Best Spirituality

What Spirituality Actually Is

Spirituality is one of the most used and least defined words in contemporary culture. It is used to describe everything from weekly church attendance to morning yoga to ayahuasca ceremonies to daily meditation to reading philosophical texts to spending time in forests. This breadth of application makes the word almost meaningless unless some distinctions are drawn.

At its most basic, spirituality refers to the individual's engagement with what is sacred, ultimate, or transcendent: with that which is larger than the everyday ego-self and its concerns, with questions of meaning, value, and the nature of reality that cannot be answered by science or satisfied by material comfort. This engagement can occur within or without formal religion, through many different practices, and in response to many different life circumstances.

What distinguishes genuine spiritual development from spiritual entertainment is the willingness to be genuinely changed by the practice. The contemplative traditions universally agree on this point: real spiritual development is not the accumulation of interesting experiences, spiritual knowledge, or elevated states. It is the gradual transformation of the person's character: the development of more genuine honesty, less reactivity, deeper attention, and more authentic compassion. These qualities are measurable in daily life, not just in meditation sessions or spiritual retreats.

William James, in "The Varieties of Religious Experience" (1902), his foundational study of religious and mystical experience across traditions, proposed a pragmatic test: "By their fruits ye shall know them." The value of a spiritual experience or practice should be judged by what it produces in the person's actual life over time. Does it make them more honest? More genuinely caring? More able to bear difficulty with equanimity? More useful to others? Or does it primarily make them feel special, confirmed in their existing beliefs, superior to non-practitioners, or able to avoid the ordinary demands of human relationship?

This pragmatic test is not cynical. James took spiritual experiences seriously as genuine psychological events with real effects. But he insisted that the effects in life, not the experiences themselves, are the criterion of genuine spiritual value. This test is useful for evaluating any specific practice or path.

Meditation Traditions and Their Differences

Meditation is not one practice but a family of practices with importantly different methods, goals, and effects. The contemporary mindfulness movement, which draws primarily on Theravada Buddhist techniques adapted for secular clinical use by Jon Kabat-Zinn, is only one branch of a much larger forest.

Theravada Buddhist meditation (Vipassana, insight meditation) aims at direct investigation of the three characteristics of experience: impermanence (anicca), suffering or unsatisfactoriness (dukkha), and the absence of a permanent self (anatta). The goal is not relaxation or stress reduction (though these often result) but liberation from suffering through the direct seeing of how experience works. Long-term practitioners often report significant changes in how personal identity is experienced, including a loosening of the sense of a fixed, separate self.

Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist meditations add the cultivation of bodhicitta (the mind of awakening for the benefit of all beings), compassion practices (tonglen: taking in the suffering of others, sending out relief), and in the Vajrayana, deity yoga and visualisation practices that use the imagination deliberately to transform ordinary perception.

Christian contemplative practices include lectio divina (prayerful reading of scripture as a meditative practice), centering prayer (resting in interior silence in God's presence), the Jesus Prayer (hesychasm, from the Eastern Orthodox tradition: continuous repetition of "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner"), and Ignatian contemplation (vivid imaginative engagement with scenes from the Gospels).

Sufi practices include dhikr (the remembrance of God through repetition of divine names or phrases), sama (devotional music and movement, including the whirling of the Mevlevi order), and the cultivation of the stations of the nafs (the soul's progressive purification, from the commanding self toward the self at rest in God).

Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical meditation is distinctive: it is a cognitive rather than concentrative practice. The meditator takes a content (a verse, a plant form, a moral quality) and holds it in consciousness with full inner activity, resisting the usual associative stream of thought. The goal is to develop what Steiner calls Imagination: the capacity to form living, dynamic spiritual images that accurately represent realities in the spiritual world.

Contemplative Prayer: Eckhart, Merton, Keating

Contemplative prayer is the oldest and deepest stream of the Christian spiritual tradition, documented from the Desert Fathers (3rd century Egypt) through the great medieval mystical theologians to contemporary teachers. Three figures stand out as especially important for the modern engagement with this tradition.

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1328), the German Dominican theologian and mystical philosopher, articulated the most radical version of Christian contemplative theology. For Eckhart, the goal of the spiritual life is Abgeschiedenheit (detachment or releasement): the complete emptying of the soul of all created images and of the will's attachment to any particular thing, even to God understood as a person or object. What remains when this emptying is complete is the Grunt (the ground), the place in the soul where God and the soul are one and undivided. "God is nearer to me than I am to myself," Eckhart wrote. The contemplative path, for him, is not toward an external divine Other but into the ground that is always already present but obscured by the soul's activity and attachment.

