Spirituality is not a recreation
Photo: The Outcast in life’s junkyard! by Barbie Robinson
As a teacher of a practice that is spiritual, I contend with what I call a recreational attitude to philosophical or spiritual inquiry. It is something that must accommodate itself around all the other activities of life. Work, family, holidays, birthdays, shopping, visitors- all other “obligations” must be met before a spiritual activity. Or, which in my view is far worse, spirituality is a “rest” from the other obligations of life. It is a respite so that one can return to the more important business of living refreshed and reinvigorated.
As a young dancer, I witnessed my teacher’s frustration with a casual attitude to dance. He came from a lineage of dance which went back at least 11 generations. For him dance was reality. Most of the dancers, like me, came from families that wanted everything- mastery in dance, academic excellence, social status, economic success, and a model family life. My teacher was frustrated with my academic demands. Why do you need to go to university, he would ask, does dance not teach you everything about life?
Today I can look back and recognise the truth of his words. Perhaps the increasing mechanization of education is far more evident now than it was in my youth. When I had children, I found myself deeply skeptical about what is touted as education which had so little that supported an inquiry into developing a philosophy of life and not simply inheriting dogma and ideologies.
In the west there is the much-vaunted Maslow’s model of hierarchical needs. According to this model (which is often visually depicted as a pyramid), humans experience needs as a hierarchy wherein the basic physiological needs of food, water, shelter, and sleep are the base of the pyramid. According to Maslow, “self-actualisation” is at the top of the ladder of needs, after personal and familial safety and security, love and relationships and self-esteem. This suggests that “self-actualisation” which is proposed as the domain of meaning, purpose, creativity, and spirituality, is likely a higher aspiration, but one that depends on some level of satisfaction of the other needs below it.
It is commonplace to say that when one is hungry spirituality and philosophy are luxuries. Indeed, the Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan advised that it is wise to make a lot of money before becoming a philosopher. In the dynamics of the world we live in that is wise advice.
It is too simplistic to interpret Maslow’s model as an absolutely hierarchical proposal. Maslow himself said that the interplay between each domain of the hierarchy is complex and not just that the absolute fulfillment of each is necessary for attending to the next one. My contention with the model is its hierarchical design. This design is inevitable within the linear knowledge systems we inhabit for most part as our reality. However, spirituality is not encompassed within linear intelligence.
This brings us to the question of spirituality itself- what does it mean? As someone for whom dance is central to spiritual inquiry, the basis of the meaning of spirituality is deeply problematic. Spiritual comes from the word “spirit” which inherently holds the dichotomy of matter and spirit. Spirit is of the realm of the immaterial or “incorporeal” as the Merriam Webster dictionary states. And herein lies the crux of the problem.
Where we assume that what is spiritual is not of the material realm, then the needs of Body become other than the needs of the spirit. And, in a hierarchical model, the needs of Body become lesser than the needs of the spirit. Maslow did not invent this hierarchy, he simply expressed what innately exists in the way in which most of humanity approaches spirituality. Most mainstream spiritual philosophies relegate the needs of Body to a lower order of importance. Indeed in some traditions we must “master” the needs of Body, even through starvation and other forms of austerity, to subjugate Body to spirit.
The fear of desire and pleasure emerges from this dualistic proposition of an impure Body and pure spirit. The sensorial intelligence of Body becomes the villain who must be vanquished in the “ascent” towards spirit. Emotions must be controlled through rationality. Creativity is divested of passion and Body and must be sublimated to spirit. Death is re-narrated as immortality or rebirth. Decay is ignored or hidden.
At the same time, spirituality also becomes an irrational goal. I have a friend who does not like to hear the word "spiritual” because she associated it with people who, in her words, “wish to escape from reality”. Here reality is only material. It is about the mechanistic everyday grind of work, family, money, and holidays. It is about putting one’s shoulder to the yoke and pulling one’s weight without seeking respite. The immaterial and transcendent propositions of spirituality are a luxury in a world racked by hunger, suffering and war. And I get this annoyance with spirituality. As I said previously, this recreational version of spirituality is a dissipated and empty one.
