1. Historical:
(From Waking Up, by Sam Harris)
“Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.”
*I don’t share the same disdain for religion as Sam Harris, but the second half of that statement really resonates with me*
2. Working Definition:
(Also from Waking Up)
“The feeling that we call ‘I’ is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is—the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself—can be altered or entirely extinguished. Although such experiences of ‘self transcendence’ are generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing, in principle, irrational about them. From both a scientific and a philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of the way things are. Deepening that understanding, and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self, is what is meant by ‘spirituality’ in the context of this book.”
3. In Practice:
(From Simulation YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/xPK3-r7N8eY)
- Go to a public place
- Sit in it
- Listen and look around
- Look through all points of view simultaneously by “slowly blurring the line between where people end and others begin”
Whereas people watching is simply seeing or judging the people around you, the goal of Spiritual People Watching is to feel unconditional love for the non-self we have within and around us.
Why does spirituality matter?
To paraphrase Waking Up: your mind is all you have. Even a slight change in the mind’s perception of the world can have a profound effect on your wellbeing. How we love or envy one another, how we perceive success or failure, set goals or give up, and live or fail to live in the present can all be changed by our mind’s understanding of it’s non-self.