Poor Richard has a very long post with a critique of spirituality, which in my opinion, he doesn’t “get” (as I did, for many years, and I think this is an unbridgeable gap until some numinous experience is profound enough to make you change your mind), though I appreciate the effort to make the experience of the numinous compatible with reason and science, which is as it should be. At some later date, I may respond with more detailed arguments why the recognition of spirituality may be important.

However, here, I just want to excerpt some of the parts of Richard’s long essay where he refers to my own work on peer to peer spirituality.

My main critique of his approach is to make a strong dualistic opposition between ‘rational’ and prerational ‘magical’ thinking. By contrast, taking an integrative point of view, so-called ‘pre-rational’modes of thinking have their place and time in human life, and those that reject it, are in my opinion, impoverished by this rejection, though it is of course a matter of human freedom to do so. Similary, I am certainly impoverished myself because of my very low interest in art, and artists will justly be compassionate or critical about this lack.

Poor Richard:

“Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation says this about a peer-to-peer version of spirituality:

I’ll give you an example in the field of spiritual research. I have an example of one or two people like John Heron in New Zealand (of the South Pacific Center for Human Inquiry). Let’s say you do meditation. You have to choose a lineage from within which to work. If you do it according to the instructions of the lineage, there are certain things you are expected to experience while other experiences may be disqualified. In other words authoritarianism is built into the spiritual practice.

…

But what if we just agree to get together and practice a certain meditation. Lets say Zen. At the end of the day we get together and exchange our experiences. This then is the open source way to experience things which I personally consider to be real without having to accept the whole hierarchical and institutional context in which this has happened until today. You can see then how peer to peer is not something you apply just in the production of goods or the collection of knowledge. … Perhaps you just apply it to everything. … Every human activity that can be done by peers allocating their resources together can be peer-to-peer. You can therefore have something as unlikely seeming as a peer-to-peer spirituality. *”

See also The next Buddha will be a collective: spiritual expression in the peer to peer era. By Michel Bauwens

I agree with Bauwens about the authoritarianism of spiritual traditions, but I disagree with him about the basic nature of spirituality itself, which even without the authoritarianism is overburdened with magical thinking.

If you subtract the magical thinking from spirituality, what’s left is 1) meta-cognition, 2) cognitive hygiene and 3) the scientific fact that all life is interconnected and interdependent.

“Is motherly love just an oxytocin release?”

Do we know what anything is, in itself? They are not necessarily completely different things which are merely coincident, nor completely different things which merely proceed from a common cause. There could actually be some existential or ontological overlap. If they are always correlated, it certainly begs the question. How can we design an experiment to expand our knowledge on this matter? It is still early days in fMRI, molecular biology and other objective lab measurements. No doubt even more subtle and more powerful methods are needed and are to come.

The question of knowing what another person’s spiritual values are is also intriguing. It is not yet widely known, but it is nevertheless a proven scientific fact that most people do not even know what many of their own values are. See and/or participate in the Harvard study on implicit associations at implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/. It suggests that if we are looking for allies for changing the material world, a person’s past behavior is a much better correlate with their probable future behavior than anything we can learn about their “values”.

What we believe about ourselves is usually no better justified than what we believe about God.

In my opinion there IS evidence that thoughts are material. They always seem to require the proximity of a physical brain. They seem to leave “footprints” we can see with EEG or fMRI or whatever. But even if there were no evidence of the materiality of thoughts, mind, self, enlightenment, etc., how would such non-evidence be transubstantiated into evidence of the contrary (non-materiality)?

It seems to me that the only evidence we have of anything being non-material is “thought evidence”. The current body of evidence for materiality may sometimes be sparse, but its better than that. Excuse me for thinking that the case for materiality (with all the wormholes it may still include) is stronger than the case for non-materiality.

Like our senses, our emotions are integral parts of our authentic experience. They can be important guides and teachers. The trouble is, they can also mislead us. Thoughts can mislead as well. We can make logical errors or deceive ourselves. We can get lost and carried away. That’s why we need our scientific methods to stay in touch with reality and stay on course.

Of course, you are right to be skeptical of science, as well. It certainly has its problems and shortcomings.

But there is no war between subjective experience and science. Science has revealed to us that the physical development of an infant’s brain depends on love. But it has also begun to reveal ways that love and other feelings are intimately interwoven with physical processes in the human brain, such as oxytocin and dopamine pathways.

Faith and science are not enemies. Faith is expectation. That is where things like neurotransmitters and other hormones, and things like the placebo effect, come in.

Unfortunately, science just has little or nothing to offer at present about many important questions and experiences. Science is still young compared with other aspects of human culture. Rational thought itself is a relatively recent, still-emerging cognitive ability in our species. Rationality still competes with many forms of predictable irrationality in our brains. On the other hand, I think many people would be very surprised at what science has learned about human nature, emotions, and cognitive processes in just the past few years.

I recently read something like “Reality is anything that still exists when you stop believing in it.”

To be fair, I have experienced a number of altered states of consciousness that I cannot explain scientifically. In my world, however, these are “exotic” experiences rather than spiritual experiences, even though they sometimes have even contained religious imagery or content. In my opinion, the jury is still out on the origin and meaning of these experiences. I lean towards natural causes, even if those causes turn out to be very subtle and perhaps very surprising.”