Spirituality is not about the apprehending of facts or anything that can be known to be true. Spirituality is about changing the way in which we attend to the world. And likewise, the very world that presents itself to us, in the first place.
Spirituality is not about gaining knowledge of the world, but about the world we come to live in as a result of paying a particular kind of attention.
We live in a culture that has become obsessed with certainty, and therefore as well with the likes of which that can be certain. We live in a world that has become increasingly fixated on the acquisition of knowledge and information, and very well at the expense of wisdom.
These proclivities of our day have bled well into the realm of the spiritual, disenchanting the wonderfully mysterious world we live in, and casting aside the very things that make our lived experience so deep.
What we are left with is not an understanding of the world in any lived sense of the word, but an oversimplification of the world that leaves us believing that we understand it. It is often the case that the less you know, the more you tend to think you know—the Dunning-Kruger Effect, as it is so called.
The result of this particular way of attending to the world, is a complete lack of appreciation for all that spirituality is, can be, and once was. Today we are left with a rather rudimentary and simplistic representation of what might otherwise be any attempt to make contact with what is sacred.
Spirituality today is evaluated and conceptualized on the basis of utility. We tend to think of any religious enterprise as a “system of beliefs.” That to engage in spirituality of any kind undoubtedly involves the admission of some statements as truths to be believed.
This leaves spirituality in a precarious situation where a practice may only be considered as valuable as the so called “truths” that it is built on or can otherwise lend you to ascertain.
Naturally, this view of spirituality has rendered most of it useless on the basis of being propositionally vapid—devoid of the kind of “truth” our culture has become so infatuated with.
Like a young man cleaning out his grandfather’s house and throwing away an old guitar—that unknowingly used to belong to Elvis Presley—completely unaware of its true value and mistaking a priceless heirloom for a rather boring piece of rubbish.
In this same way, our society has—after a rather quick and shallow evaluation of spirituality—concluded that it can be done away with entirely, not offering us the kind of understanding we think we’re after.
Quite ironically, we are also left in the absence of any recognition that the way in which we pay attention to the world does in fact play a major role in shaping the world we end up seeing. And as I will detail, this really goes much deeper than mainstream ideas like “confirmation bias” and the like.
It’s truly not about how we see the world. But the world that we see.
The World We See
We often think of attention as a metaphorical spotlight that we may cast upon something in order to illuminate it in greater detail. This carries with it the unfortunate misunderstanding that the world exists in some ultimate capacity, prior to our paying attention to it. And that our attention is simply a means of modulating how we observe what is otherwise already there.
This metaphor makes it seem as though attention is a neutral mechanism, by which we bring to light what is already the case—that the world is simply “out there” waiting to be discovered, and our discovery of it in no way shapes what it is that is being discovered.
This could perhaps, not be further from the truth.
Attention is less like a spotlight (revealing what is), and more like an eye itself (shaping what is). It is well understood that the various creatures on planet earth may each have their own individually crafted visual systems. And that the way one’s eye is shaped or designed plays every role in shaping what it is that is seen by that eye.
The world looks very differently to a bee, and to an octopus than to a human or an elephant. And the same could be said of every other sensory organ, human or otherwise.
And perhaps equally as important to point out, while different sensory organs of the same kind may shape the world differently, we must account for the fact that there are different kinds of sensory organs to begin with—eyes and ears, and so on.
Each organ determining not just how, but what is seen.
Our attention is better characterized in this way—not just changing what parts of the world we are focused on—but influencing how the world presents itself to us in the first place.
Spirituality
I mentioned earlier that spirituality is not about the apprehension of facts and knowledge, or the kinds of things that can be known in that way. But that spirituality is about modulating the way in which we attend to the world.
With hopefully sufficient context, I mean to say that spiritually is not about shining a spotlight on the world in an effort to uncover some true and useful detail about the world. But that spirituality is more about changing the means by which we experience the world, and therefore the world that is.
Let us take prayer for instance. Most people might understand prayer to be a means of communicating with God or a higher power. A way of expressing our thoughts and feelings and likewise receiving guidance and direction from above.
When conceptualized in this way, prayer becomes about the transfer of information. It becomes about what one may “bring to God” so to say, and what wisdom or assistance God might then relay to us. Prayer becomes about “things”, in a sense.
But this is a rather narrow and limited understanding of prayer. One that fails to appreciate its true transformational power. We might understand prayer instead to be a practice of changing our posture towards the world. A particular way of disposing our consciousness to whatever else is.
When we engage in the act of prayer, we are orienting ourselves in a particular way. We are opening ourselves up to the great beyond. We are posturing ourselves in such a way as to make contact with a much deeper, and far more mysterious world. We are inviting in the presence of that which transcends our understanding, and doing so in such a way that allows for the transcendent to make itself known.
This is a posture of humility. In many ways, prayer is a question. An open question of, “What happens when we choose to look at reality as though it were this way?” It’s a question of, “How does the world present itself when we so choose to view it from this perspective?”
And already, our minds may be jumping to answer these questions, as though they are questions to be answered in that way. But these questions are not themselves born of thought, and likewise are not to be resolved with thought. These questions are more like ways of being in the world. In some ways, they are answers in and of themselves.
They are not questions that exist to be answered, but to be asked. It’s the very act of posturing yourself towards the world in this way that transforms the world that makes itself manifest to you, as a result.
If we demand that these questions be answered, then perhaps we can resolve to saying that these questions are answered by being, rather than proposition.
Prayer (and all spirituality) is a way of attending to the world. It’s a particular way of disposing our consciousness towards everything that is beyond ourselves.
Spirituality is not about gaining special knowledge or wisdom through the apprehension of truth, in any ordinary sense of the word. Spirituality is a willingness to adopt and cultivate a particular mode of being—to treat reality as though it were deep, and awesome, and powerful, and mysterious. To tread lightly in the presence of a cosmos that is infinitely beyond our understanding, and yet all the while committing to a relationship with that great unknown.
A word on Love
Love is the gift of attention. When we give something (or someone) our attention, we are not just illuminating what is otherwise already the case—we are bringing that thing (or that person) into being in the way that they are. And at the same time, our process of attention both changes and reveals the way that we are. And what greater act of love could there be than to bring something into being and in doing so committing to knowing it fully, and being fully known?
Perhaps this is no act of love. But love itself.
In some ways love is not all there is.
But love is all that is.
— David Kennedy