Ten years ago I read Sam Harris’s Waking Up. The promise is in the subtitle: spirituality without religion. You can have the thing the contemplatives keep pointing at without the cosmology, without the rituals, taking nothing on faith. Just sit, look at your immediate experience, and let it show you what’s there. No beliefs required. Here was someone offering me the territory on terms I could accept, and for that I still owe the book a great deal.
What I couldn’t see at the time is that the book had answered a question it never asked: what is spirituality, anyway? It hands you a spirituality, a particular one, with its own commitments: that consciousness is the place to look, that the self becomes transparent under examination, that what you find when you look needs no tradition to vouch for it. A fine set of commitments, several of which I’d still make. But a set of commitments is not the same as an account of what spirituality is, any more than learning one instrument tells you what music is. It took me many years to feel the difference between being handed a path and understanding what kind of thing a path is.
Many people share the pull toward finding a contemporary form of spirituality, even if they don’t express it that way. Across much of the affluent West, religious affiliation has weakened while the language of spirituality has become available to people who want nothing to do with organised religion. You hear it at dinner parties, where someone says, half-apologetically, that they’re not religious but they are spiritual, and then the sentence trails off. The trailing off is the thing to notice. It often marks more than shyness or a missing vocabulary. It marks a sense that whatever they’re reaching for has already been placed somewhere it can’t quite be discussed, a private matter, a question of personal taste. We’ve sorted the world into facts, which are public and shared and the kind of thing you can be wrong about, and spirituality, which is personal and yours and nobody’s place to correct. That sounds like tolerance. Mostly it leaves each person alone with their spirituality, assembling something out of whatever is near to hand.
Ask what people mean by the word, and you usually get something about feeling connected to something larger than themselves. That describes an effect, and on a good day it’s an effect some spiritualities produce. It also can’t tell apart the person moved by a sunset and the person who has rebuilt their life around a vow. Inspiration of that kind isn’t hard to find. Orientation is harder: some account of what spirituality is, what might make one form of it better than another, how to tell whether you’re deepening or just rearranging your comforts into a more pleasing shape. The warm feeling won’t carry any of that.
The contemporary world offers many spiritualities: Buddhist meditation and its secular offshoots, ayahuasca ceremonies, manifestation teachings, tarot and astrology arriving through the feed, Stoicism in its self-help afterlife, witchcraft revived as practice and as identity, nonduality satsangs on YouTube, psycho-spiritual communities. What's missing is anything that would tell you what kind of thing all of these are. Without that, choosing a path looks like choosing a favourite colour, more taste than discernment, and the way we've sorted things insists that's all it could ever be.
I keep returning to this question in my work as a coach. I can’t avoid this question because many of my clients gravitate towards spirituality, regardless of whether they use the term. Some arrive wanting to talk about meditation, or what to make of something that happened on a psychedelic journey. Others come aspiring to be more productive, and three sessions later we’re talking about life purpose, or about what they’d do if they stopped believing the story that has organised the last fifteen years of their life. Pressed far enough, the question of how to live opens onto the question of what the whole of it is for. That is the question our culture has learned to file away as private. In the room, it won’t stay filed.
Defining Spirituality
Spirituality is the orientation a life enacts toward reality itself, in the light of what it takes to be ultimately good.
The intuition has many precedents. Paul Tillich called it ultimate concern, whatever a life is finally built around, the thing that for him decided our being and non-being. David Foster Wallace gave the plain version in a graduation speech that outlived him: everyone worships something, and the only choice is what. I’m with both of them that the orientation is unavoidable. What I want to add is an exploration of how that orientation works. It turns on four parts, and each puts the weight somewhere the most accounts leave dark.
The first is orientation. It’s tempting to locate a spirituality in what a person believes, in God or awakening or energy or past lives or nothing, and belief is where most accounts come to rest. But orientation is more fundamental. It is the prior layer that settles what counts as real, what matters, and how to stand in the world, and so decides, before you’ve formed a single belief, what your attention even comes to rest on. One person moves through life as though it is meaningful, the losses included; another as though it adds up to nothing, one thing after another going nowhere. Give them the same week. For the first, the world arrives charged with significance, this worth grieving, that worth protecting. For the second, the same hours may arrive flat, or may open as the freedom to make of a life what one chooses. Neither is adding a private gloss to some neutral set of facts. They are living in different worlds, and what shows up as significant in each follows from the orientation, not from the facts in front of them.
