The Dark Secret of Spirituality

Beyond the platitudes of unconditional love

Spiritualists and mystics typically say love is the answer to everything, because they believe that ultimately only love is real. But when a word like “love” is so overused, the word loses its meaning and becomes an empty shell we gloss over out of habit.

Let’s stop to think about the nature of this spiritual, unconditional love we’re supposed to have.

We know that in the Western tradition there are five main concepts of love, as distinguished by the Greek words “philautia,” “storge,” “eros,” “philia,” and “agape.” Respectively, these are (1) the love of oneself, the seeking of one’s own happiness or advantage, (2) instinctive, biological love for family, (3) sexual or romantic love, (4) brotherly love, friendship or camaraderie, and (5) the kind of love that Christianity developed and popularized, namely the morally or spiritually obligatory affection that’s meant to be universal and unconditional.

The Jesus of the Gospels illustrates how this unconditional love is supposed to work. Rather than confining his attention to his family or to his fellow Jews, Jesus abandoned his biological family, criticized Jewish authorities for being hypocrites, and went out of his way to aid the underclass, the forgotten people who were most in need, including the poor, the hungry, the sick, the downtrodden, and the marginalized.

In answer to the question, “Who is my neighbour?” in Luke 10:29, Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, implying that even though Jews and Samaritans were bitterly at odds with each other, if a Samaritan is selfless and shows mercy to those in dire need regardless of their class or ethnicity, that Samaritan is a Jew’s neighbour (10:30–37).

Love of Spirits (Ghosts)

Agape, then, is the love not just between spiritual brothers but for everyone in so far as they have the potential to become neighbours in that sense, by becoming enlightened and perfected. Unconditional love is directed towards this inner potential which everyone is supposed to share due to our immortal spirits.

But now we face a couple of problems with this so-called spiritual love. First of all, if there’s no immortal, immaterial, supernatural spirit, the love of this nonexistent thing would be a sham. Loving someone’s spirit would be like loving Harry Potter. This would be a confused, misguided outpouring of emotion at best.

To be sure, art ought to evoke an emotional reaction from the audience, and the greater the art, the greater the emotional resonance. But these emotions are cathartic; we know the characters are fictional and we feel for them only ironically, knowing that what we’re really reacting to is something in reality, outside the fiction, which the characters exemplify or symbolize. In the case of “spirituality,” we wouldn’t “love” each other ironically, but would be under a delusion, mesmerized by an ideology. Religious myths would be fictions that have become so clichéd they’d be revered as profound truths.

If the myth of our immortal spirit were taken as a metaphor, the universal love evoked by the myth should likewise be other than it seems. Indeed, very few religious folks live as though they took their scriptures to be literally or factually true. In short, most religious people are hypocrites, not saints, monks, or zealots. They claim to love the spiritual depth in everyone, but because they don’t know for a fact there’s any such depth — because this spirit is invisible and science has disenchanted the universe, exorcising magic and spirits from the land of causality — these fair-weather religionists compromise with secular standards and betray their supposed religious ideals.

As I explain elsewhere, the so-called spirit ought to be equated with qualia, with the most subjective aspect of consciousness, in which case spirituality becomes the existential problem that there are ranks of consciousness, depending on our degree of self-awareness and our reaction to the harsh truths of natural life.

Loving our Spiritual Potential, Loathing our Actual Selves

But leave that aside, because there’s another problem: even if we naturalize spirituality and think of unconditional love as the affirmation of our biological, psychological, or social potential to be improved upon, which potential is surely real rather than delusory, the love of this potential becomes admiration only for an ideal fulfillment of who we actually are.

In so far as we’ve fallen short of that ideal and haven’t fulfilled our potential, the spiritualist can’t be said to love us as individuals, as we are here and now with all our flaws. On the contrary, in comparison with the love of our ideal version, our imperfect version ought to provoke something like disgust or disappointment, as it did for Plato who condemned the material universe for being filled with mere copies of ideal, immaterial originals.

Compare the Christian’s casuistic insistence that she hates sin but not the sinner. She thereby identifies the sinner with the immortal, transcendent essence that arguably doesn’t exist. How else could she justify universal love towards everyone unless we were all equally admirable in virtue of our spiritual core? That core would be what God directly created in us, before we first opened our eyes, began to exercise our freewill, and tainted the divine handiwork. Loving our inner spirit would amount to loving God who is supposed to be perfect and therefore worthy of constant reverence.

Still, the Christian correctly contrasts the ideal with the flawed reality: we ought to love the spirit, but hate what we actually do in so far as we fall short of God’s expectations. This is a covert way of saying we should love the sinner as the spirit that testifies to God’s perfection, and should consequently hold in contempt not just the sin but the sinner whose personal choices in the psychological and social contexts have added to the corruption of God’s creation. “Sinner” is thus ambiguous, and the latter sense is closer to what we mean by our individual, tangible selves, the people we actually are who are defined largely by our sins, by our flaws as well as our strengths and successes.