Thomas Merton (1915-1968), the Trappist monk and prolific author, brought the contemplative tradition into dialogue with 20th-century psychology, philosophy, and the world's spiritual traditions. In "New Seeds of Contemplation" (1962), Merton described the false self (the socially constructed ego with its masks, defenses, and projects) and the true self (the person as known and loved by God, hidden beneath the performance of the false self). Contemplative prayer, for Merton, is the practice of surrendering the false self in order to discover the true self: "Our real journey in life is interior: it is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts."

Thomas Keating (1923-2018), the Cistercian abbot who co-founded the Centering Prayer movement in the 1970s, translated the contemplative tradition into a simple, accessible method. Centering Prayer involves choosing a sacred word as a symbol of intention to consent to God's presence, returning to the word whenever attention drifts, and practicing for two 20-minute periods daily. Keating emphasised that Centering Prayer is not primarily about producing contemplative states but about training the disposition of consent: the repeated act of releasing one's own thoughts and returning to openness gradually transforms the orientation of the whole person toward receptivity.

Nature-Based Spirituality

Across cultures and throughout human history, the natural world has served as the primary medium for spiritual encounter. The burning bush of Exodus, the forest asceticism of Hindu traditions, the Zen garden's aesthetics of nature, the Celtic Christian sense of thin places where heaven and earth come close, and the modern tradition of nature writing as spiritual practice all reflect the same basic intuition: that the natural world, when attended to with full presence, discloses something that cannot be found in human constructions.

John Muir (1838-1914), the Scottish-American naturalist who founded the Sierra Club and whose writing did more than anyone else's to establish the national park system in the USA, wrote with explicit spiritual language about his experience in wild nature: "The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness." For Muir, mountains and forests were not merely pleasant environments but cathedrals of natural revelation, places where the divine was more directly accessible than in any human institution.

Rudolf Steiner's approach to nature was characterised by what he called Goethean science: a method of scientific inquiry that includes the observer's full inner response, including aesthetic and spiritual response, as data alongside quantitative measurement. Goethe (whom Steiner edited and interpreted extensively in his early career) insisted that the phenomena of nature speak to those who are willing to listen with all their faculties, not merely those who reduce nature to measurable quantities. The study of a plant, for Goethe and Steiner, is simultaneously an inner event: the plant's form is a gesture of a spiritual being, and learning to read that gesture develops a kind of perception that quantitative science cannot access.

Contemporary research on nature exposure (Kaplan and Kaplan's attention restoration theory; the expanding field of ecopsychology; studies on "awe" as a distinct emotional state) provides scientific support for what nature mystics have always claimed: time in natural settings, especially settings that provoke a sense of vastness and complexity beyond the self, reliably produces increases in wellbeing, reductions in rumination, and openings to what psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the "hive switch," the capacity to feel part of something larger than oneself.

Hermeticism as a Living Practice

Hermeticism is often studied as history of ideas rather than practiced as a living path. But the Hermetic tradition always included practical as well as theoretical dimensions: theurgy (working with divine powers through ritual), alchemy (the transformation of matter and soul simultaneously), astrology (reading the correspondence between celestial and terrestrial), and meditation on the Hermetic principles themselves as a path of inner development.

The fundamental Hermetic practice is contemplation of the seven principles (as systematised in the Kybalion and its predecessors): Mentalism, Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender. These are not merely intellectual propositions; they are descriptions of the structure of reality that, when genuinely contemplated and lived, change how the world is experienced.

Contemplating correspondence, for example, means developing the habit of looking at every outer event as also an inner event: asking not only "what is happening out there?" but "what is the inner reality of which this outer event is the expression or the correspondence?" This is not solipsism (the outer world is real) but a change of perceptual stance that gradually develops what the Hermetic tradition calls the "mental alchemy" of transforming how consciousness relates to experience.

Practical Hermeticism today is pursued in a range of contexts: Rosicrucian orders (AMORC, Lectorium Rosicrucianum), traditional Western astrology schools that emphasise natal chart as a spiritual self-knowledge tool, ceremonial magic traditions (Golden Dawn derivatives, Thelema), and the growing academic study of Western esotericism (Wouter Hanegraaff at the University of Amsterdam, Kocku von Stuckrad, and others have established this as a rigorous academic field).

