Process Spirituality: A Very Short Introduction

Process Spirituality

a very short introduction

Be like the lilies, without why and without care. They bend and blow under the gentle listing of the breeze, which is the ruach Elohim, the soft winds of the spirit blowing across the epochs from creation that caress us.

-- John Caputo

Let’s say that there are soft winds of the spirit blowing across the epochs from creation and that we can be caressed by them in our daily lives. The winds are not all-controlling or all-powerful. They can be overwhelmed by storms of our own making: wars, injustices, cruelties inflicted upon other people and animals, cruelties inflicted on ourselves. But the winds are good, gentle and refreshing, and they never give up on us. Even after storms the soft winds return with their grace, keeping life in motion. They are the winds of kindness and beauty, justice and joy, intimacy and merrymaking. [1]

These winds cannot be locked within a box or placed within a verbal frame. They cannot be contained in a specific creed or ritual, or owned by a single community of believers. They are open and free.

Spirituality is attunement to these winds so that we become their carriers in daily life. The winds need not be named in order to be carried. They can be understood naturalistically, theistically, or in both ways. [2] The interpretation is less important than the attunement.

Understood in this way spirituality is ecumenical in the widest of senses,. You find it in people who are spiritually interested but not religiously affiliated: that is, in spiritually independents. You find it in people are primarily secular or naturalistic in their outlook, not interested in talk of "higher powers" and "deeper sources." And you find it in people who belong to a religious community and follow a religious path, including people who believe in a personal God who loves the world. The winds of the spirit are free and can be felt and known by all.

In moments when we are attuned to these winds, we feel more alive and awake, more fully ourselves. Often, however, we find ourselves spiritually stagnant. We lose track of the winds and lose touch with ourselves. [3] Spiritual renewal is the process of reclaiming the winds by growing in emotional intelligence and spiritual wisdom, as catalyzed and expressed in concrete acts of love. The rest of this page offers a further interpretation of emotional intelligence and spiritual wisdom, with help from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, the Greater Good Science Project of the University of California at Berkeley, and the world's most inclusive interfaith network: Spirituality and Practice.

Emotional Intelligence

"Emotions drive learning, decision-making, creativity, relationships, and health. The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence uses the power of emotions to create a more effective and compassionate society. The Center conducts research and teaches people of all ages how to develop their emotional intelligence."

Yale School for Emotional Intelligence

"Psychology once assumed that most human emotions fall within the universal categories of happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust. But a new study from Greater Good Science Center faculty director Dacher Keltner suggests that there are at least 27 distinct emotions—and they are intimately connected with each other."

Greater Good: Science Based Insights for a Meaningful Life at UC Berkeley

Spirituality

"Sometimes people get the mistaken notion that spirituality is a separate department of life, the penthouse of our existence. But rightly understood, it is a vital awareness that pervades all realms of our being. Someone will say, 'I come alive when I listen to music,' or 'I come to life when I garden,' or 'I come alive when I play golf.'" Wherever we come alive, that is the area in which we are spiritual. And then we can say, 'I know at least how one is spiritual in that area.' To be vital, awake, aware, in all areas of our lives, is the task that is never accomplished, but it remains the goal."

David Steindl Rast, The Music of Silence

Spiritual Wisdom

Having a taste for the many forms of spiritual vitality that can be part of human life. Practicing or cultivating those which are most appropriate to the circumstances at hand.

Brief Explanation of Each Mode

Emotional Intelligence

Understanding the many emotions that drive learning, decision-making, creativity, relationships, and health.

admiration, adoration, aesthetic appreciation, amusement, anger, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, craving, disgust, empathic pain, entrancement, excitement, fear, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, relief, romance, sadness, satisfaction, sexual desire, surprise

Spiritual Practices *

Spiritual Practice Toolkit

A Bouquet of Kindness Practices

Spiritual Practices for Everyday Life

The Most Spiritually Literate Films Of...

A River Runs Through It

Process spirituality is not a worldview or a philosophy or a metaphysic. It can be cultivated with help from worldviews and philosophies; indeed, process philosophies and theologies can be very helpful for this purpose.

You might imagine process spirituality on the analogy of a life-nourishing river that flows through a city. You are the city and the "process" of your "spirituality" is the river flowing within you.

