Integrative Spirituality

Religious Pluralism, Individuation, and Awakening

Patrick J. Mahaffey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429879753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

In Integrative Spirituality, Patrick J. Mahaffey elucidates spirituality as a developmental process that is enhanced by integrating the teachings and practices of multiple religious traditions, Jungian depth psychology, and contemplative yoga. In the postmodern world of religious pluralism, Mahaffey compellingly argues that each of us must fashion a unique path to wholeness which integrates aspects of life and of the self that have become disconnected and disowned.

Integrative Spirituality uniquely conjoins four components: exemplary religious pluralists from three traditions, individuation, the forms of contemplative Hindu yoga that have been successfully transmitted to the West, and a presentation of two models for integrating psychological growth and spiritual awakening. The book presents pioneering practitioners in each field who exemplify how we may fashion our own approach to integrating both spiritual awakening and psychological development and delineates an array of spiritual practices that integrate the somatic, psychological, interpersonal, and spiritual aspects of life. Ultimately, Mahaffey contends that integrative spirituality is a mode of being that fully embraces the divinity inherent in each of us and in the world.

Integrative Spirituality will be essential reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, transpersonal and Jungian psychology, and religious studies and contemplative education. It will also be of interest to analytical and depth psychologists in practice and in training, and to anyone seeking a greater understanding of spirituality, psychological growth, religious traditions, individuation, and contemplative yoga.

1
THE SPIRIT OF THE TIMES

With advancements in scientific knowledge and methods, industrial capitalism, and the decline of traditional religious authority, modernity flourishes in Western civilization. By the end of the nineteenth century, influential philosophers and writers of the day turned away from the comforting absolutes of European culture. The age of relativism dawned and with it came a sense of meaninglessness. As Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed about the impact of modernity on religion:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, “I seek God! I seek God!” … “Whither is God?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? … Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”¹

For Nietzsche, the basic assumptions of art, philosophy, science, and religion are without any ultimate foundation. Without absolutes, the products of human culture, including religions, are little more than useful fictions or constructed realities to serve particular social functions and address deeply felt personal needs for security and certainty.

The zeitgeist, or the spirit of the times in which we live, shapes our worldviews. To understand our own time, we need to step back and observe it within a larger historical context. This chapter considers how different worldviews, engendered by traditional, modern, and postmodern periods of history, condition the ways in which humans find meaning and purpose in their lives.

Secularization and the persistence of religion

We live in a secular age; paradoxically, religions persist. Secularization, a key concept in the sociology of religion, is closely related to both the concept of modernity and the fundamentalist reactions against it. Within the secular thinking that has come to dominate the West, the historical development of religion is linear. Social science, born in nineteenth-century evolutionism, presupposes this notion and contributes many of the master terms used in contemporary discourse about social change: industrialization, modernization, rationalization, and urbanization. All these imply one-directional processes and, taken together, constitute the basis for the secularization thesis—the idea that society moves away from some sacred conditions toward those in which the sacred evermore recedes.²

The resurgence of religion, including fundamentalism, during the past three decades belies this thesis and requires a theory of religion that can account for so dramatic a change. As Mark C. Taylor observes:

You cannot understand the world today if you do not understand religion. Never before has religion been so powerful and so dangerous. No longer confined to church, synagogue, and mosque, religion has taken to the street by filling airways and networks with images and messages that create fatal conflicts, which threaten to rage out of control. When I began pondering these issues in the 1960s, few analysts or critics would have predicted this unexpected turn of events.³

The relationship between religion and secularization has been misunderstood. In this regard, as Taylor further asserts, critics fail to appreciate the intricate relationship between secularity and the Western religious and theological tradition: “Religion and secularity are not opposites; to the contrary, Western secularity is a religious phenomenon.”⁴

Secularists misinterpret religion as much as believers misunderstand secularism. Religion is not a separate domain; it pervades our culture and has an important impact on every aspect of society. We need an alternative to the either/or perspective or binary thinking that serves as the conventional wisdom for understanding religion and its secular and atheistic critics. One of the most pressing dangers we face today is the conflict between the competing absolutisms that divide the world. Such ardently opposed worldviews can never be mediated, Taylor argues.

