Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age
Can cultivating a spiritual practice help address the challenges of the modern era? A critical exploration of Ryan Duns’ Spiritual Exercises For A Secular Age, and the practicing life.
We live in an age of atomisation. While modernity has brought us an enhanced sense of individuality, it has come at a cost. For many of us, the bonds of tradition, religion, community and even family are weaker than they were for previous generations.
This creates an immense challenge. Humans, by their very nature, need a sense of meaning and purpose — and structures like religion, society and culture have typically been the way in which we situate our life within a broader narrative context. Their continued fragmentation has left us disorientated and adrift. We have our freedom, but we are tormented by what to do with it.
This is the chief concern of Ryan Duns’ recent book, Spiritual Exercises For A Secular Age — a rich and erudite meditation on the human condition, modernity, and what it means to maintain a spiritual practice in the modern world. Duns’ aim is to survey what paths remain open for spiritual seekers in the modern age, or, to put it another way, how we might “chart new and innovative itineraries into the sacred”.
But let us start from the beginning. Before presuming to provide us with solutions, Duns begins with a critique of the dominant ideology of our age: scientific materialism.
With its immense success in understanding and manipulating the material world around us, scientific knowledge is increasingly assumed to be the only true and legitimate form of knowledge. But while science itself is held to be ‘neutral’, it has nonetheless led to the propagation of a particular worldview.
A worldview can be described as the foundational orientation of a society. It is the very ground of our ways of thinking, our dreams and aspirations, our culture, and our values — and it deeply informs the quality of individual experience. Such an ideology remains hidden from view for the most part, and is absorbed at such a fundamental level that it forms a set of unexamined premises operating at the deepest levels of consciousness. In a sense, the task of philosophy is to help unearth and challenge these assumptions, and thereby help us imagine new ways of being in the world.
Like any worldview, scientific materialism is laden with assumptions which subtly affect how we think about things as diverse as our conception of human beings (for example, as mere biological machines), what the focus of society and government should be (technical innovation to solve problems), what we should strive towards as a society (creating artificial intelligence, or populating Mars), and how we should live our lives (by attempting to optimise ourselves for performance within a competitive, capitalist marketplace).
Equally, it’s interesting to consider where this worldview does not question or push back upon. For instance, it does not (or can not) meaningfully critique the forces of modernity or the logic of late-capitalism, firstly because these larger scale social, cultural and political phenomena are outside its purview, and secondly because scientific materialism finds a comfortable space sitting alongside or within these contexts.
Duns quotes Charles Taylor’ on three major traits that constitute this default worldview (emphasis my own):
The first is the picture of the subject as ideally disengaged, that is, as free and rational to the extent that he has fully distinguished himself form the natural and social worlds, so that his identity is no longer to be defined in terms of what is outside him in these worlds.
The second, which flows from this, is a punctual view of the self, ideally ready as free and rational to treat these worlds — and even some of the features of his own character — instrumentally, as subject to change and reorganizing in order the better to secure the welfare for himself and others.
The third is the social consequence of the first two: atomistic construal of society as constituted by, or ultimately to be explained in terms of, individual purposes.”
This describes how the process of atomisation affects the way in which we conceive of, and see ourselves in relation to the broader world. Under a scientific materialist worldview, our thinking tends toward instrumental reason — a particular form of rationality focused on how we might achieve a specific end or goal. This form of reasoning tends to de-emphasise other considerations, say, the ethics of the end we want to obtain, the effect our actions might have on others, or how we might value objects outside of their own relation to us as something of utility or desire.
This way of thinking deeply influences the way we experience and interpret the world around us, and in turn shapes both our society and culture. The anthropologist Wade Davis captures this wonderfully in this 2003 TED Talk ‘Cultures at the far end of the world’:
a young kid from the Andes who’s raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit that will direct his or her destiny will be a profoundly different human being and have a different relationship to that resource or that place than a young kid from Montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined.
Whether it’s the abode of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant. What’s interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and the natural world.
I was raised in the forests of British Columbia to believe those forests existed to be cut. That made me a different human being than my friends among the Kwagiulth who believe that those forests were the abode of Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven and the cannibal spirits that dwelled at the north end of the world, spirits they would have to engage during their Hamatsa initiation.
These beliefs have real-world consequences. The ecological crisis we are facing is in part the logical end-point of a partnership between scientific materialism, consumer capitalism and instrumental reason. Our ability to navigate such challenges depends on our ability to create new ways of thinking about the world.
On an individual level we internalise this worldview as a sense of separateness from the world around us. Displaced from society, culture, community and the natural world, many people struggle to find a sense of meaning or connection in their life, which can lead to symptoms of depression, anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts.
Duns’ believes there is more to life than what can be revealed through scientific materialism. Like any ideology, it has its blind spots, but its uncritical absorption by society and culture — and claims that it is sufficient in itself as a system of knowledge — is problematic.
Duns endorses Charles Taylor’s claim that “an adequate picture of human life must account for the whole scope of human experience, even those stirrings and longing we can neither measure nor manage.” That is to say that, any ideology wanting to express the truth about existence must be able to account for transcendent experiences — those moments of “life-meaningful authority for questions of moral sources or human fullness”. For Duns, these are moments of deep, life-altering significance which are an essential part of the human experience.
