On Spiritual Progress and the Idea of Enlightenment

(This week’s article is by guest writer Dwayne Schulz. For a brief bio, see below.)

In his recent article on the meaning of Spiritual Naturalism Alex Cheruk draws on Thomas Schenk’s proposal that spirituality can be distilled into the concepts of mindfulness and ‘communion with and knowledge of the cosmos.’ I think the latter aspect is essential; without it spirituality is just a form of self-improvement or self-help psychology. We might summarize these observations with the idea that spirituality is concerned with cultivating two kinds of mindfulness, the first about everyday life, the second about nature and cosmos as a whole.

Many religious and spiritual traditions like Buddhism, Hinduism and Stoicism expressly link the two kinds of mindfulness promoting a ‘higher’ state of being in both the sense of being above the foibles of everyday life (e.g. above attachment to material things, to suffering etc.) and closer to the higher powers of the universe. Thus Buddhists and Hindus speak of escaping the round of birth and rebirth (samsara) and attaining enlightenment (nirvana or moksha) sharing in the unified cosmic consciousness that is the Overmind or Brahman. Early Stoics on the other hand talked of the Stoic Sage, perfect in wisdom and virtue but also in conformity with what they called the cosmic Logos. Christianity of course has its saints said to be nearer to God. A closely related idea is that the goal of spiritual quest is the attainment of a final state of perfect consciousness exhibited by figures like the Buddha.

From a naturalist perspective the idea of a perfect state of enlightenment is problematic for many reasons. Firstly, it seems that spiritual progress is a lifelong process involving lots of setbacks and missteps. I don’t know about you, but my own experience is that through a lifetime of reading and exploring ideas I pick up jewels of wisdom here and there and succeed at putting them into practice only after much effort and many relapses.

I have made progress but it has been slow and difficult and I am still far from reaching any finality. Secondly, the notion of a perfect anything let alone human being is inherently suspect. A bad habit of much religious thought is to extrapolate from everyday experience to absolute ideals. For example from our everyday experience of time religion extrapolates to eternity, from everyday goodness – the idea of God as the summum bonum and from teachers who happen to have valuable life experience and wisdom – the notion of perfect sages, saints and rishis with unquestionable truths derived from on high. 

The danger of authoritarian and cultish modes of behavior arising from such thinking is obvious but perhaps more importantly misguides us as to the nature of improving spiritual well-being which is more about accumulating different insights and working hard to implement them rather than reaching a state of instant illumination.

However as I said above there is something valuable in the idea of a higher state of consciousness in tune with nature and cosmos. It is arguable that one of the huge leaps in our evolution as a species occurred when we learned to tell stories – stories that framed our strange existence on this earth, that gave meaning to our experience as sensitive and vulnerable creatures prone to misadventure and love, grief and affliction. Such mythologies bonded communities together and imparted important ethical lessons, but also gave people the sense of being part of a larger cosmic drama, lessening existential anxiety and explaining their place in the scheme of things.

The mythologies of old are slowly dying, being replaced by scientific stories about things like photons and quarks, genes and neurons that seem haphazard and to many rather meaningless. One of the challenges of spiritual naturalism is to craft new ways of looking at existence that accord with the scientific facts but perform a similar function to the old mythologies. Authors like the biologist Ursula Goodenough and cosmologist Brian Swimme have taken up the challenge in books like The Sacred Depths of Nature and The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. They poeticize processes in nature that otherwise seem dauntingly inhuman in scale: the turning of the earth about the sun or the emergence of new species over aeons. 

Swimme for example counsels us that when viewing a sunrise to “feel the immensity of the earth as it rolls away from the great Sun” to picture ourselves “standing on the back of something like a cosmic whale … slowly rotating its great bulk on the surface of an unseen ocean.” He argues that such imaginative exercises can act as a “powerful pathway[s] into the deep wisdom embedded in the universe.”

In a different vein Goodenough invites us to ponder the meaning of death in evolutionary terms. The first single cell organisms like bacteria (prokaryotes) reproduce by fissioning in two (mitosis) and are in a sense immortal. But once multicellular organisms arose with specialized organs and separate reproductive cells (gametes), the former could be sacrificed for the benefit of the latter to ensure the transfer of our genes. Sacrificing different cells and organs allows the body as a whole (the soma) “to focus instead on strategies for getting the gametes transmitted.” Thus programmed cell-death enables all kinds of processes such as the falling of leaves from deciduous trees and the development of separate fingers and toes during embryogenesis. In reflecting on these biological facts Goodenough concludes that:

Death is the price paid to have trees and clams and birds and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love. My somatic life is the wondrous gift wrought by my forthcoming death.

However, one’s awareness of nature and cosmos needs to be integrated with more down-to-earth wisdom about the conduct of daily life. Indeed, we should strive to harmonize all the layers of existence surrounding us as individuals and as a species: mind and body; individual and community; civilization and biosphere. This too is a perpetual work in progress.

Take the connection between body and environment. I recently watched a Netflix documentary, “You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment” which delves into the question of the modern diet. It shows rather powerfully that our reliance on the industrial farming of fish, beef and chicken has dire effects on everything from our telomeres and gut biomes to issues of social justice and water pollution.

Regardless of whether one opts for complete veganism or not, the documentary brings home why we should take a more mindful approach to the food we eat, not just because of personal health but because it is connected to so many other areas of life we care about. Although the documentary points to some inspiring examples of change, it is not blind to the entrenched economic interests and cultural prejudices that stand in the way. There is a long, arduous road ahead. This is just one example of why spiritual development must be seen within the bigger picture and is a permanent process rather than a single leap from darkness into the light.

It is interesting to speculate about how new science-based perspectives on cosmos and nature might one day inform our life-philosophies and vice versa. We have hardly begun, but I’m sure poets and storytellers will weave new narratives that tie things together in compelling ways, as new forms of art, architecture and ritual will integrate the truths of cosmology, biology and physics into everyday spiritual life and practice. In the meantime we stumble on, hopefully making progress from month to month and year to year, drawing on many traditions and areas of life in the hope of creating a new kind of spirituality free from the superstitions of the old religions and conducive to a fairer, cleaner and more mindful civilization of the future. I will leave you with a few words on spiritual progress from Lucius Seneca, the famous Stoic of Ancient Rome, that ring as true today as they did 2000 years ago:

I am satisfied, if every day I take away something from my vices and correct my faults. I have not arrived at perfect soundness of mind, indeed, I never shall arrive at it: I compound palliatives rather than remedies for my gout, and am satisfied if it comes at rarer intervals and is not so painful. Compared with those who are lame, I am a racer. I make this speech, not on my own behalf, for I am steeped in vices of every kind, but on behalf of one who has made some progress in virtue.

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