The second part is ultimately good, and it locates the centre of an orientation. We tend to say a life runs on values, the kind a person might list on a wall: honesty, courage, family, hard work. Underneath any such list sit fundamental goods. Across spiritual traditions and centuries a small number recur. Truth, the good of seeing reality as it is and ceasing to live under illusion, distortion, or self-deception. Freedom, the good of release, whether from suffering, bondage, compulsion, fear, egoic fixation, or the whole turning wheel of it. Love, the good of union and self-giving, of standing in right relation to what is other than oneself. Flourishing, the good of a life lived fully and well, in health, virtue, vitality, or attunement with one’s nature and the larger order it belongs to. Beauty, the good of beholding and making what strikes us as radiant and worthy of reverence.
Different traditions give different goods a distinctive organising role. Many Mahāyāna traditions foreground liberation inseparable from compassion. Sufi paths often make love their primary language of transformation. Advaita gives decisive weight to liberating knowledge.
Whichever good a life centres, and however many it reaches, what makes the good spiritual rather than merely desirable is that we want it for its own sake. We pursue many things for the sake of something further: we want the job for the money, the money for the security, and the security for the life it is all supposed to add up to. A fundamental good is where that chain of for the sake of finally stops. It is the thing the rest was always for.
The third part is reality. To orient towards it is to stay with the questions that open when the ordinary ground of a life stops being obvious. What is actually here? What am I? What is anything, apart from my idea of it? What is consciousness, that there is any of this to anyone? How am I to stand in all this, given that I am in it and will not be here long? These are living questions, not questions you answer and set aside. To ask them seriously is to risk being moved by the asking.
A good can be wanted for its own sake and still leave the ground of things untouched. This person, this craft, this corner of a life. Such devotion can be wholehearted, even life-defining, and never once open onto what any of it is. What makes an orientation spiritual is that its ultimate good leads past the particular things we love or pursue and brings the ground itself into question, so that what is met there reaches into how a life is lived. At that point, what you are and what all this is can no longer be held at arm’s length.
Take love. To love another person can be the whole of someone’s devotion and still not be a spirituality. But love is also one of the names a tradition gives to its ultimate good, and to the way that good is met. The Sufi mystics and the Christian contemplatives built whole paths on it, treating love a quality of reality itself, the force by which what is most real is approached and finally known. To orient a life by love in that sense is a stance toward reality itself, and it is a different thing from loving any particular person, however devotedly.
In the account of A.H. Almaas, one of the founders of the Diamond Approach, the heart begins dispersed across its many loves, a person, a place, a hundred smaller wants, none of them wrong, but none of them yet what the heart is finally after. The work is to let the heart gather itself, to follow the longing past each particular thing it has settled on toward what was moving underneath all of it. And the particular loves are not left behind at the end. They return, seen now as fragments of the one love. Loving this person and loving the ground of things begin to disclose themselves as movements of the same love. Wherever I go, everybody I see, I see the beloved, as the mystics say.1 This is an orientation towards reality.
The last part is enacts, and it carries all the rest. A spirituality is something a life does, but more than that, it is something a life is: a whole way of standing in reality, the stance a person takes toward existence and lives out whether or not they ever put it into words.
This divides spirituality from metaphysics. A metaphysics is a picture of what is ultimately true; a spirituality answers to what it takes to be ultimately good. A metaphysics may inform a spirituality without ever making up one. One describes reality; the other is lived toward it. You can hold a picture of the world at arm’s length, defend it in a seminar, and drive home unchanged, because a description asks nothing of you. A good asks. It pulls. It sorts your hours. The cognitive scientist who can prove that the self is a construction, and still spends the drive home knotted in self-concern, has the metaphysics and not the spirituality. The picture is in place; nothing is being lived from it. The same proposition can sit inert in one person, slowly reshape how a second sees, and in a third dissolve the very grip of self it describes. One sentence, three lives, and only the third is a spirituality, because only there has the claim become a way of being rather than a thing believed.
This is also why a practice, on its own, is not yet a spirituality. One can pick up a technique for any number of reasons, to regulate the nervous system, to sharpen attention, to feel a little better on a hard day, and used like that it leaves untouched the question of how one stands in reality at all. What makes a practice spiritual is the orientation it serves and expresses. The Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen teachers put it most exactly: the view is the meditation. The orientation is the thing being enacted, with the practice as its expression. Much of modern life runs the other way, keeping the techniques and downplaying orientation as belief, which is part of why so much that calls itself spiritual can feel oddly weightless. The practice is never the point. What it enacts is.
