Spiritualise-Report.Pdf
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Spiritualise Revitalising spirituality address to 21st century challenges Spiritualise Revitalising spirituality to address 21st century challenges Dr Jonathan Rowson December 2014 December December 2014 Contents Acknowledgements 3 Background and purpose of the RSA’s two year project 5 1. Facing up to widespread spiritual confusion 9 Who needs spirituality? 9 Spirituality needs definition, but it doesn’t need a definition 14 Why ‘Spiritual but not religious’ might be a wrong turn 18 Spiritual is more about meaning than ‘happiness’ 21 The heart of the spiritual – it’s about our ‘ground’ not our ‘place’ 24 2. In search of our spiritual ‘ground’ – what are we? 29 The social brain: why ‘beliefs’ are not what we typically assume 30 Cultural psychology: why the sacred won’t go away 34 Automatic processing: why the spiritual injunction to ‘wake up’ matters 40 Embodied cognition: why the experience of meaning is visceral and important 44 Divided brain: why our need for perspective and balance is greater than ever 48 Neural plasticity: why we need to take spiritual practice seriously 50 Conclusions to section 2 54 3. Living from our ground, not our place 55 Love (the promise of belonging) 55 Self (the path of becoming) 67 Soul (the sense of beyondness) 73 4. Spiritual pathways to personal, social and political transformation 78 From political power to personal power and back again 80 From utility to virtue and back again 82 From economic objectives to existential threats and back again 83 From surface to depth, and back again 85 From life to death, and back again 87 From self to soul, and back again 88 From political freedom to psychological freedom and back again 88 From happiness to meaning and back again 89 From extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation and back again 89 From beliefs to institutions and back again 90 Afterword 92 About the RSA The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) believes that everyone should have the freedom and power to turn their ideas into reality – something we call the Power to Create. Through our research and 27,000-strong Fellowship, we seek to realise a society where creative power is distributed, where concentrations of power are confronted, and where creative values are nurtured. The RSA Action and Research Centre combines practical experimentation with rigorous research to achieve these goals. About the author Dr Jonathan Rowson is Director of the Social Brain Centre at the RSA. After degrees spanning a range of social science disciplines from Oxford and Harvard, Jonathan’s Doctoral research at the University of Bristol featured an analysis of the challenge of overcoming the psycho-social constraints that prevent people becoming ‘wiser’. He writes for The Guardian’s Behavioural Insights Blog, was formerly a columnist for The Herald newspaper, has authored three books, and is a chess Grandmaster and former British Champion (2004–6). You can contact him with queries relating to this report at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @jonathan_rowson 2 Spiritualise: revitalising spirituality to address 21st century challenges Acknowledgements This report is the culmination of a process that began in the Autumn of 2011, featuring contributions from around 300 people, not all of whom I can thank here, but some of whom I wish to thank more than once. If ‘relational consciousness’ is indeed a distinctive feature of spiritual experience, I am glad to be able to convey the extent to which that defined and informed this report: For the financial support that made the project possible I am very grateful to the John Templeton Foundation, particularly Program Officer Nicholas Gibson and Senior Associate Megan Graziano; and the Touchstone Trust, particularly Paul and Brigid Hains. The RSA provided the institutional platform that gave profile and broader social significance to the work, and I would like to thank Executive Team members Matthew Taylor, Adam Lent, Nina Bolognesi and Carol Jackson who supported the project substantively and opera- tionally at different stages. I am also grateful to Steve Broome, Esther Theodore, and Luke Robinson for their invaluable contributions to research, fundraising and media respectively; and to valued colleagues Nathalie Spencer and Janet Hawken for their reliable and high quality back up, particularly towards the end. I am also grateful to RSA Trustees, particularly Peter Fell and Andy Gibson, and a range of RSA Fellows for their moral and substantive support. For making the RSA Student Design Awards possible I would like to thank Sevra Davis and Rebecca Ford, and to the judges Melanie Andrews, Michael Anastassiades, Dinah