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While back in Utah over the holidays I heard a remark about the Mormon church that I used to hear a lot when I was younger: “The Church is true (or good, perfect—there are several variations), but the people in it aren’t.” I remember a friend of mine reciting that same phrase and I answered by saying that I felt the exact opposite—“the Church isn’t good, but some of the people in it are”. He took offense. In other words, he found it okay for non-Mormons to dislike individual Mormons or even the entire Mormon community, but intolerable to critique the church itself—the institution. At the time, my friend’s reaction surprised me, but it shouldn't have.

In 1829 Eastern State prison in Pennsylvania conducted an experiment. They built an underground correctional facility that denied inmates any knowledge of the outside world. Inmates were deprived of sunlight; they couldn’t write or receive letters from loved ones; they couldn’t have visitors, or receive news of worldly events (and when taken out of their cells, they had to be hooded so as to prevent them from even seeing a natural living object). The idea was a puritanical one. You could reform the corrupted by denying them contact with the corrupting forces of society. Everyone, according to Quaker theology, has the “inner light of God” within them, so by replacing social interaction with solitary reflection, an individual might become reacquainted with ‘natural’ concepts of right and wrong and thereby rehabilitate himself.

Today it was announced that US casualties in the war in Iraq have reached 2119. That’s an awful lot of people, but it hardly merits consideration when put alongside the number of Iraqi civilian deaths (upwards of 150,000 according to some reports). The liberal pundits prefer to focus on the American deaths, thinking, no doubt, that they have to play to America’s xenophobia to rally dissent against the war, but in doing so they fail to expose the main injustice of government aggression—that innocent people are knowingly put to death—and accordingly they spoil a great occasion to challenge people’s blind faith and support of a corrupt system. It goes without saying that the motives for the Iraqi war are beyond dubious, but even if we grant the administration its best rationalization—that we’re fighting this war to help the Iraqi people and to export Democracy and freedom to the world (stop laughing), then does that justify killing 150,000 civilians? (sidenote: America represents six percent of world population and consumes almost forty percent of the world’s energy resources. Does anyone really believe that’s an exportable product?)

 Today I went hiking. About halfway up the trail I had a moment. It happens a lot when I hike. I turn my head and see something out of the corner of my eye—a swathe of snow dotted by small yellow leaves, for example. And when I stop for a closer look, it hits me. I wouldn’t describe these moments as happy, though I certainly feel a sense of elation when they happen, and I wouldn’t describe them as sad, either, though “lacking sadness” is just as inaccurate. Neither do I feel any fear at these moments, yet my mortality is completely palpable. No doubt I’m talking about experiences of a spiritual nature, but I’m not going to assign that label without first divesting the word spiritual of all its New Age and religious connotations.

In the Western World when we say something is spiritual we mean that it’s transcendent—in other words, that it’s divorced from nature and from the body. This isn’t what I’m talking about. And I’m not talking about the New Age sense of being at one with the universe, either. When, and if, I use the word spiritual, I mean that I feel the full weight of existence. I feel empty yet full of longing, alone yet surrounded by company, sensual yet free of desire. There isn’t any transcendence and there isn’t any joining—just the intensity and grace of being alive at that moment. What’s more, these moments are accessible at any time. That’s something I’ve come to realize. The reason they’re accessible is that there’s nothing transcendent about them at all. They’re natural. They only seem resplendent and unfamiliar because our current way of life forbids us from indulging in them.  

In fact, I’m sure this is why the word spiritual has the connotations that it does. By calling something spiritual we essentially define it as an abstraction. In retrospect the experience is co-opted as a gift from God or from his angels and made to seem supernatural. Spirituality then becomes a euphemism to cover up a basic truth about ourselves—that we’re animals. We haven’t been trained in this culture to deal with the natural world and so we’re afraid of it. Consequently, the epiphanies we might have while hiking are either labeled and explained away as transcendent religious phenomena or avoided altogether. I think Freud was onto something when he talked about artistic sublimation, only I don’t think it explains artistic fecundity, I think it explains religious ecstasy. Because natural feeling has been made practically taboo in today’s world, we project it onto the other. We make it socially acceptable, that is, by relating it to an accepted religious or new age concept. We turn nature into culture. In turn, the experience is murdered, thus the violence civilization does to the environment is also done to ourselves and our experiences.

Consider the smugness with which people proclaim our superiority over the animals. The assumption is that our superiority has already been proven, so it hardly needs stating (just as the supremacy of whites over blacks and men over women was once proven). Anyone who challenges that assumption must have a few screws loose and hasn’t yet learned the proper uses of rational thought. After all, we are the top predators—at the top of the food chain. What is there to argue? But in the animal kingdom hierarchies aren’t as clear cut as we’d like them to be. In a symbiotic world made of finite resources it doesn’t make sense to talk about who is and who isn’t the top dog. Competition doesn’t drive evolution, adaptation and cooperation does (I’ll leave it to John Livingston and K.C. Cole to make my point on that matter). Conquest might help you to survive, at least in the short term, but it won’t make you any happier. It’s like a marriage: if you deliberately deny your partner’s happiness then you’ll deny your own happiness as well, provided you stay together and can’t seek fulfillment elsewhere. No matter how dutifully your physical and material needs are tended to, if your partner is reduced to a slave, he/she won’t be able to give you what you really want—a creative and genuine and stimulating relationship. If our only concern is to subdue and control the outer world, then we won’t have genuinely ‘spiritual’ moments within that relationship. Life will be dull. And unfortunately (for the environment, that is), in our relationship with nature, divorce isn’t an option. And neither is murder, though that seems to be the course we’ve chosen.