Is Rational Spirituality possible – Analyzing Ideologies.

Spirituality a taboo for accepted rational frameworks: a myth?

“Swami, do you think spirituality is really a no-no for rational ideologies?  Is a rationalist not supposed to identify himself with the ways of mind, to acknowledge its extreme convolution, or to tap potential values or delectations it offers to life? ”

“Good question, especially since we have just examined if spiritual leaders really care for reason, and the answers we got were not very encouraging. While such a discussion was rather beneficial for the spiritualists to introspect, what you are now asking is of use to the less religious (the exact phrase Swami used was “religiously challenged”) among us.

See - for being able to draw in a meaning to the whole discussion of reason in spirituality, we need to make sure that the ideology has been followed by a definite crowd. There is no meaning, for example, to dissect epistemological Rationalism in its fullest just to see how we can relate spiritualistic notions to the ideology. A more constructive exercise would be to examine some of the ideologies that are, or at least were, closely tying in with the social mainstream. What are we going to do with the philosophical views that are spending their lives in metaphoric “cellulose-asylum’ in philosophy books or those who have never set out from the cortical cobwebs of their conceivers?

So, let’s have a purpose-built discussion here, keeping in mind the general nature of all rational ideologies, which stresses on logic, reason and proof. The obvious sine qua non for our analysis is that, in the sort of spirituality we consider here there is no room for pranks, ticks and charms, bogus rituals, make-believing or any other esoteric shallow knowledge (though being esoteric in it cannot be considered irrational, but where there are no seamless interfacing systems in place with natural reasoning, such ideas cannot be entertained.). Let’s see if any major established system of thought in which the major chuck of practitioners or admirers of rationalism falls forbids its practitioners from being spiritual”

As it turned out, I witnessed something more than what Swami promised. Towards the end of each segment of analysis, I saw Swami slipping into slightly subjective discourses - from which I could easily deduce his ideological inclination.

“Swami, despite all corners busy gearing up to a hasty entombment of Communism, I strongly believe it is still a force to reckon with. Like it or not, ‘Left’ in India is Marxism-Communism-Socialism for many, as is the case elsewhere in the world. And I know many leftists are exceedingly puzzled as to what approach they would espouse on Spirituality. I wish to hear from you on this arena first”

“I agree. As the most influential rational ideology the planet has ever witnessed, it is emphatically essential to start our discussion at this point. But the challenge here is to accommodate and address this at the application level. I am not ready to take up that futile challenge here. Communist parties may have their agenda cut out based on their geo-political consideration. But be mindful that our goal is not to dissect the ideologies, to analyze it from a historical or societal perspective and to pronounce a verdict, but is merely to look for what the underlying thought-system has to say about sublime-cognition, spirit, mind, soul and spirituality. Same is applicable to all discussions we are going to have.

At the conceptual or the ideological level, I prefer to choose Marxian Dialectical Materialism for analysis. Dialectical Materialism defines boundaries to human cognitive space in terms of sensory possibilities. World, physical or metaphysical, objective or subjective, spiritual or materialistic can thus be perceived as a totality of what human senses can ever experience. Everything you think, feel or do is a product or a reflection of material realities and conditions. Spirit is not so much of a detached reality than it is a product of material conditions. This is very similar to what science says. Now, the interesting finding here is that, while explicitly defining the materialistic world as having objective reality independent of mind or spirit, Dialectical Materialism does not ever deny the reality of mental processes. It just holds that all mental and cognitive states could arise only as products and reflections of material conditions. Spirituality is no exception!

So, if you have an inclination towards Marxism and want to live a spiritual life, you can heave a sigh of relief – your ideology doesn’t prevent you from being spiritual as long as you consider all your experiences as reflections of your material being - just not to venture to combine or reconcile materialism with any form of idealism!

That said, I won’t recommend anybody to be a Dialectical Materialist in order to be rationally spiritual. Anybody who is not currently associated with this flavor of Materialism may find it being synonymous with Marxist authoritarianism; it may fail to live up to the need of the hour – one that satisfies a stressful world that is fed up with too much of materialism already. However hard we try, we can’t overlook the dubious distinction of Dialectical Materialism as being too overbearing to assist a genuine pursuer of truth. We need to move ahead from that point, as being judgmental just distracts us from our goal.

“Well – Swami, I know you wish to be known more of a Humanist than anything else….”

