A conceptual investigation into the possibility of spiritual education

Abstract

Three commonly mentioned aspects of the idea of spirituality are transcendence, raised awareness and spiritualism. The interrelationships among these three ‘strands’ of spirituality are explored. It is argued that each strand expresses itself along a continuum, ranging from the mundane to the profound. The second part of the article focuses on the education of spirituality in the senses of transcendence and raised awareness. Language learning provides a model for making sense of the process of how spirituality might ‘emerge’ through some dedicated practice, just as meaning is eventually grasped with the initially meaningless deployment of the verbal form. The importance of a spiritual ethos for spiritual education is highlighted.

Keywords:

• Community
• Raised awareness
• Spiritual education
• Spiritual practice
• Spirituality
• Transcendence

Notes

1. This last phrase is a very rough formulation. There is a sense in which one’s committed goal is constitutive of one’s (expanded) self. The self grows by transcending itself. Perhaps a better formulation would be ‘goals that go beyond the egoistic self’, but ‘egoistic’ might sound redundant as an adjective of ‘self’, and anyway begs further explication.

2. Jung sometimes describes the collective unconscious as the product of the evolutionary heritage of the human species, evident in such phenomena as archetypes and universal dream symbolism. In this sense, the collective unconscious is not necessarily a spiritual realm. However, in many other instances, such as in discussions of the phenomenon of ‘synchronicity’, the collective unconscious as construed by Jung is something that is a properly ‘transpersonal’ realm that hovers over, or underlies, all individual human beings, constituting a medium through which the separation of individuals can be transcended.

3. I admit that I may be mistaken on this point. For example, value is directly grasped in a ‘value sensing’ type of raised awareness, which means that there is a self‐contained, holistic perception of the value, its significance and its justifications, if such distinctions are meaningful at all in relation to the experience. The experience itself is the justification for the perceived value. Therefore there may not be any subsequent need to account for the perceived value separately. Still, analytically the ontological status of the source of the value is an issue, only that probably the answer to this is already included in the value sensing perception itself.

4. ‘Goodness’ is the sinologist Arthur Waley’s rendition of the fundamental Confucian concept of ren, which has been given different translations by different authors. For example, Fung (1997) translated it as ‘human‐heartedness’.

5. The following fuller quote reinforces the point about the unpredictable character of the future, a future that cannot be assumed simply by extrapolating current trends: ‘after the catastrophe you may end up on an attractor that you never knew existed. It was busy developing, out in the mathematical space of the possible, but you didn’t notice it because the new attractor wasn’t being physically expressed. Suddenly it is expressed, and the mathematical fiction gobbles up your own reality and lands you in totally unexpected circumstances’ (Cohen & Stewart, 1994, p. 211).

6. In other words, the child learns the language as it is used by those around it to communicate among themselves and, more importantly, to interact with it in a meaningful way. In this sense, the community and the child born into it are totally committed to the language. This commitment on the part of the community of which the child is a member is crucial.

7. ‘Good’ is Arthur Waley’s translation for ren, which has often been alternatively rendered as ‘human‐hearted’; see n.4, above.

8. This is, of course, a simplified and distorted formulation for the sake of ease of expression. This advice should not be taken as itself advocating an extreme position of avoiding extreme positions in all cases and at all costs. Instead it recommends giving everything its proper due, no more and no less.