All major religious traditions contain some fundamentalist elements. Evidence of this can be seen in the literalists’ interpretations of scripture and reactions to aspects of modernity and secular culture. Taylor describes this phenomenon as a worldwide rise in neofoundationalism. He understands this development as a symptom and a response to the process of globalization. In his view, while modernism is correlative with industrialization, postmodernism is inseparable from the emergence of the postindustrial network culture.⁵

Network culture creates a world in which to be is to be connected. As connectivity spreads, the human landscape with its dependence on technology becomes increasingly complex, causing instability and uncertainty to grow. These developments, Taylor observes, lead to a longing for simplicity, security, and certainty. Neofoundationalism, in its abundant guises, ranging from the scriptural literalism of Christian evangelicals and some Islamists to the genomic logocentrism and neurophysiological reductionism of some of today’s most sophisticated scientists, represents an effort to satisfy this longing. These disparate forms of belief are alternative versions of a religiosity that attempts to banish doubt by absolutizing relative norms and dividing the world into exclusive opposites: good/evil, sacred/profane, religious/secular, Western/Eastern, white/black, and Christian/Muslim.⁶

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, among the most profound inquiries into secularization, provides a map of the existential terrain of late modernity in Western Culture.⁷ Our epoch is a haunted moment of history, he contends. We live in immanence and the twilight of the gods. But their ghosts have refused to depart, and every once in a while we might be surprised to find ourselves tempted by belief, by intimations of transcendence.⁸ Taylor refers to this as the “immanent frame,” a circumscribed world that precludes transcendence, a spiritual dimension of reality that exists beyond or within the world.⁹ Even as faith endures in our secular age, believing does not come easily. Faith is fraught with an inescapable sense of its contestability. We do not simply believe (as opposed to doubting); we believe while doubting.¹⁰ Most of us live in this cross-pressured space, where both our agnosticism and devotion are mutually haunted and haunting.

A Secular Age persistently asks two questions: “How did we move from a condition where, in Christendom, people lived naively within a theistic construal to one in which … unbelief has become for many the major default option?” and “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this is not only easy, but even inescapable?”¹¹ These questions are concerned less with what people believe than with what is believable. Taylor carefully differentiates between three meanings of the term secular (secular₁, secular₂, secular₃):

• Secular₁. In the classical and medieval accounts, secular amounts to something like “the temporal”—the realm of “earthly” politics or mundane vocations. The priest, for instance, pursues a “sacred” vocation, whereas others engage in “secular” pursuits. This is secular₁.¹²

• Secular₂. In the modern period, particularly in the wake of the Enlightenment, secular refers to a nonsectarian, areligious space or standpoint. This public sphere is secular insofar as it is (allegedly) nonreligious; schools are secular when they are no longer parochial; hence, public schools are thought to be secular schools. Similarly, in the late twentieth century, people describe themselves as secular, meaning they have no religious affiliation or beliefs. This notion is assumed by both the secularization theory and normative secularism. Secularism is always secular₂. And, secularization theory is usually a confident expectation that societies will become secular₂—that is, characterized by decreasing religious beliefs and participation.¹³

• Secular₃. It is the third meaning of secular, however, which Taylor stresses in A Secular Age. A society is secular₃ insofar as religious belief or belief in God is understood to be one option among others, and thus contestable (and contested). At issue here is a shift in “the conditions of belief.” The shift to secularity in this sense indicates “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.”¹⁴ It is in this respect that we live “in a secular age,” even if religious participation might be visible and fervent. The emergence of the secular in this sense makes possible the emergence of an “exclusive humanism”—a radically new option in the marketplace of beliefs, a vision of life in which anything beyond the immanent is eclipsed. As Taylor observes: “For the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option. I mean by this a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing. Of no previous society was this true.”¹⁵

A secular₃ society could undergo religious revival in which vast swaths of the populace embrace religious beliefs. But this could never turn back the clock of secularization; we would always know that we used to believe something else, that there are other plausible visions of meaning and significance. We could also hold beliefs amidst the secular₃ condition; indeed, conversion is a response to secularity, not an escape from it.

Taylor also describes the nova effect in contemporary culture—the explosion of different new options for belief and meaning in a secular₃ age, produced by the concurrent cross-pressures of our history—as well as the concurrent pressure of immanentization and e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 The spirit of the times
• 2 Religious pluralism, Sspirituality, and stages of faith
• 3 Christianity
• 4 Hinduism
• 5 Buddhism
• 6 Jungian depth psychology and individuation
• 7 Contemplative yoga and awakening
• 8 Integrating spiritual awakening and psychological development
• 9 Credo
• Bibliography
• Index