When I hear someone say, “Oh yeah, I’m spiritual, but not — you know — religious,” I am reminded of Father Rageboy’s first commandment, to wit:
Vapid and narcissistic are they who repeat the mantra “I’m spiritual but not religious.”
Kneeling for communion at the temple of rage I heard the priest intone, “Take, eat this you whitebread muthahfuckah… it’s nobody’s body, we’re spiritual here but not religious, it’s just a metaphor… whitebread, get it? Do you get it!? Whitebread schmuck.”
I could see why they called it the temple of rage. The temple of rage, of course was but one stop on my metaphysical journey. I also spent a great deal of time at Starbucks seeking the clarity of an open wireless connection. And the Crate and Barrel outlet store down on 4th Street in Berkeley. Williams of Sonoma on Union Square. Pottery Barn at better malls across America. Nordstroms. The Nature Company in its original location just outside the tunnel on the Alameda. Smith and Hawken in Mill Valley… Ahhh, hippie capitalism at its best. Plant materials from Berkeley Hort. Sensual massage at Esalen down in Big Sur. A house in Marin, good dope, identical twins… little scorpios in their tandem stroller and identical maple cribs.
Spiritual was I, and bourgeois to the max. Dining out in the gourmet ghetto, riding BART with a New York Times done up in a commuter’s fold. The Larkspur ferry before that. Double vodka martinis and rubber bridge all the way home. My partner had some kind of three way going with Kaiser and Bechtel… Libyan bauxite, French refractories, and the best Bechtel built nuclear reactors available for offshore construction. We kicked ass. I was way spiritual on the commute home in those days.
I could balance the bindle and the straw and horn in copious quantities of Bolivia’s best in rough seas off Angel Island and never drop a crumb on the floor of the head. “Head.” That’s ferry boat nautical for toilet.
Was I spiritual but not religious?
When Locke writes these condemnatory tracts linking Emerson through Nietzsche to Hitler and Corporatist emergent fascism founded in post-war Allied fervid religious gratitude and shit, I pale. Is it me? All these people I hung out with were heavy into the Urantia Book and all that crap. Is it mean spirited and hypocritical of me to admit that I was only there then for the dope and the music.
All I can say right now is that I was NEVER that spiritual. And by the time I got religious I was well on my way to informed atheism, so screw the guilt. I can sit back free of guilt and enjoy his explication of the spiritual left and the spiritual right and the undercurrents that unite them, informed and aware and in concert with the idea that there is a lot of denial present whenever spiritual fundamentals overtake reason, common-sense, and altruism, whether that spirituality is founded in religion or the bourgeois mysticism that is vapid narcissism.
Something is happening here and I know what it is, I’m jonesing for more truth.
You want more Trooth? Here are a couple factoids my reading unearthed last night…
1) Thoreau liked to imagine that his name was a sort of Frenchified (as opposed to Frenchfried) version of THOR. He, and most of the Transcendentalists in Concord, spent a lot of time studying German so they could read Kant and Fichte — the latter being the originator of the whole “volkisch” meme. From _Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind_ (no lie).
2) Two of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brothers were locked up in the nuthouse. There is some credible speculation that it ran in the family. From _Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History_. Evidently, there’s a chapter on the Emerson brothers titled “The Mayflower Screwballs” in _ Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America’s Premier Mental Hospital_.
More as time allows. Stay tuned…
At the risk of sounding like I’ve missed your point in writing I’d say: where are the definitions. Religion is greatly construed to the social dimension of dogma and spirituality is attached to the senses trying to make sense of things non sense. If you want to base your terms on personal predilection then you have. As a chemist I take definitions a bit seriously to comment resonantly. But what the hell is a spiritual left and right doing with the priori concept of dealing with landscapes beyond. That sounds more like poetic license destroying the honest transmission of idea through language. I suppose I read it so I should be to blame. Sorry.