I don’t know about persistent, but certainly meaningful. I think persistent might be impossible to attain. I think of the moments when I’ve felt most at peace with life, or others, and it’s literally impossible to feel that way all the time.

2) Do you feel that spirituality is a useful term for discussing your own concerns for connection, emotionally transforming experiences, mindfulness, or becoming a better human being?

I think spirituality can be a useful term, as long as it’s clear from the start that it’s being used with a completely non-supernatural connotation.

3) What practices have you tried or adopted in these pursuits?

Honestly, listening to music and watching movies, reading Nietzsche, reading Camus, having philosophical discussions with close friends (and all of these with the influence of mind altering substances, to put it euphemistically) are what I consider “religious” or “spiritual” experiences. I would have to say listening to music under the influence takes my “soul” to it’s greatest heights.

1.Like some others here, I don’t feel a need to pursue meaningful connections to the world around me; they’re there already and just have to be uncovered. Things that deepen that sense of connection are random… Finding the night filled with stars after a good rainstorm (rare for urban southern California) or hearing particularly poignant lyrics in a song can trigger smouldering awe at any given moment, much to the delight of my wife.

2. Like many others here, I don’t like the term spirituality. As I was following my decade long path to atheism, my mom kept referring to me as a spiritual person and it drove me crazy. I think Christie hit that one out of the park so I don’t really have anything more to add.

3. I don’t really do anything. Just being the best husband, parent, friend and person I can be tends to open all sorts of doors that lead to that oceanic experience… Which I think is a great description that I want to use more often!

1) Do you feel a need to pursue a sense of persistent and meaningful connection to humanity, to this planet, or to the universe? Do you feel that you can have singular experiences that can deepen this sense of connection?

Not in a sense that most people would probably recognize as spiritual. I do want to feel a sense of belonging to and with others, in a very run-of-the-mill sense, but to me that’s a spiritual need, which is almost the same as to say, a psychological need, a requirement for mental health.

2) Do you feel that spirituality is a useful term for discussing your own concerns for connection, emotionally transforming experiences, mindfulness, or becoming a better human being?

Only if those discussing are on the same page about what they mean by it. In the past I’ve often been frustrated and disgusted with the way people throw the words “spiritual” and “spirituality” around, as in the stock phrase “I’m spiritual but not religious.” To me that always sounded so mushy and devoid of meaning, like what it really meant was, “I don’t go to church and have never really thought about religion much, but I did see a couple of quotes from the Tao de Ching on someone’s fridge magnets a while back and thought they were very deep.”

More recently, I’ve thought a lot about spirituality in terms of the human psyche, and mapped out for myself a pretty detailed set of beliefs about it – I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in the human soul. Not an immortal soul that has an existence separate from the body, but a fragile, mortal soul that can be lost, bruised, snuffed out, or nurtured. I believe in caring for this soul, in oneself and others, through attention and thought and compassion.

3) What practices have you tried or adopted in these pursuits?

Nothing really, unless you count my attempts at creative writing and the occasional quasi-philosophical essay. I feel like dialogue and honest thought are the practices most likely to nurture my spiritual well-being.

(1)(a) Sometimes, though it is infrequent. When I see a forest, or a sweeping landscape, and I get “that feeling”, I do feel it. I feel the realization that I’m a small part of something huge, that I’m connected to it, and that I affect it in my words, thoughts, and actions. I feel the desire to hold onto that feeling, to live my life constantly reminded that all people and animals are my siblings. It always slips slowly away. I think this means that I should spend more time in places that give me this feeling (or, rather, spend less time but more times in those places) so that I can maintain the sense of “aweism” that they give me.

(1)(b) I have had experiences like I’ve described above, when walking in nature. But I’ve also had experiences that are much more “spiritual”—that do not involve seeing anything physical but a “feeling” that is not a physical sensation nor a mental emotion, but a spiritual experience. They strike me at odd times and they do “deepen [my] sense of connection” to the universe. I might be a better person if I could make them happen more often.

(2) Yes. I think that “spirituality” describes something more than physical, more than mental, more than emotional. Some fourth way of “feeling” that is a deeper sensation.

