The Meaning of Spirituality and the Spirituality of Meaning

By: Ira Allen

The term "bare life" was coined by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to describe the most minimal state of human existence, where the possibility of meaning has disappeared entirely. This gives us an excellent clue, in a sideways fashion, into the nature of human spirituality generally.

Humans, it has often been said, are meaning-makers. That is, we literally cannot help, as we walk through our lives, but attach meaning to things, people and events. Take, for instance, the old saying: "a cat may look at a queen." Certainly, this is a statement of fact; a cat may indeed look at a queen. But it’s also much more—attached to this statement of fact are a variety of possible meanings.

Perhaps these words point to the relative insignificance or artificiality of human status distinctions; to a cat, a queen is just one more potential kibble-source, and no more. Or perhaps they suggest that rebelliousness is not only a human quality, but a feline one as well. Or that, in context, this particular cat has special privileges that others do not. Whatever the case may be, the ability of this sentence to mean more than it is (and, especially with such an obviously factual sentence, why say it otherwise?) points to our experience of reality as more than just what is in the material world.

Human spirituality is, at the most elemental level, the attempt to come to grips with the more that always seems to be attached to material reality: the more of meaning, the more of dreams and the imagination, is the more of religion and spirituality.

So, then, what is human spirituality? Voltaire once wrote that "If God did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him," and we don’t necessarily have to agree with him to see the kernel of wisdom in this statement. Stuck with this more, stuck with this sense that bare life is not enough, we need ways of coming to grips with something that, by definition, we cannot consciously understand.

As a concept, spirituality refers to the various attempts that human beings make to come to terms with the more that they cannot consciously understand. So, some people and religions understand this more through a God concept, an idea of a single deity that is in and above and around everything, suffusing all material life with (usually His) extra-material meaning—and, in the process, making it possible for humans to "make meaning" in their own lives. This has been a particularly popular option for Western societies, and can be traced back to (and beyond) Plato’s Theory of Forms. The Theory of Forms suggested that there was a non-material (spiritual) ideal form of everything that existed in material form, and many have seen this as the conceptual background for the development of certain models of Christianity and Islam. The same distinction, however, is also found in Hebrew texts that predate Plato, so it may simply be that humans are predisposed to find a disconnect between material and spiritual realities.

Other people and peoples have found an understanding of the more through a pantheon of Gods, as in the Hindu religion and the ancient Greek and Roman religions both. Here, too, we see some disconnection between a spiritual reality (described in the Bhagavad-Gita and in various Vedic texts) and a present-day material reality. In general, the realm of the spiritual—the realm of the more—makes conceptual thought possible; it both allows us to comprehend and results from a distinction between simple material reality and some other reality that is not simple and seems not be material in the ways we now understand.

Among the "World Religions," it is perhaps Buddhism, which also originated in India, but took greatest hold in East and Southeast Asia, that least draws the distinction between the spiritual and the material, suggesting with the doctrine of non-duality that the two are one. (In fairness, this understanding has also been advanced by various mystics in the Hundu, Christian and Muslim traditions—but it is only in Buddhism that the idea guides mainstream spiritual thought.)

Naturally, a number of non-religious spiritual directions have also made much of ideas of non-duality; these include, among many others, Taoism, New Age approaches, Lakota and other Native American traditions, and certain animist religions of West Africa and Southeast Asia. And, at one extreme, we have such luminaries as Frank Lloyd Wright, who said, "I believe in God. Only I spell it n-a-t-u-r-e." But in all cases—within established religions or not—there is one constant: spirituality is man’s attempt to understand her own moreness, her own deliberate and conscious partaking in a world that is both within and beyond her experience of material reality. It is the realm in which we mean.