A Minimalist Orientation

The spiritual life—at least in the context of this blog—needs something more than the usual definition. The phrase is usually understood as life within a religious framework and, specifically, those aspects of such a life that relate to prayer, worship, and personal morality. Using that definition, the believer—the practitioner—already has a firm belief. A well-formed cosmology is part of that belief.

But what about the person who starts from disbelief? Such a condition or view may be inherited (as religious belief usually are too); alternatively the person arrives at disbelief because he or she honestly cannot accept the teachings on offer in the culture. In the West that usually means Christianity. I emphasize honestly to brush aside shallow, juvenile, or self-pleasing motives: rebellion, restraints on sexuality, or thoughtless imitation of supposedly superior, cynical scoffers. People can arrive at disbelief for serious reasons too; and those who do may well discover the spiritual life as well. It will begin in the same way, namely by an examination of the alternative.

Every alternative to any system of beliefs is ultimately a different cosmology. It is for that reason that I talk about that subject on Borderzone. Every cosmology is a description of reality in the large frame, a map of reality. It explains the whole, it tells us where things are, it tells us where we are. It provides a narrative in two parts. One tells us how we came to be here. The other shows us where we might be going. And there are only two kinds: materialistic or transcendental. In the materialistic the individual progresses to death and total disappearance in death. In the transcendental the projection forward offers alternatives. To put it in simplest terms, one outcome is up, the other down. Different transcendental systems have different narratives for what the words up and down mean. In any case, in these systems death is a transition, not an absolute termination. And since up is better than down, life takes on a meaning beyond itself. In the materialistic frame, only this life has any meaning, and that meaning always refers to here and now.

In the Buddhist and Hindu systems down means rebirth in this world. The individual continues to go around and round. Up means escape from the wheel of karma, thus the wheel of suffering. In the Judaic family of religions, down is hell and up is heaven, the union with God. Hell is eternal except in Kabbalistic beliefs; these hold that at the very end even hell is emptied of its inhabitants.

With this extremely compressed summary, a more generalized definition of the spiritual life is possible. It begins with the acceptance of a transcendental cosmology. It is a personal decision to believe in a greater order—or a conviction reached in some way that a greater order actually exists beyond this realm, beyond personal death, and that the way we live our life may literally—not just figuratively—determine which path we’ll individually follow after our breath finally stops: up or down.

Some may say that such a decision is impossible to make on current evidence. Hence agnosticism is the only rational course. It is to these people that Pascal proposed his famous wager. For more, check here. To adapt the wager to this context: if on the one hand you have absolute personal death, no matter what you do, and on the other limitless life beyond the border in an upper realm (with effort) or a lower realm (with negligence), you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by acting on the probability that the transcendental model is correct.

This minimalist framing assumes that there is only one real quest, one real goal and that all sincere beliefs, regardless of the details into which they elaborate the cosmology, are equivalent. But this framing, simple that it is, doesn’t even begin to delineate the spiritual life as it is actually lived. Such a life may be religious—or not. What the frame defines is the minimum orientation that such a life requires.