(3) I have tried zen meditation, yoga, prayer, one-word meditation, koans, sex, sitting on the beach, hiking in the forest. They all work so some degree but mostly the really deep feelings come when I don’t seek them.

In another regard it can be very closely related to actual experiences that significantly changes you, and or your world view, or whatever — something like that. Experiences? Yes, regarding death. And I can well appreciate that there are many sorts and types of these experiences ranging from the highly suspect, sensationalistic ones, all the way up the scale and across broad spectrums. But once *you* have personally had one such significant experience, spirituality takes on a whole new meaning. It becomes something more like a ‘longing.’ It can actually tend to make you become more detached or distracted about things that are happening to you and others in this world. It can also scare the hell into you more than the delight of heaven. You wonder… about a lot of things. And as you wonder, existentialistic notions in the form of Zen, atheism, and even Christianity in some ways (if that was/is your central belief system) begin to fade and become increasingly irrelevant. This type of spirituality becomes almost introverted and very private. It changes you. You’re still not out of the woods; it doesn’t answer *the* question, but it changes you — spiritually.

I think words have no inherent meaning in themselves. Meaning comes only from what people attribute to those words. Sometimes, different people attribute quite different meanings to words, and when we try to discuss using this shared language, we would get nowhere. The meaning of words also evolves over time. Sometimes, pretty innocuous words get colonized by the unscrupulous parties and their meanings get contorted to the exact opposite of what they started out with. What you are proposing is the re-nativization of an innocuous word “spirituality” whose meaning is distorted with a lot of religious baggage. What you should remember is that language is no person’s personal property and your efforts would be successful only when a larger group of people accept and support them.

I want to do something similar with various other words in my own culture, which is Hinduism. As you might know, Hinduism is not a single religion but a conglomeration of a lot of very diverse philosophies (religions). Some of these religions can be considered to be atheistic and agnostic. And most of them are indeed pantheistic. Their ideas are very different from the monotheistic ideas of God, soul etc. But these ideas got super-imposed on these religions during the process of physical colonization that happened during the periods of Muslim and European rule in India. In other words, the meanings of various words got greatly distorted by a millenium of extraneous cultural and religious baggage. If I, for example, say that I believe in Shiva (who is a Hindu god-figure), such a statement would come with a lot of associated baggage that I am not sure if my audience would avoid to finally receive my message. So I tread carefully, and whenever possible, try to create my own vocabulary if that eases matters. The purpose of any language is ultimately towards communication, and if words hinder it instead of promoting it, it is better to not use them at all.

That said, I do understand a lot of the reasons people have stated here for reclaiming or repurposing the term “spirituality,” and I don’t find their arguments without merit. But for now, my aversion to words that have “spirit” in them or have other supernatural baggage outweighs those concerns.

1) I think that my feeling of and desire for connection to other humans stems from the simple fact that we’re all here together. We have the same basic needs and experiences and problems. I do deeply value my friendships and my feeling of connectedness to others. But the fact is, I will live and die and that will be the end of it all for me, there is nothing magic or supernatural about anything. And I find that far more comforting than when I believed in heavens and hells, gods and angels and daemons.

2) I particular dislike the term “spirituality” because of the religious/supernatural connotations is has (perhaps more so to me than others). I don’t have a spirit, there is no ghost in the machine. My emotions, my connections to others, my curiosity and awe at nature/the cosmos are completely and utterly natural, physical, explicable things. They’re a product of the way we evolved, nothing more. I don’t feel there is a difference between the mundane and what some call “spiritual” things. My need to eat food is no more base and less refined than my need to love or the joy I feel when I’m with a friend. I don’t perceive anything as “spiritual” because I believe everything is natural, which doesn’t make it any less fascinating and wonderful. Life just is, for no reason at all. I try to be an ethical person because I evolved a sense of compassion for others, and I feel badly when I fail. It’s all part of the natural human experience.

3) My belief is that I feel because I am human and we evolved that way. I need no other explanation, no deeper meaning, no ritual or practises. I just live my life, enjoy the good parts, and try to make it through the bad ones.