Duns sees similar over-reach on the part of the ‘Secular narrative’ — the idea that we live in a secular age in which atheism is ascendent, and religion is on the decline. Similarly, Taylor argues that secularism has never been able to account for “the panoply of spiritual options that have arisen over the last few centuries”. He finds the narrative reductionist: too much is left out to arrive at a neat conclusion.
Taylor certainly has a point. While we may observe the decline of traditional religious institutions in the West, we can nonetheless find religious impulses channeled into countless secular, spiritual and religious forms: utopian politics, nationalist projects, and conspiracy theories all tend to mimic the belief structure of religious cults. Even the faith that, given enough time, technological progress will solve all the problems faced by humanity betrays our yearning for salvation, transcendence and immortality. (The British philosopher John Gray is particularly compelling on this point.)
What is this spiritual impulse? The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has argued that religion and spirituality have been largely misunderstood. In You Must Change Your Life he makes the bold claim that “no ‘religion’ or ‘religions’ exist, only misunderstood spiritual regimens”. This is to say that the core of any religion are practices which aim to shape, transform, and in some way transcend the self. And where traditional religious practices have been lost, then they are replaced, as in the cult of health, fitness and life extension.
While Duns does not engage directly with Sloterdijk, he does call on the work of Pierre Hadot — a French philosopher known for his sharp critique of purely abstract philosophy. Hadot argued that ancient philosophy was less concerned with abstract arguments, and more concerned about providing a way of life, including practices which “intended to bring about a transformation of the individual”. Contrast this idea to modern philosophy’s fixation on highly technical minutiae and you start to get a sense of how we’ve been led astray. (Jason M. Wirth memorably describes modern philosophy as “micrology”, producing statements that, while true, are ultimately trivial.)
On some level, the importance of practice appears obvious. Neuroscience has brought us evidence of neuroplasticity — the discovery that our brain can both grow and rewire itself in response to our experience and actions. Similarly, we know that certain capacities can be trained, whether it be pattern recognition in the visual field, our physical reflexes, or the ability to permanently weaken the brain’s connection to the amygdala through meditation.
Spiritual practice, therefore, is a way in which we can shape ourselves, and our experience-of and relationship-with the world. It opens up a space for change, and an opportunity to create distance between ourselves and ideologies that we may have unwittingly absorbed from our environment. And this is its great promise in our current age.
How does one begin? Duns believes we must first open up a space for practice. He cites William Desmond’s imperative that we must “stay the knife of murderous concept and wait in watchful receptivity” — which is to say that we should suspend our judgment when engaging with a practice in order to avoid a reactionary interpretation. Without openness, nothing new can emerge.
The fact is human beings aren’t comfortable with ambiguity. We are problem-solving animals, and our natural inclination is to rush forward and grasp at a solution. To do so, we must filter reality through our concepts, which can lead to a bracketing out of complexity and nuance. If we are not diligent, this can create a sort of feedback loop in which we attempt to force the rich and infinite universe through a narrowly defined set of ideas, preemptively rejecting anything that does not fit in our schema. Our thinking can become rigid, or overly determined by ideologies that we have unreflectively absorbed. In short, we may come to mistake our conception of the world for the world itself, and thereby create a closed system in which no new information can be admitted.
Of course, we can face the same issue from the opposite direction. Spiritual practices are ultimately grounded in their own assumptions and ideology, which, if absorbed uncritically, can be equally stifling. For this reason Duns spends time unpacking Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, and advises that we must work to keep ourselves grounded in this world. He cites Richard Kearney’s exhortation that our practice must keep “returning us to the everyday and thrusting us into ‘the face-to-face encounters of our ordinary universe” in place of reinforcing a “Grand System”. Given the experience of disconnection in modern life, such earthliness is key. Such an approach may even be respected by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who implored his followers to:
“Remain true to the earth, my brethren, with the power of your virtue! Let your bestowing love and your knowledge be devoted to be the meaning of the earth! . . . Let it not fly away from the earthly and beat against eternal walls with its wings. . . . Lead, like me, the flown-away virtue back to the earth — yes, back to body and life: that it may give to the earth its meaning, a human meaning!”
So completes a complex navigation between two poles — the reflective cynicism that would close off the spiritual path before we’ve begun to walk it, and the temptation to cut loose from immanence for refuge in the celestial sphere. This is not a spirituality of obscurification or reality-denial, but rather as an opening-up-to and reconnection-with the world.
The promise is that, over time, we may cultivate what we might call spiritual or transcendent experiences — life-affirming states of unity, beauty, bliss, and a sense of wonder and gratitude that this world should exist at all — and that this will, in turn, dramatically transform both our experience of the world, and our relationship to it. So begins the shift away from our default, problematic worldview, and the alleviation of its symptoms of disconnection, alienation and lack of meaning.
