Spiritualise Cultivating spiritual sensibility to address 21st century challenges by Dr Jonathan Rowson Feedback on the first edition “There is much written on spirituality today, but most of it is about inward, personal experience that does little to engage society, let alone transform it. Spiritualise is a bea- con of light in this regard. Not only does it have depth and profundity, daring to face the challenges of spirituality in an increasingly secular world, but it argues that spiritual- ity, interpreted for a postmodern age, is imperative if we want to change the world… It is one of the most sensible and sincere documents ever written in the field. It faces squarely the dilemmas facing spirituality without the structures of religion, and frankly discusses the fragility of spirituality without any organisational or institutional support.” Professor David Tacey, Author of The Spirituality Revolution; The Darkening Spirit and Re- ligion as Metaphor. “It used to be common for spirituality to be dismissed as fuzzy, flaky and feminine. That was at odds with the way in which spirituality was becoming an increasingly impor- tant resource in healing and wellbeing, counselling and psychiatry, schools and train- ing, environmental action and political experimentation. The first edition of Spiritual- ise played an important role in closing the gap between perception and reality. It helped clarify what is meant by ‘spirituality’, why it matters, and what science has to say. It gave permission to take spirituality more seriously.” Professor Linda Woodhead, Director, Institute for Social Futures “This research invites readers as participants to imagine and create radical futures around a new conception of being and becoming human. It thereby gives us some of the perspective we need to systemically reimagine our legacy industrial institutional infrastructure and perhaps even our social model of creating value.” Professor Indy Johar, Director, Dark Matter Laboratories. “The report is rich and provocative…By the use of the word provocative I am par- ticularly referring to the fact that it is not purely descriptive but attempts to reimagine ‘the spiritual’ and its central importance to human identity and existence. The report also argues in favour of the inherently transformative and challenging dimensions of spirituality.” Professor Philip Sheldrake, author of Spirituality: A Very Short Introduction (OUP) and Spirituality: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury). “There should be no doubt by now that radical politics needs to be rethought and redefined for the 21st century and the internet age. And this rethinking has to go deep- er than traditional climate-threat doom-mongering or even a mere class analysis ever could. It must rather be rooted in spirituality. Jonathan Rowson’s soon to be classic text Spiritualise does a brilliant job at presenting and defending the case for political ideology returning to spirituality…” Alexander Bard, Musician and author of Syntheism: the creation of God in the internet age. “Someone once described software development as a process for turning caf- feine into code. Government is a process for turning thinking into action. The thinking is changing. It’s no longer enough to assume, for example, that increasing GDP leads to richer lives. Spiritualise contains a deep challenge for those working in and for govern- ments, to ground our thinking in what really matters to people: a sense of connection to others, of purpose in life, of realising our potential, and of an approach to whatever lies beyond what we currently understand; as the report puts it, “belonging, being, becom- ing and beyondness”. To act well in a volatile world, we need to deepen the quality of our thinking. Even in the short time since Spiritualise was published, that challenge has become still more urgent.” Ken Thomson is a Director-General in the Scottish Govern- ment and a member of the UK Civil Service’s Leadership & Learning Board. “Jonathan’s work on spirituality with the RSA landed a long overdue and widely called-for intellectual inquiry. I know from personal experience in connection with NES- TA and the Institute for Contemporary Arts that the challenge of simply undertaking and completing the process cannot be overstated. There is abundant untapped energy in many people who are looking to bring together the usually-separated phenomena of religious practices, personal development, shared existential challenges and political urgency.” Indra Adnan, Psychotherapist and Co-initiator, The Alternative UK. Author of The End of the Party, Compass 2016. Contents (Hyperlinked) Foreword by Matthew Taylor Foreword by Tomas Björkman Preface to the Second Edition Background and purpose of the RSA’s two year project Spirituality, Tools of the Mind and the Social Brain Part One Facing up to widespread spiritual confusion Part Two In search of our spiritual ‘ground’ - what are we? Part Three Spiritual touchstones: Love, death, self and soul Part Four Sketches of a more soulful society Part Five Towards