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Secular Spirituality: The Next Step Towards Enlightenment (Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality), by Harald Walach
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This book discusses spirituality as an emerging scientific topic from a historical perspective, with extensive discussion of the mind-body problem and of scientific concepts of consciousness. While the book focuses on the Western tradition of ‘Enlightenment’, it also implicitly addresses the double meaning of the term, with the Eastern tradition describing it as ‘a state of true knowledge, which is an important goal on an individual’s spiritual path’ and the Western tradition seeing it as ‘the collective process of getting rid of narrow-minded dogmas and concepts’. The book is based on a simple yet challenging premise: Science has not gone far enough in the scientific process of going from a collective mind tied up in dogmatic teachings to a truly free mind that, seemingly, freed itself from bondage and restrictions. The book shows that science, and with it our whole Western culture, has to incorporate spirituality if it is to realize this goal of enlightenment. If that is done, and it can only be done by many individuals actually practicing spirituality, this will also lead to the individual type of enlightenment.
- Sales Rank: #7714401 in Books
- Published on: 2014-09-18
- Original language: German
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.21" h x .56" w x 6.14" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 216 pages
From the Back Cover
This book discusses spirituality as an emerging scientific topic from a historical perspective, with extensive discussion of the mind-body problem and of scientific concepts of consciousness. While the book focuses on the Western tradition of ‘Enlightenment’, it also implicitly addresses the double meaning of the term, with the Eastern tradition describing it as ‘a state of true knowledge, which is an important goal on an individual’s spiritual path’ and the Western tradition seeing it as ‘the collective process of getting rid of narrow-minded dogmas and concepts’. The book is based on a simple yet challenging premise: Science has not gone far enough in the scientific process of going from a collective mind tied up in dogmatic teachings to a truly free mind that, seemingly, freed itself from bondage and restrictions. The book shows that science, and with it our whole Western culture, has to incorporate spirituality if it is to realize this goal of enlightenment. If that is done, and it can only be done by many individuals actually practicing spirituality, this will also lead to the individual type of enlightenment.
About the Author
Prof. Dr. Dr. Harald Walach is a German psychologist, medical researcher, and historian and philosopher of science. He is currently director of the Institute of Transcultural Health Sciences at the European University Frankfurt (Oder), Germany.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Disappointing coverage of an urgently needed secular spirituality
By Geoff Crocker
Harald Walach makes an urgent appeal for a secular spirituality which is non-doctrinal and non-dogmatic. He is right to do so. As he points out, rationalist-materialist models fail to express the holistic nature of humanity. They restrict the definition of consciousness to prioritise the intellectual, allow the emotional, but ignore or suppress the spiritual. We end up with consumerist society with little attention to our inner world. Material success and image eclipse virtue as human ontology. We need to rediscover our inner world, and explore our shared heart, soul, and spirit as human community, a secular ‘koinonia’. Walach proposes a merger of our two Enlightenments – the western rational and eastern spiritual Enlightenments.
However, from this welcome motivation, the specific argument for spirituality which Walach presents is inadequate. He defines spirituality as ‘the experiential core of any religion’ (p2), and experience as ‘a holistic type of knowing’ (p15, 16) which he privileges to cognitive knowledge. Experience is both of an outer material world and an inner subjective world. Spiritual experience is ‘a direct unmediated experience of an absolute reality that is beyond the experiencing self’ (p20).
Spirituality, he says, is about connectedness beyond the ego (p19). He cites the existence of many levels of consciousness as a claim allowing spirituality also as an extra dimension of consciousness. Spirituality extends beyond where science or regular consciousness take us (p64), although he does not treat the epistemology or ontology of science adequately15. He quotes Roger Bacon’s 1267 letter to the Pope comparing outer scientific experience to inner spiritual experience, which Bacon defines in terms of virtue, the beatitudes of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, the fruits of the spirit, and ecstasy (p42). However, Walach then rejects virtue as the definition of spirituality and chooses to define it in terms of transcendental experience, ‘It would be a misunderstanding if we were to reduce religion and spirituality to ethics and morals’ (p26), although he later says that these issues ‘cannot be pushed away’ (p60).
I argue elsewhere13 that religious naturalism6, emergence5, and meaning in life7,8,10,11 are potential routes to establish a secular spirituality. At one point, Halach briefly suggests a route to religious naturalism (p10), but he does not then engage the extensive literature on this concept6. He summarily rejects emergence (p74 ff), since it links back to physical matter as its host, although his later exposition of neuroscience is essentially psychosomatic. Instead he advances ‘complementarity’ between consciousness and spirituality, a concept he does little to explain or justify (p80).
