Spirituality
Dismissing spirituality throws the baby out with the bathwater. Think of it as a complex molecule — identify which components actually contribute to wellbeing.
Spirituality is a nebulous concept. This is largely why the scientific community is bearish on it — loosely defined things provide ample opportunity for moving goalposts, which is contrary to everything empiricism values. When a concept can mean whatever the believer needs it to mean at any given moment, it is not describing anything stable.
But dismissing the concept entirely throws the baby out with the bathwater. Within the noise, there is signal. The task is to find it.
Think of spirituality as a complex molecule. The goal is to identify which atomic components contribute to genuine wellbeing and which are neutral or harmful. For those inclined to believe, this helps identify what is actually doing the work. For those inclined to doubt, it provides a way to engage with the signal without adopting the noise wholesale.
Here is a reductive account of what seems to matter — a Pareto principle for the spiritual.
Mindfulness
Sam Harris, in Waking Up:
“The quality of mind cultivated in vipassana is almost always referred to as ‘mindfulness,’ and the literature on its psychological benefits is now substantial. There is nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness.”
The common version of meditation practice — a brief session before bed to unwind, or after a stressful day to calm down — focuses on the acute effects. These are real and not to be dismissed. But they are not what we’re after here.
The deeper goal is the development of mindfulness as an integrated trait: a neural disposition to notice the present moment, to saturate attention in what’s actually occurring rather than what the mind is narrating about it. The difference is between using meditation as a tool for immediate relief and using it as training for a different relationship with experience. Eckhart Tolle’s formulation, whatever else you make of his work: “Nothing has happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.”
This is not metaphysics. It is a description of a fact about temporal experience that most people spend most of their lives not noticing.
Loss of self
The second component is harder to describe without sounding unhinged to those who haven’t experienced it: the dissolution of the ordinary sense of self.
Under the right conditions — sustained meditation, or certain substances at careful doses — the ordinary architecture of self-and-world temporarily collapses. There isn’t an “I” observing experience; there is just experience. The gap between the subject and what is being experienced closes. No cause and effect; just what is.
This sounds abstract because the experience resists ordinary language, which is built on the subject-object distinction that the experience temporarily removes. But the psychological after-effects are well-documented: reductions in anxiety, increased sense of meaning and connection, lasting changes in the tendency toward rumination. What is being described is not poetry. Something real is happening, even if what exactly is happening remains philosophically contested.
The relevance to wellbeing is this: the ordinary sense of self — the continuous narrative of “I” that tracks concerns, replays mistakes, anticipates threats — is a source of significant chronic suffering. It is also not the only mode of experience available. Most people go their entire lives not knowing that.
These two components — mindfulness as a trained disposition, and some direct acquaintance with the dissolution of ordinary self-experience — seem to do a substantial amount of the work that people attribute to spiritual practice. The other elements (community, ritual, myth, metaphysics) have their roles, but this appears to be the load-bearing core.
Neither requires supernatural belief. Neither requires adopting a tradition wholesale. Both are accessible, investigable, and — if the evidence is taken seriously — worth the effort.