a break. The wikipedia entry on epiphany has this to say:
“As a feeling, an epiphany is the sudden realisation or comprehension of the essence or meaning of something. The term is used in either a philosophical or literal sense to signify that the claimant has "found the last piece of the puzzle and now sees the whole picture," or has new information or experience, often insignificant by itself, that illuminates a deeper or numinous foundational frame of reference…
Epiphanies have also made possible forward leaps in technology and the sciences. Famous epiphanies include Archimedes' realisation of how to estimate the volume of a given mass, which inspired him to shout "Eureka!" ("I have found it!") The biographies of many mathematicians and scientists include an epiphanic episode early in the career, the ramifications of which were worked out in detail over the following years. For example, Albert Einstein was struck as a young child by being given a compass, and realising that some unseen force in space was making it move. An example of a flash of holistic understanding in a prepared mind was Charles Darwin's "hunch" (about natural selection) during The Voyage of the Beagle.
Among hackers in the proper sense of the word, the word "zen" is used as a verb in the same sense as epiphany, to mean acquiring a sudden comprehension” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphany_(feeling) ).
The epiphany I had was that one can experience an epiphany and still be wrong. We may think we have found the missing puzzle piece and feel exuberance, and still have the wrong piece. The feeling does not accompany what is actually correct, but does accompany the belief that the idea is correct because it seems to have a lot of explanatory power.
This “brightness and clarity of thought” is related to what psychologist call “insight learning”. Insight learning is the grasp of the solution to a problem without the intervening series of the trial and error steps that are associated with most types of learning (e.g., a monkey housed behind the bars of a cage who, without proceeding through countless hours of futile attempts with one stick or the other, fits two sticks together to retrieve a banana outside the distance measured by either stick alone). Having a lot of experience with many of different things, practice finding novel connections between ideas, familiarity with problem solving, and the ability to think symbolically increase the likelihood of insight learning.
Other spiritual experiences
There are a number of other experiences that I am be doing a similar write up of as I have time. They include the following:
Transcendence
Out-of-body experiences
Appreciation of beauty
Compassion
Feeling loved
Feeling oneness and connected
Being filled to overflowing
Sense of depth and "realness"
Peace of mind
Serenity and calmness
Joy
Confidence
Etc.
In short, I believe that most these experiences evolved to give our ancestors an evolutionary advantage by producing an affinity for things that were good for them and motivating them to do things that will increase the likelihood of the survival and reproduction of their genes. Some of the experiences such as out of body experiences I think are produced as a byproduct of how our brains work to produce our usual sense of self.
I am using the term "spiritual" because that is the term society generally uses for these experiences, but I do not believe spirits exist or a spiritual realm.
Well said. What the OP is discussing are emotional and aesthetic experiences.
People, don't get hung up on what it is called. I did not come up with the term spiritual naturalism in the first place. I don't care what you call it. If I could, I'd strip the term out of all of the posts in this thread so people could pay attention to and comment on the experiences and how they are naturally caused and how we can produce those experiences on demand. That is what these posts are about. Forget the term "spiritual naturalism" if you find it that objectionable., and let's start talking about the meat and potatoes of this thread: the experiences themselves and how our minds produce them.
I get all high-minded and pensive when out in the boonies for an extended period of time, especially if I'm living off the land and/or hunting.
I'm not sure I'd call it "spiritual", I'm just more aware and connected with the world around me. Living free and independent among nature (at least for a short time) as humans are naturally evolved to live just feels right and good.
Hueffenhardt: I feel what you have called "spiritual naturalism" (I'm not getting hung up on semantics) when I observe the night sly with a telescope. Galaxies, globular clusters, etc. give me an almost spiritual feeling of awe and awareness of the true scale of things. Even the most intense doctrinal squabbles seem petty and insignificant against that sort of backdrop, do they not? Why would a "God" care one whit about this little dust mote and the human idiocy upon it? I regard it as pure ego on the part of humanity to think it possible.
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