What Draws People to the Spiritual?

Here it may be best to start with a distinction—between “religious practice” and “personal spiritual endeavors.” The first may be a spiritual activity, but for most of us the practice began in the family; and later, possibly, especially for those educated in parochial schools, it was socially reinforced by the broader community. I want to focus on the voluntary and the personal spiritual quest—something we undertake on our own without any kind of social nudging.

I would propose three distinct motivations. In any one case, these may appear in mixed forms as well. They are pain, the attraction of magic, and curiosity. I’m not an authority, mind you; I don’t have statistics. I’m just an old man—but rich in experience. My guess is that most people are drawn by pain, frustration, suffering of some kind, even feelings of despair: the feeling that there must be a solution, there must be something better than this one-damned-thing-after-the-other. The sheer problems of ordinary life eventually move some people to wonder; they seek out groups and thus, gradually, develop their own spirituality. This kind of questing is almost always spontaneous, sincere, and motivated by an intuition that another range of reality is needed to complete the individual; albeit the intuition arises because of suffering. To be sure, such people wish to be rid of their pain as well.

The second motive is opportunistic. It springs from a hope of gaining dominance, power, wealth, attention by learning methods, formulae, or procedures. The dominant idea here is that the spiritual is a realm of magical power which might be harnessed to improve life here and now. There is a rather extensive industry on hand to satisfy this need; the Christian brand is usually called the Prosperity Gospel. It has a large footprint in the New Age movement as well. Many, many would be disciples of cults from other cultures are moved by the promise of magical powers. We might call this spiritual materialism because the spiritual is pursued to gain something here and now.

The last motive, curiosity, arises in a small number of usually advanced, thoughtful people who, in attempts to understand the world, encounter a wall and begin to explore alternatives to the dominant ideologies on offer. They are intellectuals and artists. Many well-known converts come from this community. They enter by the paths of philosophy or art (thus reason or a strong sense for patterns); then, having gained knowledge, the seekers deepen as people; eventually they experience stronger intuitions that begin to transform them.

Here I would emphasize three things. One is that some kind of ordinary, call it worldly, impulse sets things off. For this very reason, two, the process need not and often does not continue long enough to lead to real spiritual development. It all depends. It depends, for instance, on the nature of the pain. If a person is lonely and neglected, joining a group or church may assuage that pain; he or she may make new friends, enter into new relationships, and—with the pain now lessened—stabilize on a new level. The power-seeker may never achieve that magic touch, that telepathic power, but engaging in these things may give him or her the feelings of being above the herd. Once more, the process ends prematurely. And the intellectually or artistically motivated may also stop short of penetrating very deeply into the borderzone and sit back in satisfaction when they’ve gained enough to satisfy their curiosity.

The paradoxical feature of spiritual endeavors—and this is three in the aspect I’d like to emphasize—is that such endeavors always refuse to yield ordinary payoffs in the ways imagined by the would be seeker. At the same time, once a person’s spirituality begins to develop in earnest, his or her problems tend to be transformed. They look different. Different attitudes toward them develop. Coping mechanisms are learned. The net result is that the problems diminish; they may disappear entirely. These quests therefore do have a positive worldly result, but never in the ways initially pictured.