1) I don’t necessarily feel a need to *pursue* connection so much as *uncover* it. In my opinion, sincere connection to the earth and each other is (or should be) the default for humanity; we’ve lost that connection, collectively, for a host of reasons. So for me, it’s a sort of excavation, wading past distractions and limitations to find something that fills me with that sense of awe and purpose and interconnectedness – especially as regards my relationship with nature, which has become so tremendously important to me that I feel real anguish to see ecological destruction. For me, these “singular experiences” occur mostly in nature. I wrote about that here: http://www.phytophiliac.com/2009/10/on-edges.html

2) The term “spirituality” carries so much baggage for me that I cannot find it useful or resist objecting when it’s raised. Unfortunately, I don’t have a better language for it. This was illustrated during a friendly argument I had with my doctor while she was asking about my “spiritual life.” I don’t have one, I said. I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in gods or an afterlife or that I’m anything more that this body. She argued that if I feel close to the land, if I nurture connections between myself and others, then I have a spiritual life. For her, spirituality means contacting or connecting with or embracing something bigger and greater and wiser than herself. For me, it’s about finding my place in something that is not really separate. We discussed it for a while, but ultimately I felt that we were discussing different things.

3) Ritual leaves me cold; some writers touch me but rarely those who set out to do so (Eckhart Tolle being an example of the latter). The quiet meditation during Meeting is about all I can handle of spoon-fed wisdom or prescribed ritual. Spiritually-deaf describes my experiences very well in those areas. As a Mormon, reading scriptures and attending the temple turned me on exactly once – every repetition served only to cheapen and ultimately deaden the experience.

I participate with the Quakers but I observe a gap in our relations. They accept me utterly as an atheist; they recognize that I’m uncomfortable with religious discourse. But I view my relationship with the Quakers as being about facilitating community and activism while, for some of them, being a Quaker is unequivocally about God and religion.

I enjoy a lot of Buddhist philosophy and I’ve embraced some of it in full, but I also feel like a phony white Westerner who probably wouldn’t know real Buddhism if it slapped me with a shit-stick.

Most of the things that really edify me and fuel my spiritual(?) growth are practical and earthy rather than theoretical and enlightening. They hardly seem worth a mention, and that’s how I like it.

One of my major (possibly THE major) moments in transitioning from Mormon to post-Mormon was realizing that I am what I term spiritually-deaf. It’s rather like being tone deaf I think – there’s just not part of me that feels a need for something beyond this world, these people, this place; nor do I have whatever it is that lets people have spiritual experiences – I’ve never had an answer to prayer (well, except for the infamous “maybe no answer IS the answer which I had in abundance), never felt the spirit, never had a burning bosom or a still small voice or any feeling that my prayers were reaching beyond the confines of my own small brain. That realization was incredibly powerful and quite beautiful because it lifted me out of the deep pit of guilt and self loathing that is inevitable when you are raised to believe in an immediate and intimate relationship with God.

The next important step, and one that was predicated on the other one, was to then have the -I don’t know, maturity? grace? – to accept, really truly accept, other people’s faith as equally valid. So…

1) Do you feel a need to pursue a sense of persistent and meaningful connection to humanity, to this planet, or to the universe?

Sort of. I’m hedging because I don’t feel a need to PURSUE a sense of meaningful connection – it’s already there. In fact, “losing” my religion (rather accepting that my experience, my understanding, my particular twisted little mind makes skeptical atheism, and secular humanism, the paradigm I can live in with integrity) allowed me to take my concentration off searching for some ineffable uknown “out there” and wake up to the amazing stuff that’s right here around me.

Do you feel that you can have singular experiences that can deepen this sense of connection?

Singular? Yes, times on the mountain or at the beach, moments with family and friends. Happens daily I think, no, I know – because these deepening moments don’t have to be huge or life-shifting, they are generally just those quick flashes where you are for that instant reaching outside of yourself and honestly I don’t think it takes that much effort. I like Thomas Browne’s “if thou couldst empty all thyself of self” although I think it’s unattainable – instead it’s just making room for more than just yourself.

