IS: Spiritual Development
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- Sunday June 22: Final Community Hub call of Season 18
- Tuesday June 24: The Oasis
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Last week's newsletter was "The Call" and last Sunday's Community Hub call was "Spring & Superpowers". Season 19 will begin July 6th.
How usefully true would it be to claim that psychological development is the same thing as spiritual advancement? What about, also the same thing as emotional maturation? (Skip the rest of this newsletter if that's not an interesting question!)
I haven't listened to Brendan's latest yet, he might well be providing some key evidence of the above claim, and his previous project is very relevant as well. But this is just me rolling around some vocabulary boundaries and seeing if I want to start talking this way.
"Development" is a word I've been using in the psychological sense of Adult Development, the way that folks across Lume Network would use the term. This kind of development is the complexification of perspective-taking, the expansion of seeing. It's the process of growing up - not just from children into adults, but similarly from adults into wise elders. And the core mechanism is the "subject-to-object shift" of perspective - from being "in over our heads" to "making object" by expanding one's perspective.
Spiritual advancement, in contrast, is the process of... becoming a wise elder? "Waking up" and expanding one's seeing? Having a bigger perspective on life, the universe, and everything? This seems veeeery suspiciously related to the way ADists talk about "vertical" (as contrasted to horizontal) development: It's not about the propositional knowledge of a book, it's not about believing specific claims, it is about unlocking new ways of knowing, shifting one's way of being
Emotional maturation, in contrast, is the process of... okay this one does seem to have some physical ties that cash out differently in functional behavior. Yes there is a similar component of seeing, when it comes to seeing one's reactions and feelings, de-fusing stimulus-response into discrete objects, finding new perspectives that enable new ways of relating. AND we have a body that "keeps the score", a limbic system, a lizard brain, and dozens of examples of spiritually "enlightened" gurus with manipulative emotional/ego defense patterns. So it's not just notice-accept-integrate, there are some different mechanism re nervous system repatterning and memory reconsolidation (although, that "accept" part... there's still some decent overlap on that venn diagram).
Setting aside emotional development, the spicy claim remaining, then, would be that psychological development comprises almost all of spiritual development. What remains that is distinctively spiritual and NOT psychological in nature? (if we take a maximizing view of the "psychological" label to include the various flavors of adult development)
Maybe not much if one is a naturalist? Maybe something about "beauty" independent of "good" (moral philosophy?) and "truth" (psychological seeing)? Maybe I've said or missed something so egregious at this point that someone will helpfully reply and correct my blind spot. 😅
Zooming out on why this is alive for me:
- As you read this, I'm at the Lume Network Gathering, facilitating with a theme of "renewal" and broadening the field of Adult Development!
- I find myself drifting closer to employing religious psychotech (rituals, language) as I go to round out the deep fullness of this developmental path thing
- At the same time, I'm not currently enamored with re-embracing what I label the spiritual side of religions, perhaps because I've done my heaviest growing coming from a secular psychological frame
So this is a "what am I missing?" kind of exploration today. Learning in public as always...
Cheers,
James