6 ms·

Spirituality Is Secure Attachment with Reality

34 points by mwfogleman 2y ago

superkuh 2y ago
Spirituality is not universally a belief in non-reality but it mostly is. This overloading of the word with it's opposite might be useful within their group but I think it'll just cause confusion in a global namespace.
- sixo 2y ago
  yeah. This post seems basically right, but it's not what most of the rest of the world means by "spirituality".
neom 2y ago
I've always wondered if feeling like I am something in something is the standard human experience. Never mind the philosophy or religion or any of that stuff, just the sense that I am a thing inside a thing (a spirit in a body, but that isn't quite right, more like a body+spirit in a body+spirit world?) I've always wondered if basically everyone feels this way. I thought this was good: "spirituality is, at its heart, about our relationship with reality itself. Whether we name it God, Buddha-nature, or simply Life, we are always in relationship with it. The quality of that relationship - secure or insecure, trusting or defensive - shapes every aspect of our experience." - but the author uses "reality itself" and "just like a child" waaaayyy to often, at least they are honest at the start there is a lot of LLM in there.
keiferski 2y ago
There is this really useful word, immanence, that I wish were more widely known. Basically it means “focused on this world and human experience.” I learned this in A Secular Age, a fantastic book by the philosopher Charles Taylor. Basically the book is about how modern western society is increasingly immanent, focused on this reality and not on what is after life; e. g., heaven and hell, punishments and rewards after life, personal experience after death, and so on. I bring this up because I think a decent working definition of spirituality is how one navigates this immanent situation. It seems to me that there quite likely is something beyond the bounds of human experience, but we aren’t quite sure what it is. A successful version of spirituality, to me, would be a way of navigating this situation in such a way that is psychologically healthy and philosophically justifiable. Simply denying existence outside of human frames seems like a denial of reality.
- nine_k 2y ago
  "Reality" is such a loaded word. It assumes a lot: existence of something outside the observer; its durability and continuity; presence of other similar observers, who also sense the reality in "essentially the same" way, with a lot of problems in defining the "sameness"; the idea that the "objective reality" also still exists in absence of any observers. For the reality to be "objective", the observers also need to be somehow durable, so with passage of "time", they could make some repeat observations and notice that the results are the same, that is, the reality must have "laws". It's pretty tall order. But, if we go with it by extending the reality past human death (why only human?), we, the humans, usually make it hugely anthropocentric, often more so than when astronomy put Earth in the center of universe. For me, it's a sign that many spiritual movements try to serve as a consolation to humans fearing death, rather than an honest research of anything past "this side" of reality. Certainly there are kinds of spirituality that avoid this trap, e.g. Theravada Buddhism; sadly it tries to describe provably incorrect things, like a number of heavens at particular heights above Earth. A spiritualism that tries to pass simple checks should either actually predict "physical reality" and thus become science, or drop any pretenses that it can be observable in the "physical reality", thus going firmly into the realm of not even fairy tales but of strictly internal experience of an observer, hence becoming solipsist. Solipsism is logically entitled to anything :) If you just "want to believe", the Pascal's Wager is as good as it has always been.
  - neom 2y ago
    How are you using solipsist here? I think like "ego" it can have 3 connotations ascribed to it, negative, neutral/clinical and positive?
  - keiferski 2y ago
    That can all be true, but still miss the point of what a good spirituality ought to be. Yes, it may be a flaw of human religious systems to put humanity at the center of everything. But that’s only a flaw if we’re looking for an external explanation of reality. The fact is that from our perspective, we are at the center of our universe and psychologically, we are healthier if we have some coherent answers to tell ourselves about reality. This is the real flaw with the positivist, scientific-dominant world view IMO. It obsesses over this external notion of objectivity while forgetting that human flourishing is (arguably) more important than merely accumulating information.
yoyohello13 2y ago
This article seemed like it was talking in circles and I have a really hard time understanding wtf this guy was talking about. Then I saw the header that this was in part taken from conversations with AI and now I just think it’s AI slop. I’m kind of annoyed I read the whole thing.
- neom 2y ago
  It's the hyphens that always give it away, hyphen or hyphen family. Just as an experiment, I ctrl'f'ed "-" on this article, 28, then I went to "best medium articles of 2012 2013 2014, average is 6/7 of them with high being ~ > 13 Never the less, the article mostly made sense to me, although it was a bit circular, I still found it tolerable as far as LLM assisted work goes, def didn't feel "written by AI".
- 1659447091 2y ago
