Spiritual Practice

I broadly speaking agree with the take that "religion," "spirituality," and "spiritual practice" are not really natural kinds anthropologically or psychologically, and that the modern Western conception is contingent on the specific history of the western church, its relationship with European states, etc. More specifically, my sense is that various societies have constructed a boundary between "religion" and the rest of society in different ways, or not at all, and that the underlying patterns of human behavior and experience seem much messier, overlapping with politics, philosophy, "science," etc.

Nonetheless I'll at least want to make some kinds of distinctions, so I'll refer to a few broad clusters here, with quite a lot of overlap. These definitions aren't unusual but are slightly idiosyncratic:

Religion: the practices and beliefs of organized spiritual communities, especially as part of a larger organization, and especially those with organizational hierarchies and explicit dogma.

Spirituality: the domains of meaning relating to the sacred, devotional practices, mysticism, and ultimate existential meaning.

Mysticism: the practice and experience of non-mundane reality, altered states, theophany, and transcendence. Sometimes also includes esotericism, which usually refers to mystical symbolic systems, especially when culturally marginal or restricted only to those initiated.

Transformative practice: practices and theories of psychological and spiritual development, inclusive of eg. prayer, Western therapy, often "mystical" practices, rites of passage, and sometimes even secular training regimes like those used by militaries.

I'll describe each of these in a little more detail as I conceive of them, how they relate, and what claims various traditions of each of them make.

Religion

Religious traditions, moreso those larger and more organized, and especially the so-called "world religions," generally consist of a. dogma (and a community of believers), b. sacraments, and often initiation, and c. communal rites.

(As it happens, Buddhism doesn't really fit this mold, especially b. and c., but it's so anodyne even in Asia, and irrelevant politically everywhere else, so this is often ignored. Hinduism at least historically is also much messier or leakier with respect to the identified community of believers, since there was no such thing as "Hinduism" until the British Raj.)

Religious dogmas (again at least among "world religions") almost invariably define a metaphysics, defining an axiology with respect to a particular cosmology and ontology, generally featuring some kind of life after death, a God or gods, angels and spirits, and supernormal abilities or miracles. They very often feature a soteriology, seeing the current world as incomplete or fallen, and either a heaven or an escape from this world. They also generally prescribe practices, covenants, and social structures for upright communities to maintain, lest a bad outcome occur, usually in whatever life is to come after this one.

Those traditions most importantly revolve around devotional practice: practices which involve scripted or spontaneous performance of submission, devotion, and adoration to a deity, spirit, or saint. These practices are generally very meant to be imaginally rich, bringing a person into a way of seeing in which they feel they are really communing with a spirit or deity. Often, the sense of the Sacred includes religious paraphernalia or specific holy sites, but most importantly includes the communal-imaginal space created by a religious community. Devotional practice often involve an important aspect of faith or what's sometimes called "hyperstition."

On the gentler side, these can range from personal prayer, communal devotional rites (often surprisingly similar, in the broadest outlines, to familiar Western Christian church services), to Jihad, religious crusades, matyrdom, or extreme acts of pious self denial.

Reports from practitioners in these traditions almost all describe them as ecstatic, joyous, deeply heartfelt, and profoundly meaningful. More specifically, devotional practices are often an overwhelming part of how religious people apprehend goodness, often acutely being some of the most important experiences of people's lives, or a steady source of positive emotions throughout theis lives. (Obviously, many religious people, especially in modern times, experience their religion more as a very socially important institution, but not quite as "the basis of their apprehension of all meaning" or whatever.)

Some religious traditions nominally view devotional practice as a kind of duty, hopefully joyous, but that knowledge of goodness comes through the dogma itself, whereas many others view spiritual practice as the gateway to knowledge of ultimate meaning, and often to direct communion with God. The latter stance shades into or whole-hog becomes mysticism (see below). See also on gnosis.

"World religions" are generally the output of a process of memetic evolution, and the most fecund religious memes have tended toward these features, generally prioritizing legibility and transmissibility, usually in the form of universalism.

On the other hand, so-called "folk religions" and sometimes "shamanic traditions" are much less systematized if at all, this group is such a various and riotous mess that it's hard to say much about in general. Anyway, my impression is that veneration, obeisance, and appeasement of spirits are very common features, while dogma is much weaker if present, and stories of ultimate existential meaning are often absent. Broadly it seems like "world religions" didn't invent the sacred, but probably did invent (or they might prefer "received") universalist religious cosmology.

Spirituality

There's fairly little that's in "spirituality" that's not in religion, but spirituality is a particular angle on the same broader cluster, which excludes many structural features of religions as institutions.

One take here might be that spirituality is the personal, relational aspect of this cluster, whereas "religion" makes salient the structural and institutional features that are present in the spiritualities of most humans alive today. Often, in the modern California style, one can be "spiritual but not religious," but also even a devout religious person's spirituality isn't necessarily coterminous with the orthodox view of their religion.

