The Subjective Art
Many of the folks who approach Spiritual Naturalism come from the rationalist or skeptical camps such as Humanism, atheism, and so on (like myself, in fact). We tend to look at things in a very objectivist and empirical manner. This is great for cutting through nonsense and discerning important facts about the world. But it also often means we think of the subjective as somewhat lesser. By the subjective I mean things that have to do with your internal experience. Logical thinkers often associate giving too much attention or credence to subjective experience with bias, with superstition, or with magical notions about intuition.
Certainly, a Spiritual Naturalist isn’t someone who thinks their internal experience can give them information about the outside world they wouldn’t otherwise have through the five senses. We don’t expect to meditate and discover life on another planet or commune with invisible entities, for example. But there are important truths to be discovered in subjective experience - truths about yourself, your own mind, and even about the world when it comes to simply re-examining the information you have already gathered in new ways.
Consider that scientific research into pain medication would not be possible without taking into account the subjective experiences of the subjects1. Conversely, if the naturalistic approach to spirituality is about happiness, then it is obvious but important to note that the very goal of our endeavor is a subjective experience. If we are to accept the subjective experiences of practitioners in the same way we accept them in pain medication research, then we can easily see that people in the same external conditions report different levels of happiness. Thus, it should be no surprise that a practice designed to cultivate a subjective experience (regardless or even despite circumstance) will necessarily involve exploration and cultivation of the subjective. A spiritual practice could be considered the art of the subjective.
Getting the most out of a spiritual practice requires that we dive into immersive subjective experience without reservation. We will need to get over our bias against the subjective and what it has been associated with in other traditions or practices. What you think, how you think it, and how you feel about it matters. It matters so much that it can literally be the difference between life and death. A Wall Street executive with a standard of living unequaled for the vast majority of life of earth can find himself jumping from a tall building in despair while a subsistence farmer in a place stricken by poverty and oppression can report being happy. Isn’t, then, our attention to the subjective at least as important as our attention to water, food, and shelter?
This is why one of the first steps in approaching naturalistic spiritual practice is to examine how we frame things. Our framing includes the words we use and the connotations (feelings and associations about) those words in our culture and personal experience. It also includes how we categorize concepts and their relationships to one another.
In this book I am going to propose a particular framing inspired by perspectives in a few similar and conceptually-overlapping traditions (especially Stoicism and Buddhism). At first glance, it may seem to a hard-nosed logical thinker that I am ‘making a claim’ about reality; proposing some phenomena as true or existing which isn’t - but that is not my goal here. One of the advances of naturalistic spirituality, I believe, is that it has done away with spirituality being seen as a source of knowledge about the objective world. For that, we use modern science and reason2.
Instead, what I will be proposing is one possible scheme of talking about and evaluating various aspects of life and the world. One could say this is like the old “glass half empty/half full” thing, but maybe a little more developed. The framings that come from these traditions are more than simply ‘feel good affirmations’ or euphemism. There is good and sound logical reasoning as to why these ways of conceptualizing the world really make more sense, and lead to more practical choices, attitudes, and actions. While all value judgments are subjective, the fact that we have a very real and concrete goal (human flourishing) means that there will be reasonable arguments to be made for the efficacy of some value judgments over others.
In the course of the proposal for this framing scheme, I will be suggesting highly specific definitions for certain words. These may not be your definitions or conceptions of the words, and there just well may have been other choices that would be as effective. But you will find that unless we stay consistent with the definitions within a particular framing, we will get confused and not be able to communicate the concepts clearly.
Therefore, I propose that you let go and simply ‘go with it’ for the time being. It won’t be easy because the words I’m talking about are things like good, evil, beneficial, virtuous, etc. People get very attached to their ways of thinking about these things. You may begin to feel like, if you were to entertain some of the radical redefinitions of some of these, your own worldview would become mucked up. But perhaps you can simply create a new mindset on the side, as if playing the role of a character in a play and trying to get inside their head.
Once you’ve had the chance to digest this framing, I think you will see just how and why these philosophies can be so powerful. Then, I fully support the individual practitioner coming back around and seeing what kinds of framings they might prefer to shift. After all, it needs to connect with your own mindset in order to truly be effective for you.