To give a sense of what this shift in perspective might look like, Duns quotes William Desmond on Fydor Dostoyevsky’s brush with death:
“(Dostoyevsky) was sentenced to death for political conspiracy. He was halfway into death, on the verge of execution, tilted over the bring of nothing… But he was suddenly reprieved, brought back from death, resurrected to life again. The sweetness of the morning air struck him, the song of the morning birds, the sky. He was stunned into marveling at the sheer fact of being. This is the resurrection of agapeic astonishment. But it is experienced in a blinding and a groping. Will systematic science ever do justice to what is communicated in this stunning resurrection?”
What changed for Dostoyevsky? Clearly he did not dispassionately consider life and arrive at a new set of conclusions through the process of deduction. Rather, his brush with death brought him back to his senses in a very literal sense. The change took place on a deeper, more fundamental level. He has experience a deep re-connection with the world of the sort that spiritual practice can offer.
For the last six years my own spiritual practice has centered on various forms of meditation. In 2020 I took the plunge and attended my first ten day meditation retreat. During that time I had a number of profound experiences that gave me a sense of the power and potential of these practices. Here is an account of an experience I had in my first few days of the retreat:
When the meditation ended, I realised that I had spent the full hour focused on my breath without distraction. As I walked outside the meditation hall my mind felt calm, clear and illuminated. Looking around, everything seemed more beautiful than when I walked in — the bush seemed crisper, the colours more vibrant.
Feeling content and more than a little blissed out, I took a seat on the balcony outside my room and looked across at a row of gumtrees that were being buffeted by strong winds. The trees seemed to be dancing like flames — their branches moving in a series of infinitely complex and graceful movements. I sat and watched them, deeply moved by the beauty of the world around me.
Again, what has changed here? There are innumerable interpretations we could take. One is that I ceased to project my intellectual concepts on the world, and therefore had a ‘less rationally mediated’ sensory experience. But let us leave the question open.
My intention isn’t to convince you that there is a specific practice that you should follow, but rather to try and give you a more concrete sense of what Duns, following Richard Kearney, might describe this experience as “a ‘sundering,’ a breaking open and revealing the divine in the everyday, a ‘sacramental vision’ attuned to immanent transcendence”.
In my teenage years I was someone who felt alienated on a physical, social and existential level. I see much of the last few decades as a cultivation of re-connection and openness, and my meditation practice has been invaluable in helping me establish a deeper sense of connection with the natural world and with the people around me. It’s enabled me to appreciate beauty in everyday scenes, turn down the volume of my ego, and experience a deep sense of gratitude for being alive. As Duns suggests, such experiences fundamentally alter the way in which you view the world.
How can we ground the sense of meaning that results from such experiences? Duns sets forth a series of philosophical arguments, which include:
- That, in spite of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, there lays open a path to from the ‘immanent frame’ towards transcendence through spiritual practise;
- That transcendent experiences lend themselves to the interpretation of “encounters with God”, or as “signs of the Creator who sings and sustains creation into existence”;
- That these experiences communicate the innate ‘goodness of being’, which gives rise to an ethics which reflects “our fundamental porosity to other finite beings”;
- And that these experiences are harmonious with Christian metaphysical traditions that do not reduce God into a being.
From here, Duns moves beyond the work of William Desmond — who suspends the question of any specific religion — in order to explicitly interpret spiritual experience through the lens of Christian theology. This is a path I cannot follow him on. While I can sympathise with the idea that spiritual practice leads to direct experience of the ‘innate goodness of being’, I cannot see how it meaningfully sheds light on the question of ‘a Creator’. To me, this seems a conceptual imposition of the sort we have explicitly suspended. Why should we collapse our cultivated openness in favour of a particular interpretation? And how is the introduction of Christian theology consistent with being “faithful to the flux” of everyday experience?
In place of this Christian turn, I prefer to take the approach advocated by Matthew O’Connell: to attempt to sit with ambiguity in spiritual practice, and resist collapsing experience into a particular spiritual or religious framework:
“(this approach) ultimately demands (spiritual practices) speak for themselves with justification and otherworldly claims from tradition being insufficient. When it comes to the practitioner, the loss of self-existing justification means these practices find their worth, and true value, by being placed in relationship with the pressing issues of a human life, and its place and time…
Traditions, at times, assign unreasonable burden on their practices and over time those burdens can solidify into prescriptive orthodoxy with little room to move and to breathe. Our job is not necessarily to reject tradition, but rather choose not to be subservient to its narratives, and for the intelligent practitioner, it is hard to see how this will not be a natural result of serious engagement with theory and practice.”
Undoubtably Duns follows the spirit of this approach — his openness and ability to draw inspiration from a wide range of sources is more than evident in Spiritual Exercises For A Secular Age — but personally, I see no need for the return of metaphysics. For me, the fruits of practice are enough.
While I may not agree with Duns’ ultimate trajectory, he has nonetheless produced an stimulating and refreshingly ambitious philosophical text, firmly focused on the needs of our current moment. Considering that intellectual engagement is but another form of practice in our endeavor to orient ourselves and provide direction for our life, I am grateful to Duns for this rich work. It is a compelling case for epistemic humility, openness, and spiritual exploration in our resolutely materialistic age.
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