  It was a difficult follow with a lot of concepts that repeated sometimes with the added "spirituality" parts that vacillated between secular, agnostic and metaphysical. The whole thing could entirely remove the words around "spirituality" and would still simply be about our attachment style with lived reality. I am guessing because they are religious and things heard after catholic mass sparked some thoughts, they have not reached the secure attachment part of their reality to voice these thoughts without adding in something outside of themselves that is needed for wholeness. It's a thinly veiled healing and love are there for us if we openly and securely attach to *cough metaphysical cough* reality.
chrisvalleybay 2y ago
I found this post (and the one he had posted before it) to be very useful and descriptive. I find it very interesting to attempt to view this through the lens of attachment. Creative! I have been going through a similar breakdown the last 4-5 months and some of the perspectives resonate with me. It helped to feel some community in this process.
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
> God, as I heard recently in a Catholic mass, is always facing us - though we so often turn away. Like a securely attached mother, Reality/God remains present, ready to repair, connect, love, and attune. Our task isn't to earn this love but to develop the capacity to receive it, to stay present even when it challenges and shatters our familiar views of self and world. I hate to pick out just one quote, but this is really emblematic of the issue I have with the source article. A Catholic mass is not about our psychological status or abstract relationship with reality - it's a remembrance of the incarnation of God into a specific man we call Jesus, his life in the ancient Roman governate of Judaea, his execution and resurrection, and his plans to come back and resurrect all of us at some point in the future. If you would prefer to follow "Reality/God", more power to you. But it's critical to recognize that you're rejecting the Catholic tradition by doing so, not following some deeper truth.
mrkeen 2y ago
> What does secure attachment to reality look like? It means feeling safe to experience whatever arises. It means trusting that reality is fundamentally reliable. In other words, up is up and down is down. Water is not wine. Reality doesn't come and go on the whims of a prayer halfway across the world.
michaelmrose 2y ago
Complete and utter nonsense intermixed with normalcy. > This doesn't mean all experiences are pleasant. The worldly winds still blow harsh and cold. But secure attachment to reality means we can safely experience all of it. This is why challenging events often become crises of faith - they probe the very edges of our trust in existence itself. Only we by virtue of extreme privilege can deign to pretend that this is real and only when we are young at that. It's a crisis because we are asking people to simultaneously come to grips with a world where they are both a special spiritual being personally loved by the creator of the universe and a fragile existence that can be snuffed out for no reason by a misplaced step or a gust of wind. Since the reality of our mortality is impossible to ignore one logically must doubt how special we really are. > There is no prerequisite state we must achieve to earn the love of Reality/God. That love is already here, constantly available, needing only our remembrance. Not even sure what this even means. Our gods to the extent that they exist are constructs that didn't exist before we are born and will only outlive us save to the extent that we manage to communicate these ideas to others. To be loved by god is merely to be loved by yourself no different than imagining our dead loved ones would be proud of us by virtue of emulating them in our own head. Secure attachment to reality would be the erasure of these false idols. > Consider the common experience of feeling "abandoned by God" during difficult times This is simply understanding that we are in fact alone reliant upon ourselves and those who are close to us. > The difference between becoming bitter and deepening in faith during times of challenge lies in our capacity to include the breakdown into our relationship with reality - and through this inclusion, discover a more complete wholeness. Blaming yourself or blaming god are just two different ways to rationalize a delusion. If we continue to believe in god but simultaneously blame him this is obviously a more problematic path as we have no power to reform god. > This reveals a surprising truth about both spiritual development and psychological growth: what appears as falling apart might actually be falling together. What feels like losing our religion might be faith deepening its roots. What seems like a crisis of connection might be an invitation into more authentic relationship with reality itself. This sounds like Stockholm syndrome > When we grasp this truth, we can approach both our own development and that of others with deeper compassion and wisdom. We begin to understand that the path to greater spiritual security might lead us through periods of apparent insecurity When we believe in crazy baloney by definition no proof is ever given and many counterexamples are readily available so anyone with a functional brain will ultimately experience doubt. When we socially prove that doubt is normal and expected but not a reason for fundamental re-evaluation of norms by virtue of people both adjacent and above us in a social hierarchy "triumphing" over doubt we collectively grant permission to dismiss these troubling thoughts and continue believing in crazy. The entire piece could be profitably shortened to the sentence that intellectual, emotional, or spiritual growth requires one to be secure in one's self, and in the acceptance of one's self and support of peers and betters in order to move forward from the stable base of self.
moralestapia 2y ago
Flagged? Why? This was a great read!

