Question: What is the difference between spirituality and religion?
Robert Thurman: Spirituality is love and compassion, as far as I’m concerned; meaning that you are not just being rationally stuck within what you think your body is wired to. You’re going into a deeper area of your mind where you are asserting your free will. You’re choosing to be friendly and compassionate with people whether or not they irritate you, or whether or not they’ve done something to you. You‘re nevertheless choosing some sort of extraordinary—it shouldn’t be extraordinary really—response or outreach to people. Spirituality really is touching; you let go of your self-protective and defensive controls, and what you tap into is the nature of the universe, the flow of energy interconnecting things. Then, you naturally feel like interconnecting. Spirituality is where you let go, therefore, of your narrow control of identifying yourself just as your body: “I’m holding on to my chair;” this kind of thing.
That is, of course, the heart of religion too, but unfortunately religion has this other component where it goes into something instead of what the sociologist might call “pattern transcending activity” or “mental activity.” It becomes a tool of the state and society, and their conventional culture, to control people. To say, “you have to do this,” and “you need that ritual, obey this rule.” It stifles people and spirituality, and in the name of it people will kill each other, and they’ll hate people who don’t have the same belief instead of being loving and friendly. They will misinterpret or they will allow the priesthoods to misinterpret the teachings of the great founders—who are truly spiritual, and who said, you know, “Don’t behave like that”—and they start behaving like the Roman Catholic Church.
The Catholic part is great: universal. The Church of Jesus is great. But the Roman part is the Roman Empire from Constantine, and it’s a dominating thing, and it’s conflicting even for the priesthood, and of course many of the priests were still saintly and wonderful, when they are more great mystics. They were better before the Protestants made then try to be more social, but to compete with them they too much adopted the stance of the Roman Empire is the problem. Religions do that. Buddhism too. It becomes a control mechanism rather than a liberating mechanism.
Discuss
tim hall on July 28, 2009, 2:59 PM
I am very much a fan of Robert’s explanation. However, when he describes spirit as love and compassion and free-will, and letting go of self, I favor the belief that it is more of letting go of pre-existing social fears in order to have compassion for others. I believe that the spirit that he defines is totally psychological. When he says " going into a deeper portion of mind = psychological.
I am still searching for fact that spirit connects with the nature of things. I still have suspicion that the very powerful human brain loves to please itself. That by doing good for others, therefor it is good. The differences in how much good one brain decides to do over another has to do with it’s gene make-up and it’s past experience. All psychological, given we are talking directly about genes located in the brain.
shawn disney on July 28, 2009, 11:34 PM
Very good. I like Alan Watts’ formulation that the purpose of organized Religion is to protect people from spiritual experiences.. Rather than consider spirituality as part of a brain function, I think it is more helpful to think of it as a manifestation of a Physical “Field”, analogous to the ones we know from Physics, where of course, it only appears to be a paradox that we, “The Individual” are doing the reacting. disigny
tim hall on July 29, 2009, 1:04 PM
shawn, the physical field only works in theory using numbers. I can only assume that spirit is a powerful brain function for now. We cannot see radio waves. But they are there because we have the instruments to detect them. Until we have instruments to detect spirit, the physics are only a munipulation of numbers=theory. We have been down this road a thousand times. We even had the group from Berkly using LSD to prove the brain’s wide range of subconsciousness.
sciencesaves on July 31, 2009, 8:52 AM
There’s an interesting study done recently involving mri scans of neurological activity when religious input is applied to the subjects. It seems that some folks are predisposed toward irrational belief.
Whether or not this is inherent, or learned, it looks like some folks lean more heavily toward escapism, and the non-spiritual mindset that most organized religions promote these days. Spiritualism isn’t something that you gain from rituals involving belief in supernatural hearsay, it’s about perspective rooted in reality, and the natural down-to-earth viewpoint that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. We start lifes journey with an open mind, then organized religion attempts close it with the premise of protecting people from themselves? Trash vessels?!!!
I believe that all humans have the ability to get past the paradox, and focus on more meaningful activities and outlooks, but the propaganda continues…
tim hall on July 31, 2009, 10:56 AM
Ok, I will commit to spirit of the brain in the same context as spirit of the race horse.
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