When Spirituality Stops Being Enough
Spirituality works because it’s bounded. It’s a contained system that offers a structure for personal power, responsibility, and individual agency. Spirituality gives the person the ability to see they have a choice and then understand how to stand in it once its made.
Those are useful skills. They are a big reason why people find spirituality in the first place. They come from the pain of feeling out of control and wanting to change that. Spirituality gives them some of those tools.
I learned through spiritual self-mastery how to make a choice and stand in it, while still being kind to others along the way. I learned to drop the story of blame. I learned to let things be as they were instead of trying to fix everything. I learned to stop letting the mind invent a story. Those things allowed me to stop fighting with reality and let my guard down because I didn’t have anything else to protect myself from.
But that was as far as I could go with spirituality. I eventually had agency and personal power, but my life looked the same. The problems around me weren’t resolved but I’d learned to handle them better. So, I started to question whether there was more to it than just being able to be okay with the problems I had.
The mind invents a story about how things are supposed to be. Sometimes that story is protective because the mind’s job is to keep the body safe. The protective story was padding. It was an insulated layer of protection against a world that still felt unsafe.
Spirituality teaches us to calm the mind, let things be, and just see what happens. That works, but often it gets wrapped in morality, right and wrong, or good and bad. Because its wrapped in judgment, the story is hidden instead of let go of. A hidden story is still a story.
The human mind doesn’t like unknowns and so there is a vacuum that gets created because the mind wants to fill in the blank. Spirituality doesn’t fully address the unknown. It doesn’t offer a reason why things are happening. It encourages people to get control over their reality through boundaries. If you don’t like it in your life, just get rid of it. That’s not always helpful or reasonable. It unintentionally encourages people to isolate themselves, live in caves, and abandon reality. It left me with a sense of wondering what to do next because I couldn’t just run away from my life.
After somewhat unintentionally slipping out the back door of spirituality, I found philosophy and then began to question the structure of reality. That led me to cause and effect. If everything was based on cause and effect, then judgment, morality, right and wrong, or good and bad really didn’t matter. The chain was a neutral thing that was going to happen anyway. Our only control was in how or if we acted on the chain.
Spiritual self-mastery taught me that my reaction was my choice. But it didn’t offer me clarity around what I was actually responding to. Cause and effect gave me the missing pieces. If life is purely structural and based on causal chains, then I can use spiritual self-mastery to decide how to respond to a structural chain without needing to tell a story about why it exists or what’s wrong with it.
Spirituality offers people the ability to live inside the structure without understanding it. My framework allows people to understand the structure they’ve learned to live inside.
Spirituality isn’t wrong, it’s incomplete. It offers a very limited human perspective of a much larger structure, none of which we have control over. But once we understand that we can walk away from a chain without acting on it, and learn to see whether our reaction to the chain distorts it or completes it, we get a much clearer picture of our individual impact on our own realities.
Living a life without the spiritual safety net of believing that things will work out is uncomfortable. Causal chains just do what they do and there is no guarantee of anything. If you’re not ready to let that net go, the mind will create more stories to use as replacement nets. It requires learning to live with the fear of “what if?” in a way that spirituality doesn’t really teach.
What you learn how to do is trust the structure of the causal chain to show you what needs to happen next and then you have to trust yourself to act appropriately. Letting structure show you the truth is the non-spiritual version of trusting things to work out.
You end up realizing that you don’t need beliefs to function. Life offers you a structure that you learn how to read and respond to appropriately. It doesn’t need to be padded with belief to be okay.
That might seem stark or bleak but it actually frees you to just live your life without really worrying about what’s going to happen next, without stories, without blame, without guilt or shame, without needing to defend yourself from some invisible force.
Freedom from belief is more freeing than making up beliefs that appear to offer freedom. Spirituality makes up the beliefs that seemingly free people. Structural awareness would actually free people to live as they want instead of as their beliefs tell them to. That sounds scary because people might do bad things. But the truth is they do bad things anyway. Beliefs don’t change that, they just offer a better story about why the things are happening at all. We may not be able to see the chain that led to the bad thing, but it was there. Telling a story about it doesn’t change the fact that the chain existed and ended in a way we didn’t like. The costume of belief or story doesn’t change the chain. It just makes it look better.
Spirituality is a stepping stone. It offers real and necessary tools for living in a world that offers very few guarantees. For some people, that’s enough. For others, the next step is learning to live without the safety net of belief by seeing the structure clearly and trusting themselves to handle what happens next.