Moreover, if we widen spirituality, as some anthropologist and sociologists do, to mean just practices of private and communal creation of spaces of sacredness and devotion, then we end up including practices and communities structured around national or ethnic identity, brotherhood, civic responsibility¹, and definitely stories about the long term future of our species, whether good or bad. These often evoke similar emotions and imaginal-relational stances as more stereotypically "religious" practices. I'm in this case basically down with the Durkheimian hypothesis, that religion, spirituality, and the Sacred exist more as stories that allow human communities to coordinate and trust each other, basically orthogonally to their being true, or the specific claims they make.

I'll add that maybe on average, spirituality is more likely than "religion" to include things like mundane beauty, family life, food-as-spiritual-practice, etc. etc.

In any case, I don't think there's a fundamental distinction here. I should say also that both the word, etymologically, and the concept of 'spirituality' as distinct from 'religion' are pretty modern (maybe 16th century), and quite modern in the "spiritual but not religious" sense. Still, it's useful to be able to refer to this concept and distinguish it from religion, when that's meaningful.

Mysticism

Mysticism is yet more nebulous and yet more varied than the dogmas of "world religions." Very broadly mysticism is concerned with experiences of self-and-world which are very different from ordinary daily experience. Maybe a good definition would be the mystician is about gnosis of "spiritual reality".

Reports from what I would categorize as mystical traditions and practitioners, often include (hardly exhaustive):

• Visions (usually experienced as intense and phenomenologically encompassing) of angels, hell, other planets, the far future, etc.
• Extremely altered states of attention and perception, sometimes leading to very strange experiences of self-and-world
  • The body as unreal, paper-thin, jumbled, or absent
  • Same, for the world
  • Same, for "the self," "me," etc. Sometimes also appearing to be contiguous with the external world
    • This one people have a big hardon for, and it's often reported as an utterly profound change in their life, and even the most important experience in their life.
• Speaking to or witnessing God, gods, spirits, "entities," etc.
  • I would regard these experiences as distinct from visions, they're broadly usually crisp, vivid, often interactive, and "live," rather than reported as more timeless, recollected, or "futuresight."
• "Union with" God or the universe
• Knowledge of the ultimate truths of reality, meaning, or value
  • eg. knowledge of past lives and the cycle of rebirth
• Intense bliss states, sometimes bliss-beyond-pleasure, leading into dissolution and transcendence
• Intensely hellish states, including images of horrors, sometimes seemingly contentless intense pain, etc.

Common techniques used to achieve these experiences include:

• """Meditation"""
  • We might include under this physically active but "meditative" practices, eg. Tai Chi or asana yoga.
• """Prayer"""
• Fasting, deprivation, intense sensory experiences otherwise (usually unpleasant but sometimes pleasant), sometimes called "shamanic ordeal"
• Deliberate alteration of the breath, often extremely fast or slow, sometimes more precision control interacting with somatic phenomena
• Psychoactive drugs, obviously including traditional and modern psychedelics, but also sometimes marijuana or even some forms of tobacco
• Rhythmic and hypnotic practices, eg. mantra, drumming, chanting, or some kinds of dance

There are also many reports of mystical experiences occurring spontaneously, with no prior practice or experience, as well as after many years of practice but during downtime, on a walk, or in response to some utterance from a teacher. There are also many reports of these experiences or qualities of perception creeping up on a person over a long period, eg "one day noticing that there just isn't much self around," etc.

Transformative practice

Lots of traditions and communities are concerned with the development and transformation of their members' attitudes, perception, experience, behavior, etc. This includes of course institutional religion, but also of course modern psychotherapy, militaries, penal systems, marginally (but in a real way) educational systems, and much weirder more culturally marginal groups otherwise.

The goals, techniques, and outcomes of these groups are so varied that it's also hard to say much in general here. Still, these often include:

• Most of the practices described under religion and mysticism above
• Ordeals which are meant to arouse more capacity, bravery, or intensity from a person than they were previously capable of
• Practices and experiences meant to lead to changes in values or orientation, eg. "scared straight" type of stuff, but also intense positive experiences, eg. some kinds of outdoor education for delinquent teenagers, or some kinds of communal religious practices; perhaps some aspects of hazing and military training
• Explicitly trying to counter or cover over undesired mental qualities, eg. many things that describe "changing one's thinking," but also eg. most of the techniques of Alcoholic's Anonymous
• """Introspection"""
• Various angles intending explicit catharsis, whether "structural" (that is, introspective), "purely somatic," or more unusual variations

Modern Western schools of transformative practice often have a priority on introspection, or sometimes a kind of, er, "extrospection" aided by a therapist, oriented specifically towards what's often called "insight" (not that this is really one thing).

Footnotes

1. I remember being both taken aback and touched by a video of a capitol police officer on January 6th, addressing some of the er, "rioters"? "demostrators"? who had gotten into the floor of the house, saying "you know this is the most sacred place?" ↩