This leads to difficulty. Once we allow spiritual expression independently of cognitive rationality, we have no arbiter of its truth or value. Narcotics can equally generate extended consciousness as Carlos Castaneda12 has famously shown (p102). Anyone who has observed the practice of gnostic ‘prophecies’ and ‘words of knowledge’ in charismatic Christian churches will know the potential for damage, exploitation and manipulation through the authority they falsely claim. Walach recognises the potential for abuse, but maintains that intuition equals rationality in truth claims. I find that unsustainable. Can I allow my intuition to judge a defendant guilty, rather than the forensic science?
It is difficult to see the relevance of a long and convoluted exposition on neurobiology (p106-122). His comments here are speculative and lack rigour. Thoughts are poured forth and strung together in Walach’s own stream of consciousness. His main advocacy of spiritual practice is as an antidote to stress (p115). Classical meditation techniques offer access to insight, deep sight, experiential unity, fundamental nature, boundless joy, freedom, goodness, discernment of spirits, openness, and creativity (pp139-163). He closes with a blast against Nazism and capitalism.
For Walach, it seems that if, in the unlikely case that everyone practised yoga or meditation, then all would be well. He says that we would then be ‘mindful’, which is an attractive proposition, but one which cuts across his advocacy of non-rational consciousness. Worthy as Walach’s proposals may be, I am not convinced that transcendental experiences, which are accessible only very occasionally, and by no means universally, can become the core of a renewed secular spirituality. Christ’s Sermon on the Mount celebrates virtue, not transcendental experience. I submit that a humanity embracing inner virtue has a far richer spirituality than one which experienced occasional ecstatic states1,14.
Geoff Crocker
Author ‘An Enlightened Philosophy – Can an Atheist Believe Anything?’ www.anenlightenedphilosophy.com
Author ‘A Managerial Philosophy of Technology : Technology and Humanity in Symbiosis’ www.philosophyoftechnology.com
Editor ‘Atheist Spirituality’ www.atheistspirituality.net
References
1 André Comte-Sponville. 2004. A Short Treatise of the Great Virtues. Heinemann.
2 André Comte-Sponville. 2008. The Book of Atheist Spirituality. Bantam.
3 Jacob Waschenfelder. 2012.‘The World Suffices: Spiritualities without the Supernatural’, Journal for the Study of Spirituality, vol.2, no.2, pp.171-186.
4 Don Cupitt. 2010. Taking Leave of God. SCM.
5 Philip Clayton (Ed). 2008. The Re-Emergence of Emergence. Oxford University Press.
6 Jerome A Stone (Ed). 2009. Religious Naturalism Today: The Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative. State University of New York Press.
7 John Cottingham. 2002. On the Meaning of Life. Routledge .
8 Susan Wolf. 2012. Meaning in Life and Why it Matters. Princeton University Press.
9 Erik Wielenberg. 2005. Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe. Cambridge University Press.
10 Thaddeus Metz (Ed). 2012. Exploring the Meaning of Life : An Anthology and Guide. Wiley.
11 Thaddeus Metz. 2013.Meaning in Life. Oxford University Press.
12 Carlos Castenada. 1990 ‘The Teachings of Don Juan : a Yaqui Way of Knowledge’. Arkana.
13 Geoff Crocker, 2015 ‘On Atheist Spirituality’ Journal for the Study of Spirituality, forthcoming
14 Geoff Crocker, 2010 ‘An Enlightened Philosophy – Can an Atheist Believe Anything?’ 2010 O-Books
15 Geoff Crocker, 2012 ‘A Managerial Philosophy of Technology : Technology and Humanity in Symbiosis’ Palgrave Macmillan
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
COMPLEMENTARITY, SPIRITUALITY, AND COMMON HUMAN WELLBEING
By Jean C. MacPhail, Ph.D.
Harald Walach: Secular Spirituality: The Next Step towards Enlightenment (20015). Switzerland: Springer
The notion of complementarity rules this book. Quoting Niels Bohr, the founder of quantum mechanics, the author Harald Walach states that “two descriptions which are maximally incompatible are necessary to describe one and the same thing, yet they need to be applied conjointly if that thing—in our case a human being—is to be understood properly” (pp.6, 80).
The very title—Secular Spirituality—is itself a complementarity, an oxymoron; purportedly a unity, it aligns secular—which explicitly excludes spiritualty—with spirituality itself. Just how the author proposes to resolve this issue is the big question.
Walach, for whom human growth and progress rely upon communication of the “inner” world of experience and the “outer” world of concept, first presents two historical examples of unresolved complementarity: the crushing of expression of internal experience by conceptual dogmas of faith in the Christian Church, and by contemporary materialist dogmas of natural science. Both have resulted in human stultification and in health and other global issues that require new types of intervention.
Now neuroscience has thrown light on basic the existence and interaction of complementary brain processes that may help to resolve the issue: the causal and holistic modes of brain function, which Walach compares to the particle and wave complementarity of quantum physics (p.146), as also to other complementarities, including:
Matter and mind (p.81).
Logical and non-propositional aspects of language (p.21).