Spirituality is your Way of Being
as you seek Harmony and Intensity

This river is not otherworldly. It is your own daily life as lived from the inside: what you feel, what you think what you remember, what you hope for. But it is not only what you think and feel and remember and hope for; it is how you think and feel and remember and hope. It is your way of being. It is You, understood not as a settled and already-defined fact but as a person on a journey whose footsteps help create the path. Your spirituality is the journey.

The philosopher Whitehead suggests that, at every moment in the journey you are seeking something like "satisfaction" or "enjoyment" relative to the situation at hand. More specifically he suggests that you are seeking a combination of harmony and intensity: that is, harmonious connections with yourself, other people, other creatures, the earth and sky and heavens, and intensity amid the connections. If there is wisdom in what he says, then your spirituality is the seeking of harmonious intensity and intense harmony, another name for which is "strength of beauty."

Spiritual Growth as growing in
Emotional Intelligence and Spiritual Wisdom

It can grow stagnant if you don't pay attention to it. It can become polluted with the poisons of greed and hatred and envy. But if you are in touch with it, in whatever way makes sense to you, it can grow in healthy ways, recyclying nutrients and supplying fresh energy for life.

It is the experiential activity of growing in emotional intelligence and spiritual aliveness for the sake of individual happiness, community well-being, and the greater good of the world. Much of this activity is unconscious and thus "deep." But we can cooperate with it. intentionally and unintentionally, making space for it to flow in life-enhancing directions.

Emotional Intelligence and Spiritual Wisdom

Emotions are the driving force of human life. Emotional intelligence is the activity of recognizing, understanding, naming, expressing, and working with the emotional side of life. Research done by the Berkeley Greater Good Science Center suggests that there are at least 27 distinct emotions that are part of the human experience, concerning which we can be “intelligent.” (You will find them listed in the column on the left.)

Spirituality includes but is more than emotional intelligence. As David Steindl-Rast puts it, spirituality is "a vital awareness that can pervade all realms of our being."

Spiritual wisdom is having a sense for the many moods and modes that can be part of this vital awareness, appreciating their relevance in various contexts of life, and allowing them to surface in one's own life as appropriate. The spiritual alphabet offered by Spirituality and Practice -- the world's most inclusive interfaith network -- offers a list of 37 moods and modes that can be practiced. (You will find them listed in the column on the left.)

The Aims of Spirituality

For some people in some situations, the primary aim of becoming more fully alive is individual happiness, albeit in community with others. Very old people and very young people are often in this sitution, as are people who suffer from various kinds of illnesses. Individual happiness, even if only in fleeting moments of joy, is a good in its own right.

But for many people the activity of becoming more fully alive is connected with serving the well-being of local communities and the broader world. Local communities enjoy "well-being" to the degree that that they are creative, compassionate, participatory, inclusive, humane to animals, good for the earth, and spiritually satisfying – with no one left behind. Such communities are the building blocks of "ecological civilizations."

Who Can Practice Process Spirituality?

A process spirituality need not be consciously practiced in order to be effective. Many people seek to grow in emotional intelligence and spiritual wisdom without being intentional about the growth and without calling it "spirituality" much less "process spirituality." Some practitioners are religiously affiliated and some are not. Some are young and some are old. Some believe in a higher power, some do not, and many are somewhere in between. They form a network of spiritually-interested seekers who understand the world around them, and the universe as a whole, as a communion of subjects and not simply a collection of objects.

The Importance of Concrete Acts of Love

Growth in emotional intelligence and spiritual wisdom is inadequate and incomplete without concrete acts of love. These acts can be one-on-one acts of kindness and compassion for other people, animals and the earth, and also socially and politically engaged acts aimed at fostering structural justice and compassion in society. The acts both express and catalyze spiritual growth. Without them, "spirituality" is merely inward. It lacks connection, compassion, hospitality, and gratitude: hallmarks of spiritual wisdom.

[1] The 'winds of the spirit' is a metaphor for the living spirit of God at work in the world through energizing "initial aims." When we are attuned to these aims, we are receptive not only to divine guidance but also to divine desire, divine energy.
[2] Process philosopher and theologians understand the winds of the spirit, but they can also be understood naturalistically, as energetic outcomes of an evolutionary process or as the 'moral arc of the universe.'
[3] The aims of God for the world, as present in fresh possibilities or initial aims, are that we realize our potential in community with the world, and thus become fully ourselves.