The first time I was bullied was at a religious school. As I sat quietly cross-legged in the back of the classroom, uninterested in the Arabic text on my lap, I noticed two girls glancing at me and timidly whispering something to each other. I did. The other students had someone else sitting there. All the other students seemed to understand the scriptures better than I did.
I had been attending this class for months, and although I had managed to make some superficial progress, I became more and more skeptical as each religious history class progressed. Even with my makeshift hijab and impromptu Quranic accent, I felt foreign among my peers and far removed from my teachers.
Looking back, I was 18 years old when I found the language, the confidence, and, surprisingly, the classes that finally helped me confront and digest my lifelong discomfort with religion.
Eventually, as I grew older, this discomfort gave way to a new appreciation for and familiarity with the idea of ”secular spirituality.” Secular spirituality is becoming a mainstream field of spirituality, but it claims that spirituality does not require belief in or involvement in supernatural gods, forces, or energies. Spirituality is a set of thoughts, philosophies, feelings, words, and actions derived from the abiding belief that everything in the universe, including human experience, is interdependent.
This broad definition of spirituality includes the following facts: Experiences can evoke feelings of awe, connection, and awareness, all of which can be considered spiritual. Immersing yourself in nature, meditation, or in my case learning about the human body and mind are all great examples of personal spiritual experiences. I have found that secular spirituality, if left alone, becomes individualized, grows, and adapts at its own pace.
Religion and Family: My Grandfather
Religion has always been a part of my life. It is a familial, cultural, and very personal story that I am privileged to inherit from my parents and the generations before them.
I remember that my paternal grandfather died of colon cancer, but my memory does not recall who he was before. All I remember is his father raising his hands even more than usual, pleading. All I remember is how practicing my religious practices protected me during this time of unexplained grief and bereavement.
Although I didn’t know my grandfather very well, I was keenly aware of how his memory was kept alive as our family deepened our faith in our faith. I knew him by proxy. I realized the strength of his presence through how he strengthened the faith and devotion of those who knew him, like his father.
As I grew up, the occasional bullying I experienced in religious schools left a sour taste in my mouth, but I also realized that religion was more than just a set of ideologies and practices that my parents practiced and taught me. Ta. Religion was, and is, the language they use to transform their deepest feelings into a currency of resilience, reflection, and connection.
Looking back, it’s certainly a beautiful sight to see how love, grief, and faith intertwine. But I remember being overwhelmed by a peculiar fluttering ball of guilt in my stomach. This guilt, which has changed a lot since then, told me: Look around you, how could you not love something that has given your family so much resilience and peace? This question still lingers in my mind.
Still, because I am now assertive and independent from my family, I am able to resolve my childhood discomfort with my faith without questioning the integrity of my relationship with my family. . As an agnostic atheist, I interpret the concept of God as fundamentally unknowable to humans. Even if there was some kind of spirituality in human existence, and even if God existed, I believe that spirituality is an extremely personal experience, and humans cannot grasp it through institutionalized religion. I think so.
The classroom: where science and spirituality meet
There is a common societal narrative that spirituality and science are insurmountably separate, and this narrative permeated my worldview. It meant taking an unexpected path to find a comfortable intersection of spirituality, philosophy, and science.
As a science student, it was easy to think that spirituality and science were mutually exclusive. Both seek to solve the riddle of human and natural existence, but only one can solve it in a way that brings certainty to the results through rigor. Scientific method and sophisticated formulas.
Now I realize how naive my thinking was.
Since my grandfather passed away, I have taken a number of undergraduate courses related to biology and neuroscience in my program. However, when I began studying the brain and mind, I did not expect that they would fill new spaces within me that were previously unfilled spiritually.
Last semester, I took an anatomy and physiology course and learned that just bending the knee requires a tremendous amount of biomechanics and system coordination. In another course, I tried to understand the fact that me and the tree outside my classroom window likely shared a common ancestor at some point in the evolutionary labyrinth. In my introductory neuroscience course, I was taught about a series of biological processes that allow us to move our fingers, let alone think and feel.
While my classmates around me put pen to paper and diligently take notes for their upcoming final exams, I sit quietly at the back of the class, inside the skull that has the most potential. I was meditating on the neuroscience machines that operate in the. Ignore the task. The question that crossed my mind was how much of the universe remains undiscovered. How is everything interdependent? What happens when this chain of interdependence is broken?
When I came out of these classes, I not only felt excited and amazed at the vastness of science. Ironically, the materialism of my science classes awakened me to the fundamental interconnectedness and interdependence of all the workings of nature, including myself.
Of course, up until this point I had not held an anthropocentric worldview, nor did I believe that humans were exempt from certain natural laws. But studying the sophistication of our brains, bodies, and minds has led me to see myself as a culmination of complexities that would take a lifetime to contemplate. I began to see beauty in everything I considered to be my flaws: the wrinkles on my hands, the stretch marks on my hips, the dark, thinning texture of my hair. How can I think my body is ugly or undesirable when it does so much to keep me alive?
This new way of looking at the world, prompted by my period of study and self-reflection, gave me a self-love that was not as fragile and conditional as all the other kinds of self-love I had tried to impose on myself. I grew it inside. This love and empathy I felt within me radiated and manifested into the world through my patience and ability to forgive.
embrace science and spirituality
After several weeks of sitting and reflecting on these thoughts and experiences, I realized the complex relationship that exists between science and spirituality. The course content I was studying connected me to the natural world in a way I had never experienced before. The experience seems to be usually reserved for episodes caused by psychedelic ingestion.
Science is a tool that allows us to quantify, evaluate, and understand the natural world within and around us. Western science is fundamentally empiricist, but this empiricism has increased my empathy, love, and sensitivity beyond what I had previously extracted from religion.
In a New York Times bestselling book how to change your mindIn , author and journalist Michael Pollan talks about his interactions with Richard Griffiths, a psychopharmacologist who studies psychedelic science. Psychedelics such as mushrooms and LSD are naturally occurring substances that can have a powerful effect on the psyche, towards a state of “ego death”. Although vague, ego death is the subjective experience of the “self” dissolving, and is an experiential precursor to the feelings of interconnectedness one might feel after a magic mushroom experience.
The clinical and therapeutic novelty of psychedelics is increasingly accepted by both scientists and clinicians. More scientists like Griffith are active in understanding psychedelics using both scientific and non-traditional methods.
Pollan describes Griffith’s ability to have “negative capabilities,” which he calls “the ability to exist in the midst of uncertainty, mystery, and doubt without ever reaching an absolute, whether in science or spirituality.” ” is defined. This ability to exist in a state of uncertainty applies to engaging in science as a practice and to living a spiritual life. Pollan tells of meeting Griffith and asking her about her views on science and spirituality. Mr Griffiths responded that the two concepts were not “mutually exclusive” and that he had “little patience for absolutists on either side of the supposed divide”. He argues instead that his two methods “can inform each other, correct each other’s shortcomings…and perhaps answer the big questions we face.”
Separating science and spirituality not only breeds hostility but also hinders humans’ ability to experience the world empirically and esotericly. Both fields are equally valuable to our collective stories and human search for meaning.
Although religion is no longer formally part of my world, my experience with spirituality has helped me empathize with the feelings of inspiration and devotion that institutionalized faith evokes in people like my parents. can. I don’t fully understand or empathize with some of the perspectives that organized religion offers, but I’m more comfortable than ever living in the blurred middle ground between science and spirituality. became. As I delve deeper into the wonders of science, my journey into secular spirituality has given me the strength to embrace and appreciate the unknown. I am forever grateful for the person I became in the process.
