Spirituality and Religion

 

The Dalai Lama describes the difference between religion and spirituality as follows: Religion I take to be concerned with faith in the claims to salvation of one faith tradition or another, an aspect of which is acceptance of some form of metaphysical or supernatural reality, including perhaps an idea of heaven or nirvana. Connected with this are religious teachings or dogma, rituals, prayer and so on. Spirituality I take to be concerned with those qualities of the human spirit - such as love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony - which bring happiness to both self and others. ("Ancient Wisdom, Modern World")

A faith tradition or religion is built around a concept of a supernatural reality, which comes with its own set of rules and its own handbook of how to behave. What's right or wrong is determined by these rules, made by people. Let's be clear about the fact that all those rules are put together in good faith and are meant to serve as guidelines to Life for the believer. Also, those who practice religion would be right to say that the qualities, or virtues, described above as spiritual are the fruits of genuine religious endeavour. Religion therefore has everything to do with developing those qualities and with what may be called spiritual practice. Yet it seems there is much confusion, as often among believers as among non-believers, concerning what this spiritual practice actually consists off. It must be clear, however, that the unifying characteristic of the described "spiritual" qualities has to be some level of concern for others' well-being. More so, each of the qualities listed above is defined by an implicit concern for others' well-being. But beyond that, the one who is compassionate, loving, patient, tolerant, forgiving and so on recognises to some extend the potential impact of their actions on others and the influence on their conduct accordingly. Thus spiritual practice involves on the one hand acting out of concern for others' well-being; and on the other, it entails transforming ourselves so that we become more readily disposed to act that way.

How has the confusion about spiritual practice and religious dogma infiltrated our daily lives?

The source of human consciousness, spirit, or power is considered Divine in most religious and cultural traditions, from the ancient Greek and Hindu teachings to the Chinese and Mayan. Most every culture's myths recount Divine interaction with humanity in stories of the gods mating with human beings to produce godlike and half-godlike offspring. These offspring embody the full spectrum of human behaviour: from great acts of creation, destruction, and vengeance to petty acts of jealousy, rivalry, and pique, to transcendental acts of metamorphosis, sex, and sensuality. The early cultures that created these divine mythologies were exploring their emotional and psychological natures and the powers inherent in the human spirit.

Among God stories, however, the Jewish tradition is unique, because Yahweh is never depicted as being sexual. God is referred to as having a right and a left hand, but the description never continues "below the waist". Unlike other spiritual traditions, the Jews transferred only limited human qualities to Yahweh, maintaining a more distant relationship with their inaccessible Divine.

When Christianity appeared on the scene their followers gave their God a human body. They began their new theology with a biospiritual event, which crossed the biological divide, the Annunciation. The angel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary that she has shown great favour with the Lord and is to bear a son and call him Jesus. The implication is that God is the biological father of this child, Jesus, the son of God. Suddenly the abstract Divine principle in Judaism called Yahweh was mating with a human woman. As a direct consequence, the description of Adam's body in the Book of Genesis as created "in the image of God" was interpreted in the literal sense, no longer symbolically. The notion that we are biologically made in the image of God remains a major literal and archetypal aspect of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

The thread common to all spiritual myths is that human beings are compelled to merge their bodies with the essence of God, in which image we are made. In belief systems around the world, conceptions of the Divine's spiritual nature reflect the best human qualities and characteristics. Since at our best we are compassionate, then God must be all-compassionate; since we are capable of forgiveness, then God must be all-forgiving; since we are capable of love, then God must be only love; since we try to be just, Divine Justice must rule over our efforts to balance right and wrong. We have woven the Divine into all aspects of our lives, our thoughts and our actions, and His qualities are what we call "spirituality".

Today, leaving behind the many dogmatic differences between traditional religions, many spiritual seekers are trying to infuse their daily lives with a heightened consciousness, striving to act in a more spiritual way. Such conscious living is an innovation, a request for personal spiritual authority. It represents a dismantling of the old religions' classic parent-child relationship to God and a move into spiritual adulthood. Spiritual maturation includes learning to read the spiritual language of the body. As we become more conscious and recognise the impact of our thoughts and attitudes - our internal life - upon our physical bodies and external lives, we no longer need to conceive of an external parent-God that creates for us and on whom we are fully dependent. As spiritual adults we accept responsibility for co-creating our lives and our health. Co-creation is in fact the essence of spiritual adulthood: it is the exercise of choice and the acceptance of our responsibility for those choices.