34 points by mwfogleman 2y ago

Spirituality is not universally a belief in non-reality but it mostly is. This overloading of the word with it's opposite might be useful within their group but I think it'll just cause confusion in a global namespace.

sixo 2y ago
yeah. This post seems basically right, but it's not what most of the rest of the world means by "spirituality".

neom 2y ago

I've always wondered if feeling like I am something in something is the standard human experience. Never mind the philosophy or religion or any of that stuff, just the sense that I am a thing inside a thing (a spirit in a body, but that isn't quite right, more like a body+spirit in a body+spirit world?) I've always wondered if basically everyone feels this way. I thought this was good: "spirituality is, at its heart, about our relationship with reality itself. Whether we name it God, Buddha-nature, or simply Life, we are always in relationship with it. The quality of that relationship - secure or insecure, trusting or defensive - shapes every aspect of our experience." - but the author uses "reality itself" and "just like a child" waaaayyy to often, at least they are honest at the start there is a lot of LLM in there.

keiferski 2y ago

There is this really useful word, immanence, that I wish were more widely known. Basically it means “focused on this world and human experience.” I learned this in A Secular Age, a fantastic book by the philosopher Charles Taylor. Basically the book is about how modern western society is increasingly immanent, focused on this reality and not on what is after life; e. g., heaven and hell, punishments and rewards after life, personal experience after death, and so on. I bring this up because I think a decent working definition of spirituality is how one navigates this immanent situation. It seems to me that there quite likely is something beyond the bounds of human experience, but we aren’t quite sure what it is. A successful version of spirituality, to me, would be a way of navigating this situation in such a way that is psychologically healthy and philosophically justifiable. Simply denying existence outside of human frames seems like a denial of reality.

nine_k 2y ago
"Reality" is such a loaded word. It assumes a lot: existence of something outside the observer; its durability and continuity; presence of other similar observers, who also sense the reality in "essentially the same" way, with a lot of problems in defining the "sameness"; the idea that the "objective reality" also still exists in absence of any observers. For the reality to be "objective", the observers also need to be somehow durable, so with passage of "time", they could make some repeat observations and notice that the results are the same, that is, the reality must have "laws". It's pretty tall order. But, if we go with it by extending the reality past human death (why only human?), we, the humans, usually make it hugely anthropocentric, often more so than when astronomy put Earth in the center of universe. For me, it's a sign that many spiritual movements try to serve as a consolation to humans fearing death, rather than an honest research of anything past "this side" of reality. Certainly there are kinds of spirituality that avoid this trap, e.g. Theravada Buddhism; sadly it tries to describe provably incorrect things, like a number of heavens at particular heights above Earth. A spiritualism that tries to pass simple checks should either actually predict "physical reality" and thus become science, or drop any pretenses that it can be observable in the "physical reality", thus going firmly into the realm of not even fairy tales but of strictly internal experience of an observer, hence becoming solipsist. Solipsism is logically entitled to anything :) If you just "want to believe", the Pascal's Wager is as good as it has always been.
- neom 2y ago
  How are you using solipsist here? I think like "ego" it can have 3 connotations ascribed to it, negative, neutral/clinical and positive?
- keiferski 2y ago
  That can all be true, but still miss the point of what a good spirituality ought to be. Yes, it may be a flaw of human religious systems to put humanity at the center of everything. But that’s only a flaw if we’re looking for an external explanation of reality. The fact is that from our perspective, we are at the center of our universe and psychologically, we are healthier if we have some coherent answers to tell ourselves about reality. This is the real flaw with the positivist, scientific-dominant world view IMO. It obsesses over this external notion of objectivity while forgetting that human flourishing is (arguably) more important than merely accumulating information.

yoyohello13 2y ago

This article seemed like it was talking in circles and I have a really hard time understanding wtf this guy was talking about. Then I saw the header that this was in part taken from conversations with AI and now I just think it’s AI slop. I’m kind of annoyed I read the whole thing.

neom 2y ago
It's the hyphens that always give it away, hyphen or hyphen family. Just as an experiment, I ctrl'f'ed "-" on this article, 28, then I went to "best medium articles of 2012 2013 2014, average is 6/7 of them with high being ~ > 13 Never the less, the article mostly made sense to me, although it was a bit circular, I still found it tolerable as far as LLM assisted work goes, def didn't feel "written by AI".
1659447091 2y ago
It was a difficult follow with a lot of concepts that repeated sometimes with the added "spirituality" parts that vacillated between secular, agnostic and metaphysical. The whole thing could entirely remove the words around "spirituality" and would still simply be about our attachment style with lived reality. I am guessing because they are religious and things heard after catholic mass sparked some thoughts, they have not reached the secure attachment part of their reality to voice these thoughts without adding in something outside of themselves that is needed for wholeness. It's a thinly veiled healing and love are there for us if we openly and securely attach to *cough metaphysical cough* reality.