2) Do you feel that spirituality is a useful term for discussing your own concerns for connection, emotionally transforming experiences, mindfulness, or becoming a better human being?

Not really. I think it’s become too loaded a term and it carries too personal a definition for each person you meet which makes it very difficult to have a meaningful conversation. I also think it’s more helpful for me to speak less in generalities and more in specifics – “live a spiritual life” vs “when dealing with co-workers today I want to really listen and take just a little more time.” Damn that sounds self-helpy! I suppose much of my difficulty comes because of my personal deep distrust of anything that feels too, excuse the technical term, woo-woo – too flaky, not grounded in something I CAN feel and understand.

3) What practices have you tried or adopted in these pursuits?

Again – just practical stuff. I try to make time for things that I find important (hiking, camping, biking, snowshoeing, taking photographs, writing… ) and time for people in general – listening to what they’re saying instead of thinking up the next clever thing I want to say (something I was/am terribly guilty of). I’m also trying to live with more integrity and think about what that means. One of the things that leaving religion does is allow you to really discover your own code of ethics, and I think that process doesn’t ever really stop. Right now I’m working on applying that integrity to things that I might think less important which is a major challenge as I am, sadly, a rather lazy person!

Folks, John is someone who speaks with some authority on this subject, since he just completed his 52 Weeks, 52 Religions project (which puts my OC Pilgrimage visits to shame!). Please check it out!

Just so you’re familiar with this particular conversation (the comments on this post), most of us (with the exception of Rich–kudos to you man, for always contributing respectfully to the discussion) do not believe in God, and are comfortable and secure in that unbelief. I mentioned to Jana yesterday how amazed I at what a fundamentally *good* group of people they are. Each one is a godless person who continually strives to serve and reach out to others in their own way.

I do not believe in God, especially the Mormon one. I want to be very clear with this. Reaching that conclusion was the result of an arduous process. I earned my perspective.

I do believe that the bond we share as humans is enough to make us brothers and sisters (I love that in Japanese you can call everyone brother/sister/aunt/uncle/grandma/grandpa). And I agree, we are all inherently amazing.

Even if we didn’t have the evolutionary need to connect, I think the intellectual benefits would overwhelm that. New thinking requires new perspectives, whether they be of the human or the cosmic or the micro kind. So the more I connect with the people and the universe around me, the more I expand.

2. I would say that the only problem with the term “spirituality” is the term “spirit” itself. For all of the dictionary definitions, it’s one that’s too easy to associate with the superstitions of angels and ghosts, rather than that feeling of awe, or wonder.

I’ve all but decided to stick with “connection”. I feel a connection to other people, to the world, to the universe. Not in a supernatural way, but in a very real “I’m made of the same stuff as the stars, I’m composed of 99.9% the same DNA as that person over there, I share history with that group of people over there. I’m connected to them.”

It both reminds me of my place in the grand scheme of things, and my connections to them.

Mosiah 4:9

I memorized this Book of Mormon verse because my missionary comp. said it helped strengthen her testimony.

I know that this mortal existence is a test of our faith and obedience.
We are all spiritually brothers and sisters . We each have been given different talents and gifts from our Heavenly father. It is a blessing to serve and learn from each other.
I personally have been so blessed to know you ,John. You always have a spring in your step and a vigor for life and learning. I am grateful to have the honor of meeting your family ,especially your Angelic Mother.
I was struggling on my Mission, out of the YOUR kind mother sent me the most beautiful hand sewn blue dress with a white collar! How did she know I needed a new dress?She even had it impeccably folded.( I was amazed that I could take the dress out of the pouch and wear it without pressing it!) I was in tears thinking that she had spent the time to make this just for me .

I KNEW Heavenly Father loved me because I was blessed with the kindest of friends ! Your Mother! (My eyes are wet just thinking about this .) Thank you for being my friend and sharing your Mom and family with me.

You’re about the third person I respect who’s recommended Tolle. Obviously I need to check this guy out!