Background
Religion and spirituality
Definitions of spirituality
The universality of spiritual beliefs, practices, and experiences
The phenomenology of spiritual experience
The psychological source of the spiritual perspective
Biological explanations for spirituality
The place of belief
The role of attitudes and environment
Spirits
The self
A definition of spirituality
Components of the definition | Description |
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1. Belief
| An assent to or conviction about a domain or existence that goes beyond the material world. This includes all manner of religious or other beliefs that are not based on materialism. |
2. Practice
| Spiritual or religious practice at this level occurs without conscious awareness of, or relationship to, the spiritual realm addressed. Although it involves exercises of imagination and desire such as contemplation, prayer, reading or reflection, the self is not moved by any direct experience of relationship with or connection to the other. |
3. Awareness
| There is an awareness of being moved intellectually and/or emotionally. It includes contemplation, prayer, meditation or reflection when there is conscious awareness of, or response to, this dimension. |
4. Experience
| A discrete experience which may include diffusion of the mind, loss of ego boundaries and a change in orientation from self towards or beyond the material world. The experience usually comes unbidden but may follow a period of reflection, meditation, stress or isolation. Ecstatic experiences are of this type, but experience may be much less intense and more prolonged. |
Factors
not
a part of the definition
| |
Sources
| Any consideration of the source of spirituality, be it secular, sacred, divine or diabolical. |
Consequences – positive or negative
| These may be proximate such as happiness, fear, a new sense of meaning or the intention to live an ethical life; or distant such as economic success or failure and changes in physical or mental health, or in relationships. |
Other
| Secular systems of virtue, ethics or morality. |
Grounding the definition
Implications of this definition
Question
|
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1. Are you in any way a spiritual person? |
2. Do you observe a religion? |
3. Is your spirituality mainly about you personally or is it found more in your relationships with other people? |
4. Does your spirituality help you cope with life's difficulties? |
5. Does your spirituality help you cope with illness or disability? |
6. Have you ever been aware of a spiritual realm or presence? |
7. Have you ever had a very intense experience (unrelated to drugs or alcohol) in which you felt some deep new meaning in life, or at one with the world or universe? (If you believe in God it may have felt like an experience of God.) |