Religious impulse runs deep
Religious impulse part 2: How our longing for spiritual experience and divinity manifest in secular times
In the previous post in this series, I explored the question is there no reason to believe in god?
As I followed the thought, the second thing I realised more and more: the religious impulse runs deep and spirituality is innate. Ultimately humans have a deeply-seated urge to feel connected to something larger than ourselves. God is probably the one thing humans will consistently come up with, without influence. And religion is how we organise ourselves around a shared concept of god.
Spirituality is difficult to talk about:
A lot of it is hard to be put into words
Means something different to different people
It’s an unpopular term nowadays because of the bad behaviors done by people under the guise of religions
Note that unlike most of the things I posts here, this is currently a rather incoherent collection of anecdata and observations, as I’m working through this topic. I will update the post once I had a clearer narrative arc to weave these data points together.
TLDR; The religious impulse is why we see a rise of workism, astrology, therapy, and fitness culture. Everybody worships. Bodies as shrine, political parties as tribes, identity politics as weapons, cults as churches. The crucial functions of rituals. There is universal need to believe in something larger than ourselves. The longing for spirituality, a starve for community, a pendulum swingback from secularism. Religions are still more robust solutions than therapy and psychoanalysis are.Margaret Atwood
This interview of Margaret Atwood on Offline With Jon Favreau nailed it.
Q: A lot of totalitarian regimes still use religion, religious imagery, and religious rhetoric. Why do you think that still works today at a time when people in most countries have become less religious over the last several years?
A: You’d think they’ve become less religious. It may have become less traditionally religious, (But) have you noticed the boom in astrology and tarot cards? And the absolute cultism of the interest in health. What you’re eating, what you’re putting into your body… It’s like the people have got little shrines to their own bodies which they worship daily.
So let me put it to you that I think the religious impulse is very very very very very very very old. And was probably an evolutionary plus, and to some extent probably still is.
So let us suppose that most people have an inherent tendency to believe in something bigger than themselves. Whether that be a standard religion, of the kinds that we know, or whether it be my daily horoscope.
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So I, as a teenager, went around to every religion I could get my hands on, to see what they were doing in there, including the spiritualist church. And they had their own hymn book. They’d rewritten standard hymns but with their own words. And they had their own rituals and procedures. And they had a medium on hand at every meeting of the spiritualist church. And their belief in something bigger than themselves, was that there was an afterlife and their loved ones were in it, taking a personal interest in them.
Joseph Campbell
From Ep. 6: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth
In the final episode of The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers and mythologist Joseph Campbell discuss commonalities in every culture that create a need for God, and the symbolism of circles in life and literature. In this clip, Campbell talks about the common experience of God across cultures.
From Joseph Campbell – The Hidden Dimension:
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I don’t have to have faith, I have experience.
BILL MOYERS: What kind of experience?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I’ve experience of the wonder, of the life, I have experience of love, I have experience of hatred, malice — I’d like to punch the guy’s jaw, and I admit this. But those are different divinities, I mean, from the point of view of a symbolic imaging. Those are different images operating in me.
Marion Woodman
In the full interview with Parabola Magazine titled Worshipping Illusions, Marion Woodman said:
P: What you have called “inner civil war.”
MW: Inner civil war. And that’s why so many people try to drown themselves in the addiction. As soon as the rage begins to come up, they start eating or drinking or spending money, or they turn to sex or an obsessive relationship. Or gambling, or TV. Anything that will block out consciousness. The addictive substance acts as a soporific, and gradually they sink into unconsciousness.
From my point of view, in each case you have to try to figure out what the addictive substance means symbolically. Otherwise, it will hold an almost religious significance. Now that most people do not have a religious focus, the religious focus will go on to something material. They may think it’s food they want, for example, because they experience themselves as starving. Well, the soul is starving; it’s true, because it’s not being recognized, and it’s being continually starved. They then try to feed it with food, which usually symbolizes the loving mother who can accept them as they are.
Here’s a comment from a repost of the interview on Instagram
I remember once walking around a casino in Vegas trying to understand the draw of gambling. Everyone know the cards are stacked against you, literal and figuratively. I watched the faces of those on the slots and the poker faces on the tables. None were of joy or enjoyment. Then it hit me. SACRIFICE! They were sacrificing hoping to be “blessed”. Then I also realized I was in a giant Pyramid 👁️🙏🏼 the whole strip is filled with temples of Lord 💰
A similar sentiment from two other Jungians:
Addiction is the negative side of spiritual seeking. We are looking for an exultation of the spirit; but instead of fulfillment we get a short-lived physical thrill that can never satisfy the chronic, gnawing emptiness with which we are beset.
Ecstasy, Robert A. JohnsonFirst we must learn to think mythologically. Powerful things happen when we touch the thinking which myths, fairy tales, and our own dreams bring to us. The terms and settings of the old myths are strange; they seem archaic and distant to us, but if we listen to them carefully and take them seriously, we begin to hear and to understand.
