Defining the terms ‘skeptic’ and ‘spiritual awakening’

Basic

Sep 16

A skeptic is a person who questions things, often a desirable trait in science. I define a spiritual awakening very narrowly as a person who finds themselves running higher-level cognitive functions unexpectedly.

It’s important that we clearly define what is meant by the terms I’m using the most in these blogs so we have shared context. Lots of people know about skepticism and lots know about spiritual awakenings, there just aren’t that many that know about both. Let’s do some code-switching…

You know, I take this very scientific attitude that everything you’ve learned is just provisional, that you know, it’s always open to recantation, refutation, or questioning. And I think the same applies to society.
And I, you know, I felt growing up, you know, I slowly had this process of realizing that all the things around me that people had told me were just the natural way things were the way things always would be. They weren't natural at all, they were things that could be changed and they were things that more importantly were wrong and should change.
Once I realized that there was really kinda no going back.
Aaron Swartz, The Internets Own Boy

It has not escaped my notice that the term skeptic is more concisely and practically defined than the term spiritual awakening. It’s pretty indicative that we know more about science than we do about spirituality in the West. The sections below are proportionate.

Defining the term skeptic

“In science, being skeptical does not mean doubting the validity of everything, nor does it mean being cynical. Rather, to be skeptical is to judge the validity of a claim based on objective empirical evidence.”
Matthew P Normand, Science, Skepticism, and Applied Behavior Analysis

A skeptic is a person who often questions or doubts things and the discipline of skepticism in Western philosophy, is a questioning attitude or doubt towards claims of knowledge.

A good skeptic does not refute everything always. One can always talk oneself into a box questioning reality, but then the reality is you usually have to leave the box to go get food. (Life is funny that way, almost like it was designed :) So a good skeptic is not a sophist, but a pragmatist.

A skeptic tries to stick to what is actually known about the world, reproducible, measurable, and directly observed but does not refute others claims to knowledge per se, just acknowledges the source of the claim and that it is outside of their direct experience.

Good scientific skepticism is a really, really lovely thought form if properly applied. It’s essentially the discipline and self-restraint to always think about what we don’t know. We generally don’t know what other people are thinking, or what makes them do the things they do. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, and we don’t always know the best course of action.

As humans we can kind of lump together what we observe and try to make predictions based on that, but we’re shit at it really and only barely stopped throwing plague corpses over walls and beating wives with sticks. We’ve made some real leaps and bounds with science and technology in the last few hundred years and it’s encouraging and we want more of it. A good scientist is always a good skeptic, and it’s an ideal of how humans can improve their performance.

Skepticism really just wants to do better, and that’s super fucking lovely.

I am rock solid on one thing, one must be a skeptic before one can have a spiritual awakening. Direct experience of spirit does not come unless you reject or question the status-quo and stick with your observed reality.

Ironically the more pristine your science, the more likely you are to meet spirit.

Defining the term spiritual awakening

I want to be as inclusive as possible so please bear with me if I choose material that might be activating because it is religious. It’s pretty hard to avoid religious material when talking about spirituality, but I will include a lot of stuff from many religions (including atheism and agnosticism) so don’t get your knickers in a bunch.

Please note that I do not ascribe to any religion, I consider myself a mystic (someone with direct experience of spirit) and therefore am deeply entertained and sometimes entranced by aspects of all religions :)

Typically the most easily accessible metaphor for a spiritual awakening in the West is the biblical story of Job. Some of you probably escaped becoming Judeo-Christian by default brainwashing (most Western people get this in Sunday school whether they want to or not). So I’ll give you a short synopsis.

Briefly, Job is a good person who has everything; wife, kids, land, goats (hey it’s the Bible, goats are big!). He has it the good old fashioned way through honesty and hard work. Then he loses everything, his friends tell him it’s definitely his fault, and it really adds to the torment, but he keeps his faith, and eventually everything is restored. The bible says it’s a test of his faith. I say its a standard, run-of-the-mill spiritual awakening.

Basically Job is running on human circuit #1, the ego-based circuit where you learn to make the most of what you got at birth given the rules of the society you live in. This is a good circuit and a very happy, productive life can be had here. Usually that life is a product of what you put into it and more effort and diligence equals more reward on physical, mental, or emotional dimensions.

But sometimes people get an upgrade to human circuit #2 and that means a complete rewrite of the software. This can be really fucking painful, and the end result is a much better brighter human with some cool new cognitive and perceptual bells and whistles. (In scientific terms, our poor schlod goes from Newtonian, to quantum in a phase state change.) But usually his friends are still running on human circuit #1 which means they think he just fucked up and he’s probably a total shithead. (I hope this description is highly entertaining to anyone who’s had a spiritual awakening.)

So for instance Victor Frankl was in a concentration camp, but he used the experience to refine his appreciation for free-will and wrote a really lovely book about it. He really made lemonade out of lemons and we all admire him for it. Nelson Mandela was in a prison for a long time then won the Nobel Peace Prize, these are people who really developed themselves on human circuit #1. They were highly successful in life because of honest effort despite obstacles.

In contrast Jiddu Krishamurti has his brother die, who he was inseparable from in childhood and falls down in a seizure and then stands up and disbands the religion that had formed around him and lectures for years in the most lucid and stunning way possible. Gopi Krisha is meditating and bam, he has a miserable ten years of suffering and pain while his body rewires then suddenly he’s an incredibly articulate writer and advocate for the science of human evolution despite very little education. This is human circuit #2, these guys unpredictably changed, suffered, rewired, and suddenly became superhuman.

This is getting really long so I’m going to knock off but I want to point out that a spiritual awakening is not just one mystical experience. A spiritual awakening is a predictable, upgrade to the human cognition, with direct effects on perceptual ability (psi), cognition (intelligence), and physical circumstance (changes in life circumstance and physiology). It follows a well-documented inwardly moving spiral pattern and only ends up in one place.

Defining skeptic and spiritual awakening

A skeptic limits his belief to logical reports of consensual reality and direct experience. Someone undergoing a spiritual awakening has a radical change in their direct perceptual and cognitive experience of the world which follows a predictable pattern which has been reported by other people throughout many centuries and across many sociocultural contexts.

Can you see that these two things are not misaligned?

ScienceKundalini