Ontological monism and an epistemology based on phenomenological dualism regarding our experiences in the phenomenological world (pp.81-82).
The fact that complementary function has been documented in the same brain, and that the balance between them is constantly adapting to meet whatever exigencies are at hand raises the possibility that there is some as yet unknown substratum in which both are embedded and play their respective roles. It also suggests that there is no intrinsic reason why concept or experience should be privileged over the other, as has been the case over the two millennia of the Common Era.
Walach seeks to use these insights to leverage classical natural science from its dogma of materialism to an acceptance of the validity and necessity of cultivating the interior, experiential functions of the human psyche. He proposes to do this by promoting the practice of meditation, which depends for its success on a supportive community, an ordered and internally directed lifestyle, an understanding of principles, values, and an ability to discipline oneself in order to perform the meditation. A rising tide of measurable wellbeing that could be correlated with the rise of meditation practice would be the strongest materialist argument in favor of the validity of the interior world and its impact on the material world.
As and when we gain some expertise in such a dynamic, the issue becomes: where to focus this newly-discovered flexibility. Walach’s last chapter provides us with a whole menu from climate change to an equable facing of the universal problem of evil, which should keep us busy until we get to the next stage of our collective psychic development.
Secular—the gift of modernity—appears in Walach’s utopia as freedom: from enforced dogmas, especially when they are not directly related to valid experience (p.37); of the individual to choose whichever spiritual path works pragmatically; to take personal responsibility for self-transformation: to experiment and to find workable and unique ways of actualizing the insights obtained in meditation or other spiritual practice (pp.180, 188, 195).
The price of maintaining balance between whatever complementaries arise, however, would be the constant awareness of the ongoing “yin-yang” type of interplay of concept and experience. This would hopefully prevent the ascension of rigid, strangulating dogmas of any sort or—from the other side—wild uncontrolled fantasies and excesses that result from unexamined lifestyle.
As Walach’s primary aim is to get beyond the stultification of scientism, it is not surprising that he focuses on the inevitable clash of exterior and interior that it involves. However, in the spiritual traditions of the world after the battle of dogma and experience is over, there open out two other options that offer different ways of looking at the issue. First comes an ontology from matter, perceived externally, to the most interior aspects of consciousness, which provides a framework within which complementarity is seen from a variety of different levels that throw light on how to resolve complementarity itself. Walach himself refers occasionally to this model, including the thirteenth-century view of Roger Bacon of seven levels of “interior science”, as also the ten Zen/Daoist ox-herding pictures. In answer to his reservations about exposing beginners to such a model (p.162) it seems only fair that there should be some kind of map, no matter how incomplete, for anyone setting out on such a self-motivated and self-maintaining journey. It might also guide neuroscientists in their selection of subjects for study—clearly one size does not fit all in this situation.
Beyond even that there is now emerging, both in the East and in the West, a further solution that focuses on “whatever it is” that the two sides of the complementarity emerge from. The evidence that we have indicates that a person who has “cracked that nut” is able to see every single step of the whole process as equally valid and important and at the same time totally interrelated with all of the other possibilities, without which the whole picture cannot be either seen or responded to appropriately. In addition, he or she is capable of entering every single level on its own terms without losing his or her balance or vision of the whole picture. This is the integral or holistic approach that is the ultimate pragmatism that Walach seems to aspire to. I would suggest here as exemplars Paul Tillich and Swami Vivekananda. Inexplicably, Walach dubs Vivekananda an idealist, who is alleged to reject matter from his ontology, despite all evidence to the contrary.
In addition, he dubs Vivekananda and Asians like him as “independent thinking subjects with immediate access to experience” (p.72), allegedly not working like contemporary scientists in a group effort. This does not take into account that Asian yogis were and are embedded in a millennial community and culture of the interior world every bit as stringent and diverse as Western science and its communities; nor, for that matter, that Western science has progressed on the intuitive discoveries of the likes of Newton, Maxwell, Planck, Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg. These are understandable misjudgments—or even unexamined Western stereotypes—which, however, is somewhat moderated by Walach’s suggestion that, in view of the failure of Western science to access the inner world, “perhaps assessing the rich introspective traditions of the East might be a starting point” (p.83).
It seems likely that at this early stage of Western scientific study of the interior world, Walach’s proposal to study concentrated or collected states of consciousness in highly-trained subjects (pp.85-86) would in practice not only bring him to those who have most seriously followed Asian methods of yoga but also an understanding of the interior ontologies and states of consciousness including the holistic, integral, global vision now emerging from its hoary culture.
This is the mindset we urgently require to tackle the global, multicultural issues we are currently faced with. And, having effectively established the link between the inner and outer worlds, surely neuroscience will soon arrive at methods that can investigate and test the claims made by these advanced yogis, and thus give “secular approval” to a radically new, emerging worldview.
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