𝘚𝘩𝘦: 𝘜𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘍𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘗𝘴𝘺𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺, Robert A. Johnson
What is spirituality in the context of mental health? Spirituality is the experience of connectedness with a transcendent meaning or force. This does not have to be as grand as it sounds. We do not have to be a special prophet or genius to discover the transcendental world. We simply have to make a ‘good enough’ connection with something meaningful, so that the spirit in us is justified and feels content.
Lack of meaning can make us physically sick and mentally disturbed. ‘Meaning’ may seem inconsequential to some, and they may refer to it as fantasy or fiction. But Jung is convinced that the role of spiritual meaning has been hugely underestimated in the approach to disease.
The spiritual attitude impels us to search for connectedness, and this search intensifies when we live in disconnected times such as now. There are many kinds of connection, but spiritual connection seeks a relationship with something greater than ourselves, something that links us to the cosmos, but also to what is most genuine and true in ourselves.
Gods and Diseases, David Tacey
The function of surrender
In this video, Andrew Huberman shared with Lex Fridman that he prays in moments where he encounters things that he alone can’t solve or figure out on his own. He thinks that if we don’t believe in something bigger than ourselves, we will self destruct. What struck me is the humility to say there are things outside of his control, (even if he still wants to understand as a scientist, but there are just things we can’t make sense of). And in a way, that restores a sense of agency, to be asking for help to come through you.
One of the top comments there:
It saddens me that we live in a culture where ppl feel ashamed to admit that they pray and believe in higher power
I also picked up the science vs religion (false?) dichotomy, putting them at odds with each other. That to identify as either means you’re discrediting the other side.
Lisa Miller on our innate spirituality
What if our innate spirituality was the antidote to the escalating rates of mental health issues in the world?
Dr. Lisa Miller, a Columbia University professor, studies the profound interplay between spirituality and mental health. She argues that our modern obsession with achievement has led to neglect of our spiritual side, contributing to increased depression and despair.
In contrast, “awakened awareness,” a state where we are receptive to life’s signals and guidance, can serve as a neuroprotective mechanism against such issues. Emphasizing the universality of spirituality, irrespective of religiosity, she suggests altruistic acts as a means to strengthen our spiritual core. Such acts, according to her, could ignite a journey of recovery and holistic wellness.
Two pieces of insights I picked from the video:
Religiosity and spirituality
In most of the post-industrial world, about 70% of people will say, “I am spiritual and I am religious.” They go hand in hand.
About 30% of people will say, “I am spiritual, but I am not religious. For me, spiritual life is experiencing nature, family, in art or music.”
Whether or not we are religious, every single one of us is a naturally spiritual being. Spirituality is innate.
Achieving awareness and awakened awareness
Scientists cannot define spirituality, but what science can do very well is take our lens, whether that lens is an MRI study or epidemiology or genotyping, and point at the impact of spirituality on the rest of our lives.
I’ve devoted my life to the scientific study of spirituality and its deep, really unlimited resource as it protects us against diseases of despair. Our deep spirituality is our greatest resource for renewal, for healing. And even when we’re faced with profound mental illness, spirituality is our source of hope.
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Every single one of us has two forms of awareness: Achieving awareness and Awakened awareness. And we need both, and we need them in balance.
Achieving awareness lets us strategize, its tactical thinking. Research it, go after it, get it done. And to be effective is important in our lives. The achieving brain is in a relentless addiction to the next goal, the next accomplishment. So where we get in trouble is when achieving awareness sets our North Star. This leads us into depression.
To find our North Star, our deepest direction and purpose in life, we need another form of perception, and that is our awakened awareness.
Awakened awareness is when we don’t ask, “What do I want and how am I going to get it?” But instead, ask, “_What is life showing me now? Where am I finding guidance, direction?_”. This can come from synchronicity. This can come from a mystical experience, an intuition, someone showing up in our lives and pointing us in a direction that we’d never thought of before. The awakened brain allows us to perceive that we are on a journey- we are on a path.
No matter where you sit on the spirituality or religiosity spectrum, these two videos are worth considering
The problem with young adults losing spirituality
Are you led by your head or your heart?
By the way, this head x heart concept reminds me of left x right hemispheric theory from Iain McGilchrist. How well do they map together? I’ll look into this later.
On workism
The history of how protestant work ethic shaped our current conception of work is well documented. In The Importance of Being Lazy, Marina van Zuylen discussed Paul Lafargue’s 1880 pamphlet Le Droit à la paresse (The Right to Laziness):
Free time, Schopenhauer contends, actually terrifies us. This might explain why so many people secretly hate Sundays, a day of forced rest that fills us with horror vacui. We do not know what to do with ourselves when we do not work. Lafargue, by implication, disdains such anxieties…. to Lafargue, it was important to demonstrate that this abstinence was part of the outrageous campaign devised against personal initiative. It simply proved that work increasingly masqueraded as religion. Workers were brainwashed to believe that their toil was sacred, never to be used for individual purposes.
