Spirituality Is Secure Attachment with Reality

In other words, up is up and down is down. Water is not wine. Reality doesn't come and go on the whims of a prayer halfway across the world.

The above works if you disregard that all observations of “physical reality”, any models, and the meta mode of attending to reality that leads you to structure your models in a particular way and choose which experiments to perform, are all a product of your mind and start treating physical models as gospel.

Natural science is about making predictions, not speaking truth. It offers models as a shortcut to predictions, but does not even claim to offer complete knowledge or “true” models. The territory is unknowable, all we have is maps, and all maps are wrong (physical models being a special case of maps). Natural science by design is not equipped to get us to any true reference points, and becomes remarkably useless as soon as our mind gets under the spotlight—though what it does do is provide us some useful maps (notably, “useful” as defined by our minds. You see the pattern).

It is a struggle to live a life given such uncertainty. We have options as to how to represent the territory, and so we go about it with varying degrees of rigour.

A seemingly popular approach of just taking the current models provided by natural sciences and using them as a proxy of truth does not score high on rigour in my opinion, since it strikes me as taking physics as a poor surrogate for religion.

Thus, I personally have no problem with spirituality, unless it flies in the face of observations and fails to offer sound philosophical reasoning. Like in physics models are shortcuts for predictions, spirituality/religion could be considered shortcuts for philosophy (with a degree of charitability, depending on the views one holds), and reducing philosophy to physics would degrade, not elevate it (after all, natural sciences came from and are subordinate to philosophy, not the other way around).

This is also why being a physicist and simultaneously a religious person (the case with many famous physicists) is not a contradiction.

> This doesn't mean all experiences are pleasant. The worldly winds still blow harsh and cold. But secure attachment to reality means we can safely experience all of it. This is why challenging events often become crises of faith - they probe the very edges of our trust in existence itself.

Only we by virtue of extreme privilege can deign to pretend that this is real and only when we are young at that. It's a crisis because we are asking people to simultaneously come to grips with a world where they are both a special spiritual being personally loved by the creator of the universe and a fragile existence that can be snuffed out for no reason by a misplaced step or a gust of wind. Since the reality of our mortality is impossible to ignore one logically must doubt how special we really are.

> There is no prerequisite state we must achieve to earn the love of Reality/God. That love is already here, constantly available, needing only our remembrance.

Not even sure what this even means. Our gods to the extent that they exist are constructs that didn't exist before we are born and will only outlive us save to the extent that we manage to communicate these ideas to others. To be loved by god is merely to be loved by yourself no different than imagining our dead loved ones would be proud of us by virtue of emulating them in our own head.

Secure attachment to reality would be the erasure of these false idols.

> Consider the common experience of feeling "abandoned by God" during difficult times

This is simply understanding that we are in fact alone reliant upon ourselves and those who are close to us.

> The difference between becoming bitter and deepening in faith during times of challenge lies in our capacity to include the breakdown into our relationship with reality - and through this inclusion, discover a more complete wholeness.

Blaming yourself or blaming god are just two different ways to rationalize a delusion. If we continue to believe in god but simultaneously blame him this is obviously a more problematic path as we have no power to reform god.

> This reveals a surprising truth about both spiritual development and psychological growth: what appears as falling apart might actually be falling together. What feels like losing our religion might be faith deepening its roots. What seems like a crisis of connection might be an invitation into more authentic relationship with reality itself.

This sounds like Stockholm syndrome

> When we grasp this truth, we can approach both our own development and that of others with deeper compassion and wisdom. We begin to understand that the path to greater spiritual security might lead us through periods of apparent insecurity

When we believe in crazy baloney by definition no proof is ever given and many counterexamples are readily available so anyone with a functional brain will ultimately experience doubt. When we socially prove that doubt is normal and expected but not a reason for fundamental re-evaluation of norms by virtue of people both adjacent and above us in a social hierarchy "triumphing" over doubt we collectively grant permission to dismiss these troubling thoughts and continue believing in crazy.

The entire piece could be profitably shortened to the sentence that intellectual, emotional, or spiritual growth requires one to be secure in one's self, and in the acceptance of one's self and support of peers and betters in order to move forward from the stable base of self.

Not everyone is curious about ultimate questions like these. That’s fine, but for those of us that are curious, they are very important questions indeed.

I bring up my experience, because who measures that (the totality of existence)? There was no denial from him, because from his view point that was the totality of existence.