Practical Peace

3 Ways to Build Spiritual Connection

What is Spirituality

While I expect to find spiritual people in a yoga or meditation class, I am surprised that my dating profile gives the option of “spiritual” right next to agnostic, atheist, and any common flavor of religion.

What the hell does it mean?

Spirituality is an umbrella term for any practices that seek to unify a conscious being (aka us) with a force larger than ourselves. This brings psychic order to our lives, much the way a proscenium arch frames the action of a play on stage.

Religions are collections of practices that supposedly lead to this unified feeling; they’re a proscenium blueprint. The blueprint says what pieces go in exactly what place, and so set the stage for common meaning behind the scenery, lighting, and scripted words of the actors in our lives.

A religious blueprint can be extremely fixed (Evangelical Christian, Orthodox Muslim, Hesetic Jew), or more flexible (

Spirituality gets criticized as illegitimate for not subscribing to a single set of beliefs. But there is more than one way to build an arch.

This ability to cherry pick is not its weakness, but its strength. You get to feel, think, and believe for yourself. In this way you find what is true for you, and can plan your life around this map of truth you continuously make in your mind.

Spirituality is:

1. the feeling or belief that individual human psyches are part of a larger psychic entity, and

2. that this connection can be cultivated and experienced (aka we can derive an understanding of how the world works).

Spiritual Sensory Experience Categories

Common themes in spiritual practices include renunciation of the ego/individual self (meditation), worship of nature, and cultivation of gratitude. These practices are meant to give the individual direct experience with something greater than themselves. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt showcases 3 primary categories of experience that can “shut down the self, making you feel that you are simply part of a whole”

1. Awe in Nature

Are you a mountain or an ocean person?
Picture yourself standing on a cliff face looking toward the natural panorama before you. You are struck by the scale of the picture, the easy way the wind moves, the electric life buzzing, slightly hidden, in that landscape. You breathe deep and feel at peace. Sound familiar?
Hopefully so, because it is common; that just being outside can elicit the feeling that your individual problems are a little smaller, and instill wonder at the beauty and improbability of carbon-based life.

Science is now often touted as the antidote to mystery and wonder. But scientists studying natural phenomena did not contrive this modern conflict between empirical data and psychological awe. They held them both easily.

Charles Darwin, on the Amazon:
“whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, “it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.”
I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the breath of his body.”

When we see the vast, shifting beauty of natural settings it “opens [us] to new possibilities, values, and directions in life” according to Haidt.

It helps us turn off the self-centered perspective of “I” and invites us to recognize our place in the great vista of life, a feeling of connection that Haidt calls the “hive mind”, and others call spirituality.

2. Hallucinogenic Drugs

Obviously, hallucinogenic drugs can offer experiences beyond those of our physical bodies.
If it’s not obvious to you, you have likely never spoken to a rave-goer on Ecstacy, heard of Native American vision quests, or seen Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. To be clear, I am not suggesting you have a Fear and Loathing drug trip.

But hallucinogens were popular in the 1960’s, and are making a comeback for spiritual and medical reasons.

Compounds derived from plants are the most studied hallucinogens. The most common are psilocybin (mushrooms), mescaline (peyote cactus), and DMT (ayahuasca). All were studied by academics in the years before 1971. Nixon’s War-on-Drugs outlawed the use of them for anything, including academics and pharmaceuticals.

In the 1960’s, even academics took low doses to experience hallucinogens themselves. This was for the spiritual experience, self-study, or personal curiosity. Curiosity and self-examination prompted Brave New World author Aldous Huxley to take a supervised low dose of mescaline one sunny afternoon.

In The Doors of Perception, his account of this experience, he does mundane things like stare at a flower, vase, and chair for hours. He also feels far removed from himself and his human condition, though still completely aware of his surroundings. Human concerns like cars take on an “absurd self-satisfaction” in his mescaline-eyes, and he “laughed till tears ran down [his] cheeks” at our small everyday concerns.

This points to the danger of drugs — that they have an intoxicating power to draw us away from matters of washing, going to work, and intellectual discourse.

But Huxley’s ultimate conclusion is “that the mescaline experience is what Catholic theologians call “a gratuitous grace,” not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available.

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone”

Currently, organizations like MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) Canada focus on healing applications for hallucinogens. PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) has been a particular focus and success.

Recreational tourism for guided peyote and ayahuasca ceremonies in the whole of the Americas is surging in popularity. The appeal is perhaps best described by this study participant on psilocybin:

“All of a sudden I felt sort of drawn out into infinity, and I had lost touch with my mind. I felt that I was caught up in the vastness of Creation…Sometimes you would look up and see the light on the altar and it would just be a blinding sort of light and radiations…
We took such an infinitesimal amount, and yet it connected me to infinity.”

Synthetic hallucinogens such as MDMA (ecstacy) have also gained popularity for their ability to stimulate feelings of communal love and connectedness. The feeling of connection to something greater than an individual self is in high demand from spiritual seekers, and many non-spiritual people besides.

Rave dance parties are the setting that is nearly synonymous with the use of ecstacy.

The last Haidt-listed gateway to spiritual experience is relevant to raves too, strengthening their association with spiritual sensation.

3. Group Movement

Good news for the sober peeps, though: humans can cultivate connected feelings of joy and love without the use of drugs! Group movement will do the trick.

Marching band, military training, yoga, races and raves all have one big thing in common: masses of people moving together.

During activity, endorphins (“feel good hormones”) are naturally produced by the participants. But endorphins alone do not explain the shared sensations of “pervasive well being” or “deep connection” associated with group movement.

This cohesion is called “Muscular Bonding” by social scientists. It “enable[s] people to forget themselves, trust each other, [and] function as a unit.”

People don’t even have to use the same physical gestures as one another to achieve muscular bonding. A shared inspiration such as a finish line, percussive song, or verbal command is enough to pull them into a union that feels greater than the sum of its parts.

Ever had a post-race high, or felt WAY too good after a workout class?

WWII army veteran and Historian William McNeil shares:
“Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved.
A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.”

Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh’s first rave experience mirrors and expands McNeil’s:

“What I experienced next changed my perspective forever…Yes, the decorations and lasers were pretty cool, and yes, this was the largest single room full of people dancing that I had ever seen.

But neither of those things explained the feeling of awe that I was experiencing…

As someone who is usually known as being the most logical and rational person in a group, I was surprised to find myself swept with an overwhelming sense of spirituality — not in the religious sense, but a sense of deep connection with everyone who was there as well as the rest of the universe. There was a feeling of no judgement…

Here there was no sense of self-consciousness or feeling that anyone was dancing to be seen dancing…Everyone was facing the DJ, who was elevated up on a stage…The entire room felt like one massive, united tribe of thousands of people, and the DJ was the tribal leader of the group…

The steady wordless electronic beats were the unifying heartbeats that synchronized the crowd. It was as if the existence of individual consciousness had disappeared and been replaced by a single unifying group consciousness.”

A dance’s spontaneous movement of thousands of limbs or the practiced march of a military unit both induce muscular bonding.

Our ancestors and Native American peoples danced around a central bonfire in times of ceremony, uniting the population by this ritual. Group movement clues us in to group consciousness and takes out of our individual selves, revealing the interconnected spiritual feeling.

Conclusion

Spirituality is anything that breeds connection to something larger than ourselves. This sensation is sought by all humans, in all cultures, in all times. Taking cues from well-documented practices, anecdotal evidence, and modern science we can find ways to integrate this sensation into our lives making us healthier, happier, and more at peace within ourselves.