In romance
Romantic love often provides the container for people’s longing for wholeness to be satisfied. And, that is a fundamentally religious impulse that does not belong in the realm of human relationship. By religious, I mean a connection to an existential longing, to something that stretches well beyond the confines of our ego. — Invocation, Bea Gonzales
On divinity
I find these theories compelling to explain the religious impulse and, essentially, divinity.
Note that the next sections onwards are generated by LLMs (gpt-4o and perplexity).
Is divinity just what we think? It appears that while human thought significantly shapes our understanding of divinity, this concept is not purely subjective. It is influenced by cultural, religious, psychological, and philosophical dimensions. Divinity can be both a deeply personal belief and a shared cultural construct, making it a complex interplay of what we think, feel, and experience.
Against the Maslow hierarchy of needs
Psychologically, divinity is not just a static concept but a dynamic interplay of cognitive processes, emotional needs, and developmental stages. Understanding divinity through a psychological lens reveals how deeply it is intertwined with the human experience, providing insights into why it holds such a central place in many people’s lives.
Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs provides a useful framework for understanding how the concept of divinity might fulfil various human needs:
Safety and Security: Belief in a higher power can provide a sense of order, stability, and protection, addressing fundamental fears and uncertainties about life and the universe.
Belonging and Love: Religious communities offer social support and a sense of belonging, which can be essential for emotional well-being.
Esteem: Engaging in religious practices and adhering to moral codes can boost self-esteem and provide a sense of purpose and accomplishment.
Self-Actualisation: For many, spiritual practices and beliefs in the divine are pathways to achieving personal growth, understanding one’s potential, and finding deeper meaning in life.
The cognitive science of religion
Researchers in the field of cognitive science have studied how human cognitive processes contribute to religious beliefs and experiences:
Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (HADD): This theory suggests that humans are predisposed to detect agency (intentional actions by agents) even in ambiguous situations. This predisposition might explain why people often attribute natural events to the actions of divine beings or spirits.
Theory of Mind: Humans have a sophisticated ability to attribute thoughts, intentions, and feelings to others (known as theory of mind). This ability can extend to imagining the thoughts and intentions of gods and supernatural beings, making divinity a relatable and comprehensible concept.
Emotional and Existential Coping
The concept of divinity can also serve important emotional and existential functions:
Coping Mechanism: Belief in a higher power can provide comfort and hope during times of stress, loss, and uncertainty. It can offer a framework for understanding and coping with suffering and mortality.
Existential Meaning: Many people find that belief in a divine plan or purpose gives their lives a greater sense of meaning and coherence, addressing existential questions about the purpose and significance of human life.
Developmental Psychology
Developmental psychology explores how religious and spiritual beliefs evolve over a person’s lifespan:
Childhood: Children often have anthropomorphic views of divinity, imagining gods in human-like forms and attributing human characteristics to them. These early views are shaped by family, culture, and religious education.
Adolescence: During adolescence, individuals often begin to question and refine their beliefs, seeking personal experiences and understanding of divinity that align with their developing identities.
Adulthood: In adulthood, religious and spiritual beliefs may become more nuanced and integrated into one’s overall worldview. Personal experiences, such as parenthood, loss, or profound events, can significantly influence one’s conception of divinity.
Asking perplexity, “is divinity just what we think”
Btw, I like how Perplexity is able to provide source it aggregates from, so we know which bits come from Reddit 😉
The concept of divinity is strongly linked to how humans perceive the universe and chaos. It is argued that the idea of divinity stems from humanity’s emotional relation with nature and universal chaos. This relationship is condensed into two main states: fear and trust. Fear arises from the incomprehensible power of nature and cosmic events, while trust comes from the necessity of believing that someone who cares for us is in charge of the whole thing. However, as society progresses in technology and human care for one another, the roles traditionally assigned to God start being passed down to humans, which will diminish the significance of divinity in human thought until it becomes widely considered implausible or unnecessary[1].
This perspective is limited in that it only considers the dogmatic ends of the spectrum of religion and leaves out the mystical end. For example, Taoist and Christian mystical traditions view divinity in a broader sense, encompassing experiences and emotions beyond traditional religious roles[1].
Another perspective emphasizes the importance of recognizing the divinity in others. It suggests that seeing others as children of God can change how we interact with them and encourages us to stop judging others and instead view them with love and compassion[2]
In contrast, some philosophical and religious texts argue that divinity is not just what we think but is rooted in our experiences and emotions. For instance, the concept of the divine is often linked to feelings of awe, wonder, and smallness in the face of the universe[1][3].
Ultimately, the concept of divinity is multifaceted and influenced by various factors, including human perception, emotions, and experiences. It is not solely defined by what we think but also by how we feel and interact with the world around us[1][4].
Citations:
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/17lhl0p/the_concept_of_divinity_is_strongly_linked_to_how/
https://marriott.byu.edu/magazine/speech/seeing-the-divinity-in-others
https://www.amazon.com/God-Versus-Idea-Divinity-Experience/dp/1504386566
https://www.thoughtchangerblog.com/2017/10/are-you-living-your-divinity.html
Originally published to Proses.ID