Anthroposophy: Steiner's Spiritual Science

Anthroposophy, the spiritual science developed by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), is one of the most systematic and ambitious Western spiritual paths of the modern period. Steiner's background combined genuine scientific training (he edited Goethe's scientific writings), philosophical rigour (he held a doctorate in philosophy), and claimed direct spiritual perception that he described as developing gradually through the specific practices he outlined.

The entry point to Anthroposophy as a practice is "How to Know Higher Worlds" (1904), Steiner's most practical guide to the development of spiritual perception. The book prescribes a sequence of exercises beginning with reverence: the cultivation of a genuine sense of the sacred in relation to knowledge, nature, and human beings. This is followed by exercises in thinking (developing the capacity to hold a thought in consciousness with full inner activity for extended periods), feeling (specifically the cultivation of equanimity in response to experience), and will (transforming habitual reactions into consciously chosen responses).

These preliminary moral-cognitive exercises prepare the ground for the development of the three higher organs of spiritual perception: Imagination (perception through living spiritual images), Inspiration (hearing the language of the spiritual world in inner silence), and Intuition (direct union with spiritual beings). Steiner was clear that these organs cannot be developed through intellectual study alone; they require years of consistent practice of the moral-cognitive exercises, which purify the soul's instruments so that spiritual perceptions can enter without distortion.

The practical expressions of Anthroposophy in the world include Waldorf education (developed by Steiner in 1919 for the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory workers' children, now a major worldwide educational movement), biodynamic agriculture (applying Steiner's spiritual science of plant growth to farming), Camphill communities (social communities for adults with developmental disabilities), and anthroposophical medicine (integrating conventional medicine with homeopathic and artistic therapies).

Theosophy and the Perennial Philosophy

The Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), Henry Steel Olcott, and William Q. Judge, was the most influential Western esoteric organisation of the late 19th century and shaped the entire landscape of modern Western spirituality. Blavatsky's two major works, "Isis Unveiled" (1877) and "The Secret Doctrine" (1888), presented a synthesis of Hindu, Buddhist, Gnostic, Hermetic, and Kabbalistic teachings as expressions of a single underlying wisdom tradition preserved by a brotherhood of adepts in Tibet and elsewhere.

Theosophy's influence on modern spirituality is enormous and often unacknowledged. The chakra system as taught in contemporary yoga studios, the concept of karma in its popular Western usage, the idea of spiritual masters or ascended masters guiding humanity's development, the framework of multiple planes of existence (physical, astral, mental, causal), and many other concepts now widely used in New Age spirituality were introduced or popularised in the West primarily through Theosophy.

Aldous Huxley's "The Perennial Philosophy" (1945) is the most influential statement of the thesis that underlies Theosophy's comparative approach: that all the world's mystical traditions converge on a single set of truths. Huxley's four propositions: that there is an immanent and transcendent divine ground of all being; that human beings can know this ground; that this knowing is the ultimate purpose of human existence; and that this ground is everywhere the same, whatever the tradition's outward form. This framework has deeply influenced popular Western spirituality's tendency to treat all traditions as interchangeable paths up the same mountain.

Critics including Steiner and later scholars like S.N. Balagangadhara and Kocku von Stuckrad have argued that the perennial philosophy tends to erase significant differences between traditions and to project a modern Western framework onto very different forms of human religious experience. The convergences are real but partial; the differences are also real and important. The most honest relationship with the perennial philosophy is to appreciate its insight that spiritual truths transcend any single tradition while remaining attentive to what is genuinely distinctive about each path.

William James on Religious Experience

William James (1842-1910), the American psychologist and philosopher, delivered the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 1901-1902 that became "The Varieties of Religious Experience" (1902), still the most comprehensive and rigorous study of religious and mystical experience from a psychological standpoint.

James described the marks of genuine mystical experience as four: ineffability (the experience cannot be adequately described in words, even by the person who had it), noetic quality (the experience conveys genuine knowledge about the nature of reality, not merely pleasant feelings), transiency (the fullest form of the experience does not persist, though its effects can), and passivity (the subject feels in the hands of something greater, even when they have prepared for the experience). These four marks are met by contemplative experiences across traditions, which James took as evidence for their common ground in something real rather than merely individual psychology.

James's conclusion, arrived at through extensive documentation of first-hand accounts across traditions, was that religious experience is a genuine psychological phenomenon with real effects on the person who undergoes it. Whether the metaphysical claims made about these experiences are true, James thought, cannot be decided empirically. But the pragmatic criterion is clear: if the experiences produce genuine growth in the person (more honesty, compassion, courage, and clarity) they should be taken seriously and valued, whatever their ultimate source.