The same line marks what the definition counts and what it leaves out. A spirituality is world-constituting. It is the layer of a life where what is finally real, what is ultimately good, and how to stand in the whole are being answered, and the answering may be carried by inquiry, inherited from a tradition, or absorbed from a culture without anyone noticing it arrive. Pursuits usually sit at a different level. The career, the craft, the cause, the person a life is spent on: each ordinarily runs inside a world some orientation is already holding open, and can run to its end without ever touching how that world is held. Spirituality is the having of the world itself. The border can be crossed, and this was Wallace’s warning. A pursuit can swell until it is doing the answering, until success decides what is real and what everything is for, at which point the game has quietly become a god. What makes something a spirituality is the level at which it operates in a life.
None of this is fixed once and kept. An orientation forms and unfolds across a life, fed by your experiences, who you sit with, what breaks, what a practice slowly works into you. In any single moment, what a life is shows through what it does. Across a life, the doing and the being make each other.
Secular Materialism Is a Spirituality
Put your eye to a telescope on a cold night and find a smear of light that turns out to be a nebula, a nursery where stars are made. Somewhere in the chain of facts that follows is this one: the iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones were forged inside stars that died before the sun was lit, and scattered, and gathered again into the body now leaning into the eyepiece. People who hold nothing sacred, who would wave off any talk of spirituality, feel something move at this. A vastness opens. The small hard shell of the self goes thin for a moment. They have touched, by the most rigorously secular route available, awe.
Strictly speaking, secular materialism is a metaphysics. Lived, it becomes a spirituality. It is a full orientation toward reality, and most people in the modern West stand somewhere within it. Here is a version. What is real is the physical universe and nothing besides: matter and energy in lawful motion, with no author behind it and no purpose woven through it, meaning arising only where a mind makes it. The cosmos is not for anything; it simply is, and we are a brief, local part of it, conscious matter on its way back to the unconscious kind. Within that settlement, you stand as a subject among objects, looking out at a world of separate things to be known and used. You know them through reason and evidence, and what the sciences establish carries an authority that tradition and revelation have lost. Such knowledge is also power: grasp how the objects work and you can arrange them, your own body included, toward better ends.
The goods this serves are among the most honourable we have. Truth, first: see clearly, follow the evidence, refuse the consolations that will not survive scrutiny, prefer the world as it is to the world as you would wish it. And flourishing: a good life well lived, suffering reduced, dignity widened, the single span there is spent well. With no purpose handed down from outside, you are genuinely free to decide what your life is for, and that freedom registers as a gift and a burden at once. The weight makes it meaningful. People stand on these goods with their whole lives. It asks of its adherents an honesty that other orientations are often too comforted to manage.
It is the same cosmos in every case, but it does not come out the same for everyone. Carl Sagan said, we are a way for the cosmos to know itself. This is an orientation compressed to a sentence. Matter has become able to look back at the matter it came from, and the looking back is luminous. One can meet the world in gratitude and grief and still hold it is matter all the way down. Nothing in the physics forbids the tenderness. Another physicist holds the identical facts, the identical vacuum and chemistry and decimal places, and sees no deeper meaning. He takes that reading to be the sober one; the feeling stripped away to leave the facts bare. No measurement decides between them. What flattens a world is not the science. It is a further claim the materialist need not make: that a third-person description exhausts the real, that once you have said what a thing is made of and how it behaves, you have said all there is to say. The claim offers itself as the objective view with the feeling removed. It does the same world-making work as any other way of looking, and the world it hands back, drained of depth and call, is one reading among several, not the bare residue it takes itself to be.
Which undoes the assumption beneath most spiritual seeking: that ordinary secular life is the neutral baseline, and spirituality the dimension you bolt on if it appeals, the way you might take up a language or a sport. Charles Taylor calls this a subtraction story, the secular pictured as what is left once the old illusions fall away. Nothing fell away to reveal it. The baseline was already a stance. You stood in an orientation to the whole long before the question came up, and reaching for a spirituality only ever meant reaching, from inside the one already running, toward another.
A Spiritual Orientation Made Explicit
To see an orientation whole, it helps to find a tradition that has done the rare thing and written its own out in full. Where many paths teach through oral transmission and practice and leave the view implicit, Nondual Śaiva Tantra produced philosophers who set the view down in the open. Christopher Wallis, a contemporary scholar-practitioner of the Trika lineage and its recognition philosophy, the Pratyabhijñā, compresses that view into the following paragraph.
