Spirituality revisited

Thinking again about spirituality. Now, instead of trying to come up with a universal definition, I am a lot more comfortable with having separate definitions. I was specifically thinking about Native American spirituality, and I know that they thought about things significantly different than Christians. I checked the Internet and found this on Caroline Myss's site:

Indigenous peoples look on the cosmos as a living womb that nurtures their lives, and so they have less neeed to destroy or reshape it as more technologically developed cultures do (although they sometimes abuse the land and livestock as developed cultures do). Their goal could be described as achieving harmony in the personal, social, and cosmic realms, rather than gaining personal salvation or liberation as historical religions aim to do.

And she's right. It is different from Christian Spirituality. Christian Spirituality is primarily about connecting with the Holy Spirit.

Strangely enough, I looked for definitions of Spirituality before, but for some reason I hadn't looked at Wikipedia, which is strange, because that's usually my first stop. Anyway, I looked today, and what caught my attention was the section on spiritual practices:

1. Somatic practices, especially deprivation and diminishment. Deprivation aims to purify the body. Diminishment concerns the repulsement of ego-oriented impulses. Examples include fasting and poverty.
2. Psychological practices, for example meditation.
3. Social practices. Examples include the practice of obedience and communal ownership, reforming ego-orientedness into other-orientedness.
4. Spiritual. All practices aim at purifying ego-centeredness, and direct the abilities at the divine reality.

I'm giving the side eye to that last one. Maybe Supernatural would be a better description.

The interesting here though, is that even though there are wildly different definitions of spirituality, I think that in terms of practice, they all fall into these four categories.

I found some pretty good descriptions on Quora. Here's one: Anything that is not related to material world enters the domain of spirituality. I like this one because it is pretty all encompassing.

As I'm reading others definitions, what strikes me is that spirituality involves connecting to something. And this connection makes us better as people. To many people this connection is to the divine. Some people see the divine as God, some see it as nature. Some see it as a force that is present in all things. Some people see the connection as being with ourselves, to know ourselves better, to be better.

Self-love vs. selfishness

There is a difference between self-love or self-esteem and selfishness. And it is an important difference. Selfishness is basically what the bible equates as evil. The bible also advocates loving others, but I have learned that this is not possible unless one loves self first.

This is a topic that I definitely need to explore further, but right now, my studies are more pressing.

The opposite of cosmos

The opposite of cosmos is chaos. I wish I had known that sooner. That would have made my understanding of what cosmos means a lot easier.

Tribalism

For awhile now I have been talking about this mentality that I see in both political and religious circles of demonizing "the other." Somewhere I heard this described as tribalism. I searched for articles about this and found some good ones.

First I read this article by David P entitled How Tribalism Overrules Reason, and Makes Risky Times More Dangerous. He gives an example of religious tribalism from his youth, but explains that tribalism extends to politics, race, and gender as well. We choose tribalism, he says, to keep us safe, and it trumps morality, reason and anything else that would threaten our survival. But that's dangerous.

Amy Chua wrote about The Destructive Dynamics of Political Tribalism in the New York Times. She ends with this statement:

But the emergence of coastal elites as an insular minority is also rooted squarely in the breakdown of national unity — in the fracturing of our country into two (or more) Americas in which people from one tribe see others not just as the political opposition, but as immoral, evil and un-American. America desperately needs leaders with the courage to break out of the tribalist cycle, but where are we going to find them?

Toby Young follows up Chua's thinking in We are being destroyed by tribalism. Let's get rid of it.  He explains how Chua makes a correlation between Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Donald Trump and how our political climate created an environment where working class whites were feeling disenfranchized and Trump stepped right in and gave them someone to rally behind.