After beginning my life in a very “rational” and “scientific” (or so I thought) way, when I was 25 my life changed in a big way: I suddenly realized I knew very little. I also realized there was a whole field of inquiry I had previously disregarded – that of “spirituality”.
Spiritual is an interesting term. To me, it doesn’t really mean much, but you have to use some word to describe what we’re talking about, and if we changed it to a new word it would just ruin that word as well.
Having been a science student at university, I was always interested in the biggest questions of life – What is it? How does it work? Where did it come from? – and I thought studying a science degree would be the best way to work these questions out. And don’t get me wrong: science is an incredibly powerful and indispensable method of inquiry for investigating how our universe *behaves*. But… it doesn’t exactly tell us what it *is*.
There’s a very famous thought experiment (philosophers love to have these) by an Australian philosopher, Frank Jackson, called “Mary’s Room”. The short version of this thought experiment is: Imagine you have a girl, Mary, who is born into a black and white room, but she is an amazing scientist. The best scientist in the universe. She knows everything. Mary is like a little human God. But… she was born in a black and white room.
The thought experiment is one of knowledge. In philosophical terms this is called epistemology, the study of knowledge – what is knowledge, and how do we know what we know?
The thought experiment goes like this – if Mary knows everything in the universe, she knows all about colour. She knows all about the electromagnetic spectrum and photons and how the retinas in our eyes receive this information and transform it into electrical signals which are interpreted by our brains, thus producing the experience we know as “colour”. But again, Mary only lives in a black and white room. The thought experiment then poses the question: If Mary leaves the black and white room into the outside world and actually sees colour for the first time, does she learn anything new that she couldn’t have learnt from just studying the physical mechanics of light and nerve processing alone?
In other words, is there anything about life that cannot simply be reduced to its physicality.
The answer to me quite obviously is yes, she learns something new that she couldn’t have learnt if she hadn’t left the room. The thing she learnt was not based in physicality but in experience – what philosophers call “qualia” – the subjective, conscious experience of a phenomenon.
This to me really gets to the heart of what the term “spirituality” is all about: What is our direct perception of life, what is our experience of life, when you take away all the mental labels and models our minds have placed over the top of everything.
Say, for example, you’re eating an apple. You could say you’re eating an apple, but really there’s just this roundish, red, crunchy, delicious (if you like apples) blob of sensation in front of you. Now, obviously to communicate we need to use these labels. We can’t say “could you please hand me that roundish, red, crunchy, delicious blob of sensation on the table there?” It would be a great waste of time. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that all we ever really experience is the blob of sensations, never the actual “object” we call an apple.
As Morpheus said to Neo in the Matrix:
Neo: This… this isn’t real?
Morpheus: What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste, and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
The thing is, we live in the same universe that apple lives in, so this also applies to us, and the labels we use to describe ourselves are only labels for a collection of sense perceptions we have called our “self”. To me, this is the essence of what spirituality is really all about. It’s realizing that the labels we use to describe things are only labels, and they don’t get fundamentally to the actual nature of the thing we’re describing. In other words, things are not what we think they are, and we are also not what we think we are.
Try this experiment:
Without referring to your mind for information, and just look into your direct experience, ask yourself the question who or what are you? Your mind may say, “Oh my name’s Greg.” Yeah, but that’s just a name, a label given to you at birth, what were you before you were given that name? Or you might say, “I’m a landscaper!” Yeah, but that’s just your profession… if you changed jobs I’m pretty sure you’d still say you were you. So what exactly could you be if you really go deeply? Well, you might eventually come to the conclusion that you are your mind, but what is the mind? Just a collection of thoughts that come and go. What if you stop thinking? Are you still you then? So it needs to go even deeper than that. You might then start to touch upon that which is in you that never changes, that which is always there, the conscious witness of all your experience.
There is a great video here with Eckhart Tolle guiding someone through this process (the section begins at 15:50) –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3CunRgjXBk&t=4s
This is why enlightened master after enlightened master has always repeated the phrase: you are consciousness itself! And when you look deeply into all of your experience, you realise that everything you experience is actually made up of this consciousness: sight, sound, touch, smell, taste… the whole world, as far as our actual experience of it goes, is nothing but consciousness. And you are not a separate part of it, you are a collection of sensations, just like the apple.
This might sound depressing to some, but really it is liberating – it means you are no longer tied to any of the mental identifications you had with yourself. All your previous thoughts about yourself, your faults, your struggles, is all just consciousness blobbing its way through existence. And when you start to let go of all those previous thoughts about yourself and the world that you had, and start going with the flow of your direct experience, without the mind getting in the way with its constant chatter, the blobs start to blob a whole lot better. The reason for this is because when you’re perceiving things more directly as they are, rather than through the filter of the mind with all of its preconceptions and belief systems about how you think they are, you are more directly in touch with what is really happening.
In one way, spirituality is a very simple topic. It’s just a case of mistaken identity: we have mistaken ourselves to be the body or mind we perceive in front of us instead of seeing ourselves as consciousness, the witness of these bodies/minds. In another way though, we live in a very large and very complex world, so spirituality can also be a very large topic, and I’m not going to be able to cover everything in one blog post (especially because I don’t know anywhere near everything about it!), but essentially that’s what spirituality means to me – realizing that you really are one with the universe, and that, again, as far as our direct experience goes, the whole universe is made out of what we could call “consciousness”.
It might sound like a big leap to say that just because our direct perception of life can only ever be consciousness that the universe must only be consciousness, but this position is also being backed up by modern physics as well, which, while confusing the hell out of almost every physicist in the world, points to the fact that the “physical” world we think we perceive is actually a construction that depends on the conscious observer of the event. That things are not things until they are witnessed by an observer! There’s a great video on this by someone on youtube called Inspiring Philosophy –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C5pq7W5yRM&t=225s. Now, I don’t agree with his religious conclusions at the end – I think he is making a leap in reasoning there that you can’t make, but it is still a great video up until that point.
Probably the best physicist I have found today discussing this topic is a person called Robert Lanza. He was called by The New York Times one of the three most important scientists alive today, just to give you a bit of an idea of how good a scientist he is! He is a much better writer than speaker, and his book “Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe” is a fantastic read and very accessible even for those unfamiliar with physics. But for those who don’t have the time or inclination to read a book, here he is at the Science and Nonduality conference giving a talk on this subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI_F4nOKDSM&t=47s
As I said, spirituality is also a very broad topic and covers a whole range of issues, but this is what it means to me in its most basic form, as a former science student and advocate of the scientific method (the method based on direct evidence!). I may make some more blog posts on the broader topic of spirituality in future but I think that’s all I have to say for now.
Thanks for reading,
Will.
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