All that exists, throughout all time and beyond, is one infinite divine Consciousness, free and blissful, which projects within the field of its awareness a vast multiplicity of apparently differentiated subjects and objects: each object an actualization of a timeless potentiality inherent in the Light of Consciousness, and each subject, you and I, the same plus a contracted locus of self-awareness. This creation, a divine play, is the result of the natural impulse within Consciousness to express the totality of its self-knowledge in action, an impulse arising from love. The unbounded Light of Consciousness contracts into finite embodied loci of awareness out of its own free will. When those finite subjects then identify with the limited and circumscribed cognitions and circumstances that make up this phase of their existence, instead of identifying with the transindividual overarching pulsation of pure Awareness that is their true nature, they experience what they call “suffering.” To rectify this, some feel an inner urge to take up the path of spiritual wisdom and yogic practice, the purpose of which is to undermine their misidentification and directly reveal within the immediacy of awareness the fact that the divine powers of Consciousness, Bliss, Willing, Knowing, and Acting comprise the totality of individual experience as well—thereby triggering a recognition that one’s real identity is that of the highest Divinity, the Whole in every part. This experiential insight is repeated and reinforced through various means until it becomes the nonconceptual ground of every moment of experience, and one’s contracted sense of self and separation from the Whole is finally annihilated in the incandescent radiance of the complete expansion into perfect wholeness. Then one’s perception fully encompasses the reality of a universe dancing ecstatically in the animation of its completely perfect divinity.
— Christopher D. Wallis, Tantra Illuminated, pages 56-57
Every piece of the definition is sitting there in the open, named.
Begin with what is taken to be real. Here consciousness is the one reality, one infinite divine Consciousness, free and blissful, and matter is something it does, a projection thrown up within its own awareness. For the secular materialist it is matter. Both are monisms; they part only over which of the two, mind or matter, is the ground.
Then what a person is. Here you are the same divine Consciousness plus a contracted locus of self-awareness: not a thing among things but the Whole, narrowed to a point and having forgotten it is the Whole. The materialist’s self is a subject among objects, looking out from behind the eyes at a world of separate things. Where the materialist’s separateness is the basic fact, here it is the basic error, and the whole of the suffering follows from it.
Then the ultimate good. The doorway is recognition: the recognition that one’s real identity is that of the highest Divinity. Truth. That recognition rectifies suffering, which is freedom. It reveals a Consciousness whose creative impulse is an impulse arising from love. And it ends in a world dancing ecstatically, radiant, blissful, which is flourishing and beauty fused, the world finally beheld. Secular materialism centres truth too. Both orientations stake everything on seeing clearly. What each one sees when it does could hardly be more different. One meets a world of matter and lawful silence; the other, a world ablaze with divinity.
Then enactment, which the passage states almost as a definition. Take up the path of spiritual wisdom and yogic practice that creates the conditions for recognition. The recognition is repeated and reinforced through various means until it becomes the nonconceptual ground of every moment of experience. The insight is worked, by practice, into the ground a person sees from, until it becomes the texture of every ordinary moment. That is the whole of what enactment means. The view has become a way of being.
Implicit and Explicit Orientations
Under the definition, there is no spiritually neutral life. Everyone lives from some working sense of what is real, what matters, and how to stand toward it, and that sense is doing its work whether or not you ever turn around to look at it. The question was never whether you have a spirituality. It’s which one is already running, and whether you can see it. Sometimes a person deliberately takes up a spiritual orientation, such as the one we have just seen. Secular materialism is rarely chosen in the same way. Often, it is absorbed from the culture. Call the first kind of orientation explicit and the second implicit.
The more completely you come to live from an orientation, the more it fades into the background. A view you’re still trying on stays vivid and external, turned over daily, easy to examine: the secular rationalist starting to explore a spiritual path he does not fully trust. But a deeply settled orientation stops being something you consult and becomes the basis of operation, the way a healthy body or a fluent language disappears into its own working. You don’t look at it. You look out from it, and it feels like simply seeing how things are. This is why an implicit orientation is the hardest of all to catch sight of. The person certain they deal only in evidence, with no use for spirituality, has an orientation, often a more definite one than the people who know they’re still seeking.
Nothing in this makes explicit spirituality a compliment. If it’s the orientation a life enacts toward reality, then a life can be wholeheartedly, coherently, monstrously spiritual. The fanatic who reads all of existence as a war between the pure and the defiling, and lives every hour from that reading, has a spirituality, a fully committed one. This is not a slip in the definition. It’s the first sign that we have conflated two different questions for too long: whether something is a spirituality, and whether it’s any good.