At the heart of this dilemma of where the spiritual is positioned in our everyday lives is what we understand as spiritual. For my teacher, dance, which is a Body-led inquiry, was his spirituality. As such there was no separation between matter and spirit. Matter is spiritual. It is the experiential and expressive reality of spirit. Ancient archetypal traditions did not separate Body and spirit. Body is infused with spirit and with divinity. Body exudes spirit as expression, and this expression is predicated upon the sensorial intelligence of Body. Earth and Nature are enjoyed as sensory experiences and not just as objects of our analysis. To live in this way is to be the centre of reality, not as a recipient of theories about reality. Reality is our Bodily and sensorial enjoyment. And this enjoyment is the sensation of the Divine within and without.
All of this makes sense only when we relinquish linear and hierarchical approaches to life and reality. Dualistic propositions of Body and spirit, desire and non-attachment, and the like oversimplify the multi-dimensional truth about reality. We are fooled into assumptions of expertise and control which, in the end, bring us as individuals and as a civilisation, to the brink of self-destruction.
This has been long piece towards expressing my frustration with a casual attitude to self-inquiry or spiritual inquiry. I have much sympathy for my teacher’s frustration now as I witness how some people approach my programs as the last one on the list of priorities. I am, even now, guilty of this myself, so I do not speak from a position of self-righteousness. How can we escape the pervasive hierarchy of needs that we imbibe every single moment through every single channel of our daily lives! I catch myself perfecting my administration of my programs, or attending to other tasks that provide me with a definitive “tick” on a list. True spiritual inquiry provides no ticks because it does not appear on any list.
It lurks within, as an ache, or a yearning. It is like a rustle when a bird lightly hops on a bed of fallen autumn leaves. You look around and the bird is gone, and you are not sure if you imagined the rustle. The thing is that this rustle is not dependent upon a needs-based hierarchy. In my life I have come across spiritual people who are poor and alone. I would count some of my greatest teachers amongst them.
Indeed, the archetypal doorway into self-inquiry is the Outcast. The Outcast is “homeless”, “village-less”, wanderer of the forest. She exists outside the paradigms of social, psychological, and economic notions of order and meaning. Often such archetypal Deities are described as insane, derided as unkempt and feared. These invocations are not meant to be situated as polar opposites of order and meaning, rather they invite us to venture into what we have designated as chaos. Chaos in a dualistic system is simply that which we are unable to wrap our heads around. And the Outcast deities invite us to step out of our heads into intelligence of our Bodies.
A spiritual inquiry is not a part-time activity. It is certainly not recreational. It is not conditional upon the fulfillment of other needs. Neither is it about fulfilling other needs. Efficiency and productivity are celebrated in our technocratic world. In this milieu, we find “value” and “use” for spirituality as wellbeing, therapeutic, health and healing modality. We think we have cleverly bypassed the hierarchical Maslow model by bringing spirituality into other “lower” domains. We do not have to feel guilty about wasting time in “self-inquiry” if we can appendage it to feeling healthy and healing from disease.
Sometimes people turn up to my classes with their Fitbit watches even though I suggest not approaching the classes as a fitness regime. The thing is that we only end up shortchanging ourselves when we think we can be clever with our motivation. We cannot have our legs in two boats, not in self-inquiry. We cannot be the Outcast and the villager, but we can be the Outcast in the village. As the Outcast, we perceive the movement of the totality of Reality, and not just the hierarchies of the village which Hubristically propose that they stand for all of Reality.
The ancient constellations of self-inquiry, which included dance, archetypes, ritual, and ceremony, are intelligent technologies that invite us into the forest. This is a heartfelt and serious invitation. It is also a necessary one. If we must have a hierarchy, then I would put this invitation in the lowest rung. It is as urgent as food and water. The Deity Krishna calls it “choiceless” which is inherent in the inseparability of spirit and matter.
Krishna’s invitation to the archetypal seeker, the archer Arjuna, offers a poignant and poetic way of dissolving the hierarchy of choice- “Do not make a stranger of Me Arjuna, become Me”.