a new social imaginary Acknowledgments Endnotes About Foreword by Matthew Taylor The RSA argues for a twenty first century enlightenment. The core principles of the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries – autonomy, universalism and humanism - are still relevant and progressive. But over time these principles have been diluted and compromised; they need to be renewed for today’s world and tomorrow’s challenges. In one of my early annual lectures as RSA chief executive I suggested that our idea of autonomy has too often been reduced to possessive individualism. The goal of indi- vidual freedom needs to be informed by the insights on human nature and its fallibility that have come from the behavioral sciences. True autonomy is only reached through self-awareness and self-discipline. As for universalism, we need to see that our duties to our fellow citizens comprise not just a commitment to their human rights and social inclusion – vitally important though this is – but also a desire and capacity to empathise with people different to ourselves, even if - especially if - we find their views and choices hard to comprehend. Finally, humanism, the idea that progress should be ordered to in- crease human satisfaction must be more deeply grounded by a critical debate about what progress and fulfilment mean and about the responsibilities of humans – including to the planet - as well as their desires. Our commitment to a 21st century enlightenment led naturally to an interest in the insights of behavioral science. From the start we wanted to go beyond micro-interven- tion ideas like nudging and priming and explore the deeper implications of the relation- ship between human nature, social reality and meaningful change. Any proper inquiry into what motivates and inspires human beings will soon con- front the spiritual dimension of life, seeing it not as merely an illogical handover from pre-enlightenment times, but rather speaking to an enduring human need. While it may seem perverse for an enlightenment organisation to commit itself to research on spirituality, in Jonathan Rowson’s profound and highly engaging paper the decision received a powerful endorsement. The first reading of Jonathan’s draft for Spiritualise was an exciting moment. Reread- ing it in this new updated version rekindled that enthusiasm. My sadness that Jonathan has moved on from the RSA is easily outweighed by my pride in this paper and pleasure in seeing his new initiative – Perspectiva - with whom we co-publish this book – go from strength to strength. It is a rare claim to suggest that reading a think tank output might change the way you think about yourself and reality, but in this case it just might. Matthew Taylor is Chief Executive Officer of The RSA, a Fellow of the Royal Acade- my of Social Sciences and former advisor to the UK Prime Minister Foreword by Tomas Björkman For several years I have been involved with two organisations taking a systemic view of the world – The Club of Rome, an international think tank most famous for its Limits to Growth publication in 1972, which continues to grapple with challenging ques- tions about ecological constraints; and the Ekskäret Foundation, which I founded in 2008, that supports a range of social entrepreneurs and cultural change processes con- cerned with reimagining ourselves and building intentional communities in the context of rapid technological change. Throughout my experience of hosting social change retreats on Ekskäret island in the Stockholm archipelago, I have observed a fascinating disparity between the objective and conventional language of the formal meetings and the relatively sub- jective and spiritual language used in smaller informal groupings, for instance after a long working day during the traditional evening sauna. Professionally, people wielded reason and evidence, but when they felt free to connect at a human level they were much more open and candid about the depth of human experience and how to focus on what matters in our lives. I have learned that systems change is difficult mostly because it is not really a single type of system that has to change. The outer objective perspective, for instance ‘the economy’, is only part of the story that always needs to be complemented; both by the inside subjective perspective and the shared intersubjective perspective. These three main perspectives are constantly evolving and interacting in a process that I describe in my most recent book The World we Create (2017). For instance, the economy is never just numbers going up and down; it is what money means to us in terms of freedom and security, how we forge social identity and personal purpose in an economic context, what kinds of metaphors are being used to shape debates and conceal power rela- tions, our critique of conventional metrics of success, whether we might learn to speak of the market as if it were a social construct and not a law of nature, and how the un- derstandable pursuit of economic growth might relate to our denial of limits and death.