“…a rational, secular Humanist”

I know why he resorted to couple of adjectives here. Lately, it was me who invited Swami’s attention to an ideology that a major Indian political party, which is known for its overt religious disposition, has adopted as their declared, official philosophy: Integral Humanism. Swami had been visibly worried at the use of the term “humanism” here, but in the end, Swami and me spent a long and interesting hour discussing this, and we both wondered how easy is it to propound a “new philosophy” just by renaming an ancient set of beliefs and by defying established ideologies using incredibly simplistic statements like : “..We do not want socialism because it lets the law of Marx prevail. We don't want capitalism because it makes people take sleeping pills to go to sleep…”!!

“All right – a rational, secular Humanist. Speak on…”

“The strength and weakness of Humanism is its unparalleled flexibility. Interestingly enough, the words rationalism and humanism are used more and more interchangeably these days. Even though Humanism as a philosophy doesn’t vary much from what Rationalism has to offer, Humanism is widely adapted as a preferred ideology for many over plain rationalism partly, I think, due to the way it simply sounds. It might well be taken for some ideology that celebrates human potential and existence, and rightly so.

It does acknowledge the human endeavors in molding and existence in individual, societal and worldly contexts. Humanism is immensely liberated, doesn’t ideally stand for any set of defined principles whatsoever. This innate generality of Humanism has paved way to countless movements worldwide using in its name – some are good and others are well – may be unacceptable to most. Secular Humanism is an ideological denial of all supernatural and religious beliefs; but strange are the ways of politics and organizations – they can bend and bulge anything in their favor. But in general, humanism, to me, is the best ideology one can adopt in his life.

The most important facet of Humanism is that it doesn’t support mind-body dualism. It considers a human being to be a complete system and unit in itself with body, mind and personality as its components or characteristics. Being entirely autonomous, any detached existence for soul or spirit before or after life is obviously not advocated. That is quite acceptable for reason, isn’t it? But our question here is if it holds back one from exploring any potential of human soul. Not only does it answers this question in resounding negation, but humanism categorically celebrates human abilities to make well thought out, reflective, matured decisions in life and gives complete liberty to an individual to apply any, all or a subset of his composite abilities for betterment of himself and humanity.

In a nutshell, Humanism more or less encourages spiritual pursuits!”

“Fair enough! Now, don’t get irritated; I know you don’t particularly like Ayn Rand; but I would like you to talk about Objectivism now..” !

“Do you really want me to do that? Firstly, we may not be able to measure the influence and reach of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism as an ideology. I doubt how many of her tight admirers of “Atlas Shrugged” or “The Fountainhead” would actually have adopted Objectivism as their life’s philosophy. What I have observed so far is that, Ayn Rand’s followers, by and large, only include staunch advocates of radical Capitalist values and a handful of over-zealous tender-brains with unreasonably blotted ego. I am not sure if they really know what they say when they try their wits end to bracket Ayn Rand along with top-notch Philosophers and genuine pursuers of truth. I regret to say this, but she was not more than a frustrated refugee from erstwhile Soviet Union who didn’t have any control whatsoever over her emotions as well as over her writings…”

“Stop, please. We can have another discussion to work out your distaste. For the time, please let me know how Objectivism would look at spirituality”

“An Objectivist stand on Spirituality can only be analyzed with the help of Objectivist theory of perception. Here again, as in the case of any rationalistic philosophical stream of thought, we can see that all cognitive activities are explained through the rational and natural correlation the senses and the sensed. The prime distinction here, though, is that Rand argues that knowledge or awareness is not absolute, and it is wrong to pursue absolute knowledge unmindful of the object and context of such knowledge.  Same holds good for any spiritual attainment. This is how I would interpret Objectivist spirituality here. True Objectivists are welcome to comment.

If spirituality can ever provide anything other than our normal experiences, that can only be considered as an aberration in one’s own interpretation of whatever perceived, due to the complexity and enormity of cognitive data during the spiritual exercise. The data collected by our senses are absolute, our sensory capabilities are absolute, but the potentiality of reasoning based on the sensory data would have forced us to circumvent the actuality of the experience. Thus it is highly likely that we would interpret the spiritual experience to be either unnatural or hallucinatory. But here again, it doesn’t explicitly say that spiritual experiences are non-existent or irrational.”

“Is that all?

“There can be no end to this discussion. There are dozens of such ideologies lining up for consideration, literally. Humanism itself manifests into Transhumanism through Religious Humanism. We have Secularism and its Indian version. We then have naturalism through Epicureanism. But make no mistake dear, there is no ideology I mulled over defies either the existence or the possibilities of spirituality.”

Next:  Spirituality minus religion, Part-5: Solution, Conclusion