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Spirituality
The Opposite of Spiritual
To understand what "spiritual" is, consider what it's not.
Posted March 26, 2021 Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
Q: What does it mean to be spiritual? I know that is a big question. I also know that what it means to be spiritual is different in different religions, that people from the same religion experience being spiritual in different ways, and that you don’t have to be religious to be spiritual. But I’m wondering whether you think there are any qualities or features of spirituality that cut across these differences and are universal. And if so, in your opinion, what are they?
A: Wow, I love this question. Thank you for sending it. And it is a big question, so I’m a bit intimidated by it. But here we are, it’s in the blog, so I’ve obviously decided to take a swing at responding.
I’ll begin by highlighting these important words from your question: “whether you think,” “in your opinion.” I trust that you and other readers understand that what follows is the musing of one person, not a body of facts, not the collective opinion of any group, guild, or school of thought, and not some pill I hope you’ll swallow. It’s all just grist for the mill of your own musing.
Next, I’ll reiterate what you also named in your question: that being spiritual and being religious are not one and the same. There is often great overlap, to be sure, and the difference between them is not a sharp one. But the general distinction is that “spiritual” is more an inward, psychological, uniquely personal experience, and “religious” is a with-others experience—the beliefs, practices, and values shared by a community of people. So, people can have spiritual experiences apart from connection with any religious practice—consider the sense of peace or awe of someone witnessing a sunrise—and a hundred people at the same worship service or meditation retreat will be having a hundred different spiritual experiences.
Let’s also note that the word “spiritual” is one of those words, like the word “health,” that refers sometimes to an entire spectrum of experience and sometimes to a particular end of that spectrum. If I ask you, “How’s your health?” you might say, “Excellent,” or “Not so good”—and both are proper descriptions of health. But if you say, “I’m grateful for my health,” you likely mean that you are well, in contrast to unwell, and are referring to the positive end of the health spectrum.
In much the same way, the word “spiritual” can refer to a dimension of human experience and the wide spectrum of states and qualities within that dimension. So, we can say, “Everyone is spiritual,” and include people who embody wisdom, love, and generosity, but also people who embody the opposite qualities, delusion, hatred, and greed (which Buddhism calls “the three poisons”). Often, though, when we use the word “spiritual,” we mean the wise-loving-generous end of the spectrum. In this case, “She’s very spiritual” means, “She’s spiritually perceptive,” “She’s spiritually virtuous,” or “She's whatever the opposite of not-spiritual is.”
And with that last comment, “whatever the opposite of not-spiritual is,” I turn from preliminary remarks to the real heart of my response.
“Spiritual”—spiritual at the healthier end of the spiritual spectrum--is one of those concepts we understand relationally, in contrast with its opposite. Just as up is the opposite of down, hot the opposite of cold, and quiet the opposite of loud, spiritual is the opposite of—
--and here we pause. What is the opposite of spiritual?
I’ve asked this question to a number of groups, and I’ve heard a number of great answers—the opposite of spiritual is material, the opposite of spiritual is meaningless, the opposite of spiritual is lifeless, or empty, or disconnected—all of which shine light on “what spiritual means.” But here's my answer today—not the answer, remember, and possibly not my answer tomorrow:
The opposite of spiritual is mechanical.
Machines operate without thinking and without choosing. Someone flips a switch, and they do their thing, whatever that is, without consciousness, without freedom, without volition. To live mechanically as a human is to live as a stimulus-response machine, to think, feel, and act on automatic pilot, by habit, reflex, and unconscious conditioning. Being mechanical means living under the control of whatever happens to be flipping our switch—events, circumstances, and people in the world around us, thoughts, moods, prejudices, assumptions, and preferences within us.
It is very difficult to interrupt our mechanical, automatic pilot way of perceiving and acting. Someone doesn’t offer the attention I want, someone withholds the appreciation “I deserve,” someone criticizes me, and a fairly predictable sequence of thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and impulses starts to happen. Or I notice that other people have more of something I want—money, ability, influence—or the newsfeed tells me the world is going to hell again, or I do one of those things I do that I really wish I didn’t do, and off I go, like clockwork, like a machine.
It’s the opposite of that, the opposite of mechanical, that is at the heart of what it means to be spiritual. In my mind, this is the least common denominator that spans the great diversity of spiritual perspectives and religious traditions: “Spiritual” is our capacity to know reality as it really is—not in the filtered way our inner machine is conditioned to perceive it—and to engage the really real from a posture of freedom, rather than a posture of habit. Spirituality is our relationship with an energy that radiates and resonates at a frequency different from the frequency of the mechanical.
This notion that spiritual is the inverse of mechanical is adapted from the psycho-spiritual teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff, but the image drawn more often In the major spiritual traditions is that of being awake or asleep. The word Buddha, for instance, means, literally, “I am awake.” Hindu philosophy and psychology describe four states of consciousness: pure (non-dual) consciousness, waking-state consciousness, dream-state consciousness, and deep-sleep-state consciousness. And Jesus repeatedly tells people to “wake up” and “stay awake.” He also says, “I am the way, the truth, and life,” and the word translated “truth,” in English, is the Greek word alethia--a, meaning not, and lethia, meaning lethargic, sluggish, and sleepy. “I am alethia." I am not asleep. I am awake.
Being spiritual means sensing a gravitational center in ourselves that is deeper than the gravitational pull of external events and internal habits. It means noticing and attuning to an energy within that is other than, deeper than, and more real than the energy of our various surface identities. It means using this deeper frequency in ourselves as a kind of radar, or sonar, to notice and attune to the deeper frequency in others—other people, other animals, plants, and spaces—and to guide our interactions with these others.
It takes intention and continual effort to be spiritual in the way I am describing. Most of the social systems we live in exert immense pressure on us to be mechanical and sleepy. Our entire economy depends on our purchasing what the advertisers tell us we need. (Go to sleep, and keep spending your money.) Many families require their members to get in a role, stay there, and don’t ask questions. (Keep sleeping, and don't rock the boat.) And lest we cast all the blame outside and overlook our self-propelled perpetual-motion habits of attention and behavior—our preferences, our routines, our bent toward busyness and rushing, the images of ourselves we treasure and defend—these also would prefer that we stay in line and keep doing whatever it is we’ve grown accustomed to. (Dream on, and pay no attention to that little man behind the curtain.)
The pull of these external and internal forces is relentless and powerful. So, in one sense, as I said earlier, it is very difficult to break the mechanical trance, be awake to the non-shrunken reality and mystery of what is, and have intention and aim of our own.
But in another sense, to be spiritual in the way I am describing is the easiest thing in the world. Living mechanically may be our default mode, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. “There is dukkha,” said the Buddha. There is suffering. There is dissatisfaction. There is something about default mode that brings us pain and leaves us lacking. Or, to paraphrase St. Paul, “The wages of mechanical living is death.”
But beneath the dissatisfying and wearying hum and thrum of mechanical living, there is a deeper pulse. It is forever beating, in us and in all things, its energy radiant and resonant. While we sleep and dream, it keeps calling our secret name. Eventually we hear it, a hearing that sneaks up on us. We realize we’ve been hearing it all along, but only now are we noticing that we’re hearing it.
This is called falling awake.
This is a question-and-answer blog for therapists, therapy clients, and others interested in the intersection of psychotherapy and spirituality. If there's a question you'd like to see addressed in a future post, please contact me through my website.