That is a spiritual revolution, not a religious one. By transcending religious dogmas and rituals and embracing the qualities of the spirit there will be a radical reorientation away from our habitual preoccupation with the self toward the wider community of beings with whom we are connected. There will be an emphasis on conduct which recognises others' interests alongside our own, instead of conduct which primarily strives to adhere to the rules laid before us by a particular religious belief.

What, then, is the relationship between spirituality and ethical practice?

Since love and compassion and similar qualities all, by definition, presume some level of concern for others' well-being, they also presume ethical restraint. We cannot be loving and compassionate unless at the same time we curb our own harmful impulses and desires.

Certainly each of the main religious traditions has a well-developed ethical system. However, the difficulty with tying our understanding of right and wrong to religion is that we must then ask, "Which religion?" The arguments would never stop, creating a new world war. And what about people who reject religion? Are these people without a sense of right or wrong all together? Even so, religious belief is no guarantee of moral integrity. Looking at human history, we see that among the major troublemakers - those who visited violence, brutality and destruction on their fellow human beings - there have been many who professed religious faith, often loudly.

If we do not accept religion as the source of ethics, must we then allow people's understanding of what is good and right, of what is wrong and bad, to vary according to circumstances and even from person to person? Equally, we will have to acknowledge that it is impossible to device a set of rules or laws to provide us with the answer to every ethical dilemma. This is not to say that it is useless to attempt to construe principles which can be understood as morally binding. We must have some means of adjudicating between, for example, terrorism as a means to political reform and Gandhi's principles of peaceful resistance. We must be able to show that violence toward others is wrong. And yet we must find some way of doing so which avoids the extremes of crude absolutism on the one hand, and of trivial relativism on the other.

Establishing binding ethical principles is possible if we take as our starting point the observation that we all desire happiness and wish to avoid suffering. We have no means of discriminating between right and wrong if we do not take into account others' feelings, others' suffering. The notion of absolute truth is difficult to sustain outside the context of religion. Consequently, ethical conduct is not something we engage in because it is right in itself but because we and all others desire happiness and want to avoid suffering. Each individual has a right to pursue this goal, and therefore the one thing that determines whether an act is ethical or not must be the effect it has on others' experience or expectation of happiness. An act which harms or does violence to this is potentially an unethical act.

Potentially because there are other factors to be considered besides the consequences of our actions, such as the intention and the nature of the act itself. Sometimes we may upset people despite the fact it was by no means our intention to do so. Equally, some acts may appear somewhat forceful and aggressive and likely to cause hurt, yet they could contribute to others' happiness in the long run, such as disciplining young children. On the other hand, the fact that our actions may appear to be gentle does not mean that they are positive or ethical if our intentions are selfish. The factor which is perhaps most important of all in determining the ethical nature of an act is neither its content, nor its consequences, however. In fact, since only rarely are the fruits of our actions directly attributable to us alone, consequence could conceivably be the least important factor.

The greatest significance in determining the ethical value of a given action is what actually drives or inspires our actions. The individual's overall state of heart and mind will determine the value of his/her actions, both those we intend directly and those which in a sense are involuntary. When the state of mind is wholesome, it follows that our actions themselves will be ethically wholesome. The more we transform our hearts and minds through cultivating spiritual qualities, the better able we will be to cope with adversity and the greater likelihood that our actions will be ethically wholesome.

All we can do is striving continuously to cultivate a positive, or wholesome mind-state, to try and be of the greatest service to others that one can be. In addition to this, one has to make sure that the content of ones actions is similarly positive, as far as one is able to make them thus. How effective this strategy is, what the consequences are in terms of others' well-being, either in the short or the long term, there is no way to tell. But provided ones efforts are continual and provided one pays attention, one can be sure that the best has been done.

But how can we resolve ethical dilemmas?

By relating ethics to the basic human experience of happiness and suffering we avoid the problems which arise when we ground ethics in religion. If we additionally consider the effects of the spiritual revolution as described earlier, whereby a coming of age means an outgrowing of religious dogmas and an acceptance of individual responsibility, we should find that ethical dilemmas melt away as snow under the sun. A wholesome state of mind, which also includes the notion that all other individuals are entitled to their own state of mind, will ensure that every action, every thought, and every word is for the enhancement of all happiness and for the lessening of all suffering. Allowing others to have a different way towards the same goal will clearly show that what appears to be a dilemma, is in fact not split but congruous. This appears to be a dilemma becauise it is seen from two different view points.

Once again we can rest assured that by fully concentrating on our own actions and thoughts, the storms that surround us will die down, the ripples in the world will smooth out, the stillness and peace will spread. The "with-in" rules and regulates the "with-out".

February 2003