chrisvalleybay 2y ago

I found this post (and the one he had posted before it) to be very useful and descriptive. I find it very interesting to attempt to view this through the lens of attachment. Creative! I have been going through a similar breakdown the last 4-5 months and some of the perspectives resonate with me. It helped to feel some community in this process.

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago

> God, as I heard recently in a Catholic mass, is always facing us - though we so often turn away. Like a securely attached mother, Reality/God remains present, ready to repair, connect, love, and attune. Our task isn't to earn this love but to develop the capacity to receive it, to stay present even when it challenges and shatters our familiar views of self and world. I hate to pick out just one quote, but this is really emblematic of the issue I have with the source article. A Catholic mass is not about our psychological status or abstract relationship with reality - it's a remembrance of the incarnation of God into a specific man we call Jesus, his life in the ancient Roman governate of Judaea, his execution and resurrection, and his plans to come back and resurrect all of us at some point in the future. If you would prefer to follow "Reality/God", more power to you. But it's critical to recognize that you're rejecting the Catholic tradition by doing so, not following some deeper truth.

mrkeen 2y ago

> What does secure attachment to reality look like? It means feeling safe to experience whatever arises. It means trusting that reality is fundamentally reliable. In other words, up is up and down is down. Water is not wine. Reality doesn't come and go on the whims of a prayer halfway across the world.

michaelmrose 2y ago

Complete and utter nonsense intermixed with normalcy. > This doesn't mean all experiences are pleasant. The worldly winds still blow harsh and cold. But secure attachment to reality means we can safely experience all of it. This is why challenging events often become crises of faith - they probe the very edges of our trust in existence itself. Only we by virtue of extreme privilege can deign to pretend that this is real and only when we are young at that. It's a crisis because we are asking people to simultaneously come to grips with a world where they are both a special spiritual being personally loved by the creator of the universe and a fragile existence that can be snuffed out for no reason by a misplaced step or a gust of wind. Since the reality of our mortality is impossible to ignore one logically must doubt how special we really are. > There is no prerequisite state we must achieve to earn the love of Reality/God. That love is already here, constantly available, needing only our remembrance. Not even sure what this even means. Our gods to the extent that they exist are constructs that didn't exist before we are born and will only outlive us save to the extent that we manage to communicate these ideas to others. To be loved by god is merely to be loved by yourself no different than imagining our dead loved ones would be proud of us by virtue of emulating them in our own head. Secure attachment to reality would be the erasure of these false idols. > Consider the common experience of feeling "abandoned by God" during difficult times This is simply understanding that we are in fact alone reliant upon ourselves and those who are close to us. > The difference between becoming bitter and deepening in faith during times of challenge lies in our capacity to include the breakdown into our relationship with reality - and through this inclusion, discover a more complete wholeness. Blaming yourself or blaming god are just two different ways to rationalize a delusion. If we continue to believe in god but simultaneously blame him this is obviously a more problematic path as we have no power to reform god. > This reveals a surprising truth about both spiritual development and psychological growth: what appears as falling apart might actually be falling together. What feels like losing our religion might be faith deepening its roots. What seems like a crisis of connection might be an invitation into more authentic relationship with reality itself. This sounds like Stockholm syndrome > When we grasp this truth, we can approach both our own development and that of others with deeper compassion and wisdom. We begin to understand that the path to greater spiritual security might lead us through periods of apparent insecurity When we believe in crazy baloney by definition no proof is ever given and many counterexamples are readily available so anyone with a functional brain will ultimately experience doubt. When we socially prove that doubt is normal and expected but not a reason for fundamental re-evaluation of norms by virtue of people both adjacent and above us in a social hierarchy "triumphing" over doubt we collectively grant permission to dismiss these troubling thoughts and continue believing in crazy. The entire piece could be profitably shortened to the sentence that intellectual, emotional, or spiritual growth requires one to be secure in one's self, and in the acceptance of one's self and support of peers and betters in order to move forward from the stable base of self.

moralestapia 2y ago

Flagged? Why? This was a great read!