In relation to jiyu shukyo, I define it as an attitude of caring. It is a reverence we feel toward anything, which usually begins in faith, and which inspires us to attend to it with love and quality of action.
It is a concept one can use to differentiate a quality of “mechanical-ness” or cut-throat competition.
I need a word that captures as much of existence as possible. A word that is free that it could include an engagement not just with the good but also the bad. A word that could mean I am all of these that all these parts are interconnected that there is a thread that goes through these areas.
It’s like philosophy but a way of life.
Unprocessed
My niche is walking as a spiritual practice. But I need a clear understanding of what the word spiritual means before I could continue with my project.
Spirituality is such a heavy word. It comes with a baggage filled with contradictions. It is used differently by different people, but the people who use the word almost always assume that everyone uses the word the same way and they aren’t usually sensitive to this fact. For example, most Christians I talk to almost always equate spirituality to a reverence of a personified God. But there is a large collective of people who don’t define God as a person and therefore could not find such a definition of spirituality useful.
My initial response to this problem is to use a different word altogether. jon kabat-zinn suggested that the word “spiritual” should be substituted by the word “conscious” to signify “focused attention” or mindfulness.
There is another way, of course, and that is to borrow the word BUT always be clear on how one defines it. I find it useful to equate spirituality with reverence towards something.
For example, feel reverence to things we hold “sacred.” We don’t revere it and consider it worthy of our dedication unless we recognize its importance and significant to our life. I don’t go to nature and write poems about it unless I feel first that I value it enough to hold it sacred. So spirituality I think is closest to what I feel when I feel in awe to the intelligibility and yet mystery of reality.
There are many definitions, but I want to differentiate the two based on their methods.
The popular version of spirituality forces me to believe on things I am not prepared to believe in. Philosophy does not force anything. It only advocates for me to believe in myself, in what my mind reaches.
Because of this nature of spirituality, I want to intentionally distance myself from it. While I engage in a lot of practices that are labeled spiritual in the mainstream, I do not do these to achieve what mainstream spirituality uses these for.
I don’t want to believe in magic, in the esoteric, in stuff that cannot be explained through common sense. Who knows maybe these are true and one day I will eventually believe in them. But the point is that I am not ready. Spiritual language discriminates against the agnostic, the atheistic, the nonbeliever, many of which do not reject spiritual claims, but are simply not ready for them.
Philosophy I think is the freest, most egalitarian and welcoming space for people like me. It has its flaws, yes, but it fits people like me more than spirituality does. And so we start iterating from it.