Spiritual Bypassing: The Hidden Pitfall

John Welwood, an American psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher, coined the term "spiritual bypassing" in 1984 to describe a pattern he observed frequently in students of both Western psychology and Eastern meditation: the use of spiritual ideas, practices, and attainments to avoid, rather than genuinely engage with, the actual psychological and emotional work that real development requires.

Common forms of spiritual bypassing include: using meditation to suppress rather than acknowledge and process difficult emotions; using the concept of non-attachment to avoid genuine intimacy and vulnerability; using spiritual community membership to feel special or superior without doing the actual inner work; using concepts like "divine plan" or "everything happens for a reason" to avoid grieving real losses; and using elevated spiritual states or experiences to bypass the need for ordinary human connection and accountability.

Welwood was careful to distinguish spiritual bypassing from genuine spiritual practice. The difference is not in the practice itself but in the relationship to psychological reality that the practice maintains. A genuine meditator uses meditation to become more present to their actual experience, including its uncomfortable dimensions. A spiritual bypasser uses meditation to escape from experience. The same sitting practice can serve either function depending on the practitioner's orientation.

Steiner addressed the same problem from a different angle. He warned repeatedly in "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds" against a particular danger on the spiritual path: what he called "premature transcendence," the attempt to access higher spiritual states before the necessary moral and psychological groundwork has been laid. A genuine spiritual path, in Steiner's view, requires prior moral development precisely because genuine spiritual perception without a morally purified soul produces distorted and potentially dangerous results.

Creating Your Own Practice

Given the range of available spiritual traditions and practices, how should a serious seeker proceed? The following principles, drawn from across the traditions surveyed here, offer practical guidance.

Go deep before going wide: The temptation to sample many traditions is understandable but typically counterproductive for genuine development. Each tradition has a surface level accessible to casual engagement and deeper levels accessible only to those who have sustained practice within the tradition long enough to encounter its real demands. Jumping between traditions keeps the practitioner permanently at the surface. Choose one tradition as your primary home and engage with it deeply for at least two to three years before seriously exploring others.

Include the body: Most Western spiritual traditions have historically undervalued the body as a site of spiritual development. Contemporary integrative approaches recognise that genuine spiritual development cannot bypass the body: the body is the ground in which the inner life is rooted, and spiritual practice that does not include the body tends to become disembodied and disconnected from ordinary life. Whether through yoga, qi gong, walking meditation, or simply the sustained attention to physical sensation in ordinary mindfulness practice, include the body in your practice.

Include community: Sustained spiritual development almost always requires genuine community: people who share your orientation and who can see you clearly enough to challenge spiritual bypassing when it occurs. This is not the same as simply having spiritual friends or attending events. It means the sustained, accountable engagement with others in a shared practice context over time.

Include honest self-examination: James's pragmatic test is useful here. Regularly ask: is my practice producing more genuine honesty, compassion, and attention in my actual daily life? Or is it primarily producing pleasant states, interesting experiences, and a sense of spiritual identity? If the latter, something needs adjustment.

Integration: Bringing the Spiritual Into Daily Life

The final and perhaps most important dimension of spiritual practice is integration: the translation of what is experienced in formal practice into actual quality of daily life. This is where most spiritual practitioners find the greatest difficulty and where the most significant development occurs or fails to occur.

Steiner described this as the challenge of "grounding spiritual perception in practical life." The point of meditation, prayer, or contemplative study is not to produce temporary elevated states but to change the person's everyday consciousness: the quality of attention they bring to ordinary tasks, the warmth they extend to people they encounter, the honesty they maintain in situations where dishonesty is easier, and the equanimity they sustain in circumstances that previously provoked reactive identification.

Thomas Merton's insight about the false self applies here: spiritual practice that strengthens the false self (its sense of being special, elevated, or more awake than others) is not integration but inflation. Genuine integration is humbling rather than elevating, because it consistently reveals the gap between the ideals held in practice and the reality of one's actual behaviour in ordinary circumstances.

Brother Lawrence (17th century Carmelite lay brother, "The Practice of the Presence of God") described this as the goal of all spiritual practice in the simplest possible terms: learning to be as genuinely present to God while peeling potatoes in the kitchen as while kneeling in prayer in the chapel. The measure of integration is not the height of one's peak experiences but the quality of ordinary moments.