Atheism and spirituality

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.