Reality Discloses Itself
We are already here, in the midst of it. Before we’ve formed a single view we could defend, we’re orienting towards reality in some way, leaning one way or another, meeting the world as though it were this kind of thing rather than that. No one waits at the edge of life for the question of reality to be settled and then steps in.
Which is why the natural question arrives with force. If the materialist and the Tantrika are both setting out the nature of reality, the reflex is to suppose one sees reality as it actually is, and the other one is projecting, dreaming, adding something. To the materialist, the Tantric cosmos is a beautiful fantasy, awareness flattering itself across a universe with no awareness in it but its own. The Tantrika sees a universe dancing in its own divinity, ecstatic and alive, and the materialist standing inside that dance and calling it inert. Where the materialist finds a fantasy added to a bare world, the Tantrika finds a radiance unmet, the same blazing reality answering a look too narrow to receive it. Each looks across with equal conviction, and neither can show the other a fact that would decide it. And these are only two of the candidates; some hold that mind and matter are two faces of one reality that is neither. The accounts do not sort into tidy opposites. The modern instinct is to reach for evidence and settle it. Which account is correct?
Evidence can test many specific claims made by traditions. Not every view is equally answerable to evidence. What it cannot do is stand outside every orientation at once and rank them from there. Each measurement you bring is already taken by someone standing somewhere, looking one way rather than another, and no instrument reports the world with no one holding it. The dispute is not between claims you could check. It is between whole ways of meeting reality, and there is no vantage above all of them from which to judge.
From here it is tempting to conclude that the whole matter is subjective. If no orientation is simply true, then it is all invention, one as good as another, and nothing can be told apart. The conclusion moves too fast. It assumes an orientation is solely a proposition about reality, which must be true or false. Therefore, if the proposition lacks verification, only preference remains.
Spirituality begins in earnest when we admit the not-knowing to ourselves. The admission changes what you do next. You set the propositions down and turn instead to what is in front of you, to see what it shows.
You can test the small version of it over a week. Take the most ordinary thing there is, the sun going down, and meet it two ways on two nights. One evening, watch it as the disenchanted person does: a scattering of light, refraction and dust and the eye’s tired cones, the planet’s turn carrying you out of the sun’s reach. Another evening, take up the way of looking the contemplatives have always pointed at: meet the world as though it were sacred, as though reverence rather than explanation were the fitting response, and give the whole slow burn of it your attention, reaching for nothing. Stay past the glance. Something may begin to answer. The light is no longer scenery but somehow meeting you, the colour deepening past what the air alone would account for, the moment thickening into something to be received.
Neither evening was a mistake, and neither was a mood you brushed across a neutral sky. The physics held steady through both. What changed was the way of meeting, and the world answered each meeting in kind. A way of looking is something you live from, not something you hold at arm’s length and switch between, and the moment you hover above it choosing, you are in a third stance that flattens both. So I stop hovering. A way of looking is not chosen from above; you come to live in one, and the one I live in is the second.
Rob Burbea, who built a body of practice out of ways of looking, was careful about what this does and does not show. In his teaching, every way of looking fabricates what it meets, to its own degree and in its own way, and none of them is the bare readout the others failed to reach. What it shows is subtler and harder to dismiss: that the depth was neither invented at will nor lying there to be found, that it arose in the meeting and belonged to neither side alone. “Reality discloses itself” is itself a fabrication, a very beautiful and very fertile one.
Pressed to its end, that question changes shape one last time. Contemplative reports describe reality continuing to disclose itself past every picture, including the pictures the path itself supplied. A.H. Almaas, at the far reach of his work, calls this totality: a point at which realisation is the discovery that reality is endlessly self-revealing, exceeding each formulation the moment it sets, so that to hold any account as final is to have stopped too soon.
Once people feel this rather than grant it, and it takes time, the question of which account is true begins to loosen its hold. Another question stands, and it is the one that was always alive: what does an orientation do to the life that holds it? What does it open, and what does it close? Does more freedom come, or less? Does the heart open or contract? Does the world appear with more depth, or less? And what does it do to the lives it touches?
This quote is from this oral teaching by A.H. Almaas. Almaas’s formulation belongs to a much older Sufi grammar of divine presence and disclosure: “wherever you turn, there is the Face of God” (Qur’an 2:115). Ibn Arabi gives this intuition one of its most celebrated expressions in his poem beginning, “My heart has become capable of every form”, which concludes: “I profess the religion of love; wherever its camels turn, there is my religion and my faith” (Tarjumān al-ashwāq, poem 11).