Tag Archives: atheism

Atheism and spirituality

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Lisa J Miller (The Awakened Brain: The Psychology of Spirituality and Our Search for Meaning) tells the story of a high school girl she, Miller, once interviewed, who gave an account of a profound spiritual experience she’d once spontaneously had. The young student’s account ends:

“…I was connected to something bigger. I thought, ‘I’m here. I feel like I’m just me.’ It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I feel so much smarter. Like anything is possible. I love it!” She smiled again, then shrugged. “But it’s not scientific. And I believe in science and evolution and everything.”

Here, given gently as a natural part of a connected narrative, is the nub of a problem that Lisa Miller herself encountered during her post-graduate research. On one occasion, after she had presented a paper on the role of spirituality in resilience to depression a colleague in the audience responded, “I’m just trying to figure out what this data really means. It can’t be spirituality that’s making the difference.” It was a long haul to get her work accepted as scientifically valid while remaining true to the experience of her subjects.

Sam Harris, in a passage I’ve quoted here before, writes:

I share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms spiritual and mystical are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences but about reality at large. Far too often, these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem, because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these experiences are false. But the fact [is] that… [t]he human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover.

Later in Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion, we read:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Atheism and spirituality are not opposed; it only looks that way through the lenses of our cultural preconceptions. If we are already convinced that spirituality is unscientific mumbo-jumbo, then that is how we will hear first-hand accounts of such experience; if we are already convinced that all atheists are irredeemably reductionist physicalists, then we shall be on the defensive before any conversation can even begin.

We need those who, like Lisa Miller and Sam Harris, are prepared to ignore the prevailing preconceptions and look for the sources of these profound ways of being human. There are more implications than merely our own personal journeys, too. Human wellbeing, resilience and connectedness, on a fundamental level, depend – as Miller points out – upon the possibility of brain-states that are an inherent part of who we are. That this is “biologically identical whether or not [we are] explicitly religious, physiologically the same whether the experience occurred in a house of worship or on a forest hike in the ‘cathedral of nature'” (ibid.) is perhaps one of the essential insights of our time. We need to celebrate the fact that our vital spirituality is in no way dependent on our belief in supernatural entities; that atheist spirituality is alive and well, and (at least potentially!) living between the ears of each of us.

Why?

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I realise that yesterday’s post may have seemed unnecessarily startling. “Atheist” is one of those words, like “evangelical” or “apostate”, almost guaranteed to produce a sharp intake of breath on the part of the reader. I apologise – but I did want to be definite, having prevaricated on the issue for so long.

Please don’t imagine that I’ve turned away from the contemplative life, or that I’ve decided to embrace some “There’s nowt but muck and brass, lad!” brand of materialism. I hope you’ll forgive me for quoting Sam Harris yet again:

I share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms spiritual and mystical are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences but about reality at large. Far too often, these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem, because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these experiences are false. But the fact [is] that… [t]he human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover.

And that is the problem – if it is a problem – I have had to face here. It is far too easy to read the word “atheist”, as I sometimes did myself in the past, and imagine someone for whom “all talk of spirituality [is] a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception.” I am not that man.

In fact, until the relatively recent extremes of polarisation set in, many of those we think of as archetypal atheists, like Bertrand Russell, had hearts open to experience beyond everyday consensus reality.

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory: And Other Essays (Routledge Classics)

I confess that having spent much of my life wrestling with spiritual insight on the one hand and unease with the concept of the supernatural on the other, I am profoundly relieved to be able at last to admit, to myself as much as to anyone, that atheist probably does come closer to describing my metaphysical attitude than anything else I can think of. I did consider using the softer “nontheist” (a term beloved of some contemporary Quakers) but I couldn’t get away from the sense that to use the term of myself was once again clouding the issue. I have to admit, though, that there is a passage using it, in Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, that comes as close to expressing my own feelings at the moment as anything I’ve read:

The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God… Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold… Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves… Nontheism is finally realizing there is no babysitter you can count on.

I am an atheist

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I have written here before (most recently here) of my increasing difficulty with organised religion, its practices and its dogmas, its internal turf wars and its external grasping after the levers of political and, worse, military power. What I haven’t discussed clearly enough, perhaps, is my unease at a far more fundamental level. It has taken me far too long fully to admit this unease to myself, let alone to attempt to write about it. Even now I am nervous about setting it down in permanent form.

God is usually understood, in monotheistic religions, “as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith” (Wikipedia). I have very gradually come to realise that even at the most overtly Christian periods of my life this did not describe anything I could relate to the ground of being (Paul Tillich) of my own experience. I have increasingly found it impossible to “maintain the truth that God is beyond essence and existence while simultaneously arguing for the existence of God.” (Tillich)

Spirituality, it seems to me, is far more about the discovery of meaning and purpose in direct experience – ultimately of the ontological ground itself – than it ever has been about supernatural entities however exalted. As I keep saying, this is actually very simple: it is just a matter of practice, and some measure of honesty in thinking through the implications of one’s experience.

Sam Harris, in a passage I’ve quoted often here before, writes:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Waking Up

I’m not sure I’ve encountered a better summary. And yet Harris also writes (ibid.) “…many spiritual teachings ask us to entertain unfounded ideas about the nature of reality—or at the very least to develop a fondness for the iconography and rituals of one or another religion.” I have been trying no longer to entertain unfounded ideas.

Nontheist Quakers, among others, have of course long engaged with this issue. But for me, at this late stage in my life, something simpler is needed. I have to own up to having discovered myself to be an atheist. There is no need to imagine the supernatural. The mystery of the natural is, at rest in its ground, all that we are. In that there is all the peace and clarity I had not expected, but had so long sought.