What is "Spirituality" anyway?
I would like some real examples and definitions. My favorite example is a dog enjoying the sun on its nose. If you mean being someone like Mother Teresa, forget it – that woman's faith has kept uncounted people in superstition and disease by her condemnation of condoms and abortion. Really, you should be able to describe something as important as spirituality – shouldn't you? Is it contentment? Happiness? Self-satisfaction?
Returning to my example of the dog in the sun, spirituality is when one's biology, including one's brain, is running smoothly – when one does not live in unsatisfied and unsatisfiable fantasies – when one is not sputtering around on pipedreams, toxic chemicals, and untreated diseases. There is no such thing as spirituality, and it's easier to prove that God is a sadistic demon than a benevolent guardian.
Right now a six-year-old child is being brutalized in a dark apartment and crying for God to help her... Sadly, God won't help. Karma fares no better.
Nietzche said that compassion is too rare to waste on imaginary beings. The "spirituality" that describes itself as acceptance of the child's brutalization is a shameful waste of the short time we have here on earth. My advice to the newcomer is to use the sleepy spirtuality during one's convalescence, but at some point, we are cured and need to return to the struggle to make this world better – without hiding behind our "recovery".
Returning to my example of the dog in the sun, spirituality is when one's biology, including one's brain, is running smoothly – when one does not live in unsatisfied and unsatisfiable fantasies – when one is not sputtering around on pipedreams, toxic chemicals, and untreated diseases. There is no such thing as spirituality, and it's easier to prove that God is a sadistic demon than a benevolent guardian.
Right now a six-year-old child is being brutalized in a dark apartment and crying for God to help her... Sadly, God won't help. Karma fares no better.
Nietzche said that compassion is too rare to waste on imaginary beings. The "spirituality" that describes itself as acceptance of the child's brutalization is a shameful waste of the short time we have here on earth. My advice to the newcomer is to use the sleepy spirtuality during one's convalescence, but at some point, we are cured and need to return to the struggle to make this world better – without hiding behind our "recovery".
posted by Troy Spears at 2:18 PM
1 Comments:
"We have come to believe He would like us to keep our heads in the clouds with Him, but that our feet ought to be firmly planted on earth." (Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 9 'The Family Afterwards')
i think that passage captures the often absurd underpinnings of all too much of AA’s ‘spirituality’: “keep our heads in the clouds” … he’s kidding about that, right?
it needs to be said: the 'spirituality' articulated in the big book, the 12x12, and all too many shares at meetings is one woefully lacking in philosophical & theological rigor. take one part happenstance, two parts willful naiveté, add lip service to 'god' and voila -- spiritual experience!
it's not so much the indifference of most AA’s to the suffering of your metaphorical 'brutalized child' i personally find so difficult to countenance. rather, it’s the narcissistic insistence that an omniscient, omnipotent, [presumably] benevolent entity will act to keep one person sober while allowing crushing poverty & ethnic or religious strife to destroy thousands of other lives ... on a daily basis! and there’s nothing metaphorical about that suffering and injustice. it's headline news –usually just a few pages past the latest nastiness about britney.
the ‘understanding’ of a personal, intervening deity may be a comforting and sometimes fortifying illusion, but it’s still an illusion. it’s still magical thinking. having drank & drugged myself to the point of psychosis on three separate occasions, i'm decidedly not ‘willing’ to indulge illusion & magical thinking as a method for getting & staying sober.
for the most part, i think, the greater percentage of AA’s use personal notions of ‘god’ or the divine as a means toward appreciating & magnifying the positive things (like continued sobriety) in their lives. troubling questions about mortality, suffering, horror, or evil shake the foundations of that and so are ‘put on the shelf’. understandable behavior, even if it doesn’t add up to a terribly convincing or coherent ‘spirituality’.
i can have my own opinion on that kind of thinking, but it's not incumbent on me to pass judgment on my fellows when they (often very vocally) espouse it. when i do, it’s usually me who ends up feeling alienated, angry, and wrong. that said, it is incumbent on me not to perpetuate that kind of thinking. one can have an understanding of the transcendent without indulging the childish need for an all powerful parental figure in the sky.
now to some ears this may sound like ‘AA bashing’, but it’s not. i am very grateful for the fellowship and i am grateful for the structure of the program, grateful to work the steps while discovering a means of having the steps work for me. but the insistence on a spirituality grounded in the acceptance of an intervening ‘father of light’ is the bloated, distended, gas-filled underbelly of bill wilson’s legacy. shot through with contradiction & inconsistency, that spirituality is a dumbing down of 8000 years worth of strenuous philosophical, theological, & intellectual inquiry. less a gentle call to ‘keep it simple’, it’s a thinly veiled command to stay stupid.
the animating breath – the spirit – within all of us, alcoholic or not, impels us to move past such artificial, anthropomorphic boundaries.
your insights & commentary are a very welcome counterpoint to the oceans of hogwash this east coast drunk usually has to wade through. cogent, well-meaning, spirited critique must always be a part of the discourse if an institution means to stay vital.
keep up the good work.
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