Casson and Rose Sinclair. For helping to organise an excellent series of RSA public events, I am very grateful to our Events team, especially Mairi Ryan, and to all our speakers: Madeleine Bunting, Robert Rowland Smith, Elizabeth Oldfield, Guy Claxton, Iain McGilchrist, Steven Cave, Joanna Cook, Will Self, Mark Vernon, Devorah Baum, Claire Foster-Gilbert, Andrew Samuels and Marina Benjamin. For much needed assistance at a difficult time I extend a special thank you to Jules Evans, who swiftly brought together a range of impressive people to contribute to our workshops; some of whom are quoted directly in the report, but all of whom helped to shape it: Andrew Powell, Piers Benn, Rabbi Dr Naftali Brawer, Matthew Engelke, Jules Evans, Pippa Evans, Toby Flint, Christopher Harding, Margaret Holloway, Elizabeth Oldfield, Jonathan Reams, Juliane Reams, David Rousseau, Nathalie Spencer, Sam Sullivan, Robin Carhart-Harris, Professor Chris Cook, David Luke, Professor Gordon Lynch, Becca Massey-Chase, Iain McGilchrist, Amelia Peterson, Robert Rowland Smith, Bettina Schmidt, Nick Spencer, Steven Taylor, Louisa Tomlinson, Raphael Underwood, Gay Watson, Clare Carlisle, Mark Harris, David Lorimer, Claudia Nielsen, Danny Penman, Jacqueline Watson, Indra Adnan, Madeleine Bunting, Ian Christie, Professor Guy Claxton, Oliver Davies, Andres Fossas, Claire Foster- Gilbert, Sanderson Jones, Jennifer Kavanagh, Matthew Mezey, Charlotte Millar, Oliver Robinson, Dr Mark Vernon – thank you to all of you! Acknowledgements 3 I was fortunate to have an informal advisory group, including Jules Evans, Mark Vernon, Pippa Evans, Oliver Robinson, Guy Claxton, Ian Christie, Elizabeth Oldfield, Chris Harding, Gordon Lynch and Iain McGilchrist; all of whom were swift and helpful in their email responses, and made the project feel less lonely, and more worthwhile. For miscel- laneous contributions and guidance, thank you also to Ruth Sheldon, Matthew Mezey, Simon May, Tom Crompton, Casper ter Kuile, Linda Woodhead, Anthony Painter and Joe Hallgarten, and apologies to others I have neglected to mention. I am grateful to Chris Harding for helping to kick-start the writing process, with substantial thoughts on an earlier draft structure and an erudite analysis of the workshop contributions, which informed the final report. Andres Fossas played a crucial role in the final six months, as a researcher, transcriber, summariser, fan, critic, and sounding board. I am sure I couldn’t have finished this report in 2014 without him. Thank you Andres. Finally, I trace the genesis of the key idea that informed our initial funding application for this project to a speculative phone call Senior Researcher Dr Emma Lindley made to Professor Gordon Lynch in the autumn of 2011. Emma’s capacity to quickly establish intellectual and emotional rapport was crucial to getting this project off the ground. The personal and professional impact of losing such a singular and close col- league was considerable, and choosing to make death a central feature of spirituality was no doubt informed by Emma’s untimely passing. Emma’s intellect and humour have been sorely missed, and while I am sure this final report would have been different – and better – with her contribu- tion, I am glad to dedicate it to her memory. 4 Spiritualise: revitalising spirituality to address 21st century challenges Background and purpose of the RSA’s two year project Spirituality, Tools of the Mind and the Social Brain “We all see our lives, and/or the space wherein we live our lives, as having a certain moral/spiritual shape. Somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worthwhile, more admirable, more what it should be. This is perhaps a place of power: we often experience this as deeply moving or inspiring.” Charles Taylor 1 The RSA’s Social Brain Centre seeks to improve public awareness of how prevailing understandings of human nature, need and aspiration shape practice and policy. The general shift in perspective that informs our work is the awareness that human beings are much less self-determined, conscious and cognitive and much more social, unconscious and embod- ied than we typically assume in most walks of life. Our work in a range of policy domains – recently including climate change and educational inequality – is about ‘behaviour change’ but looks, as we do here, at human behaviour outside of a neo-behaviourist paradigm, from as wide a range of perspectives as possible. Spirituality, Tools of the Mind and the Social Brain was a two year pro- ject funded by the John Templeton Foundation and the Touchstone Trust. The project’s main aim was to examine whether new scientific understand- ings of human nature might help us reconceive the nature and value of spiritual perspectives,