In other words, this “spiritual” Christian seems to be holding out her love of something dubious, to distract from her contempt for most people as they actually are. The spiritualist loves who we might become in a utopia or a supernatural afterlife, when our spiritual essence is revealed and the old world of flawed nature has passed away. But this same spiritualist necessarily has the opposite emotional reaction to our actual selves, to who we are here and now before any such transformation has occurred.

The two-sidedness of spiritual love is often missed merely because we’re expected to focus on the act of striving to fulfill our potential. If you’re running a race and you’ve trained yourself to have a single-minded concentration on achieving the glory of crossing the finish line, you may ignore the hardship of all the preceding stages, of training, going to physical therapy, and actually running around the track. Indeed, the actuality of what we experience can seem illusory when juxtaposed with the euphoria of fulfilling some telos, of achieving a great purpose.

Still, if the love of fulfillment transfers over to our feelings toward our means of achieving the end, this is by way of a mental trick, a shift of attention. Just as we can focus on hearing different voices in a crowded room, we can overlook our negative response to an imperfection, by focusing on a plan for improving on it. We can ignore the offending thing as it currently exists and treat the thing as though it were on its way to becoming something superior. We can view the thing through the lens of the ideal.

To that extent, spiritual love is patronizing. Imagine a wife who loves her husband only when he wears a Superman costume. In reality the husband is far from the fantasy of Superman. So does the wife love the man as he really is or does she equate him with that fantasy? Does she play a mental trick on herself to cope with his unappealing mannerisms, to the point of hallucinating that even without the costume, her husband is close enough to the true object of her love, to the heroic Superman, because she can always anticipate the moment when he’ll don the costume and thus evoke some condescending affection from her?

None of which is to say there’s nothing to the phenomenon of so-called spiritual, unconditional love or Christian agape. My point, rather, is that we’re expected to be charmed by the repetition of spiritual slogans so that we lose sight of what the lofty attitude would entail: love for “the spirit,” contempt for the actual person. Or if the spiritualist can summon some love even for our flawed instantiations, she’ll do so only with the “discipline” of overlooking the extent to which we live now on earth as ends in ourselves, as natural, accidentally-wily primates with limited autonomy, not as stepping stones toward becoming something perfect and perhaps preposterous.

Monism and the Mystic’s Necessary Selfishness

Perhaps the mystic can swoop in to give some semblance of honesty to the proceedings. Instead of pretending to be so elevated as to sneer at us because of what we evidently are, namely evolved, duplicitous and easily-misled creatures that have no business speaking of perfection unless we’re in the business of fooling ourselves and erecting a dystopia, maybe the mystic can explain why we should love things unconditionally.

The mystic’s strategy seems clear: metaphysical monism. If there’s really only one thing that exists, one source of all material illusions, a primary conscious spirit that’s at the bottom of each of us, which source we can commune with through meditation, enlightenment would consist in seeing past all apparent divisions and particularities, and loving each person as an expression of divine reality.

But here again we should be appalled rather than comforted by any assurance of such love. We’d like to think of a spiritual person as eminently selfless and moral, but her profoundest love for everyone ends up being self-love! The illusion of matter is matched by an illusion of religious altruism, as the charade of morality gives way to mystical solipsism: the love of the other becomes love of oneself, or God’s love of the infinite expressions of his vanity or of his creative whims.

Mind you, divine creativity wouldn’t be substantial, according to the mystic, because none of God’s creations would be real. Only the oneness of God is real, for the mystic, and the apparent differences between causes and effects, opposites, or between you and me pale into insignificance by comparison with that unity that hides in plain sight. Why would the supreme reality attempt to create something necessarily inferior, if not for God’s need to escape into a fantasy, to flee from the insanity entailed by being the lone reality?

In any case, on this monistic picture God’s intention for creating the illusion of a material world could hardly be as innocuous as the moralistic platitude that God wants to share his greatness. God couldn’t be so benevolent if he fails even to create substantive alternatives to his supreme self, but concocts only avatars that mistake themselves for independent entities and that therefore lose themselves in the charades not just of selfishness, competition, and conflict, but of morality and even the exoteric, conventional practice of religion.

Indeed, the stereotype of the selfish monk or mystic who withdraws from society to pursue a spiritual discipline but who nonetheless benefits from the social order, as he or she begs for food or shelter, hints at the deeper selfishness implied by this metaphysical monism. Of course the mystic thinks mainly of herself after all, socially speaking, since she believes all that really exists is a single self!

The Subversiveness of Spiritual Love

The upshot is that “spiritual love” is much more surprising and antisocial than the carefree pablum and feel-good, religious slogans and mantras. You can say that love is the answer to everything or that all you need is love, and folks will nod, quickly forget the cliché, and go back to their narrow-minded secular endeavours, because the true meaning of spirituality is hidden.

When we examine the basis of gearing ourselves up to love everyone unconditionally, we uncover some unsettling assumptions. The spiritual lover is covertly revolted by the actual state of the world, as she’s fixated on an unreachable ideal. Perhaps she’s even poised to use her spiritual discourse and her unconventional role as a supposedly enlightened figure as cover for her perpetration of a fraud, as she naturally exploits the weaknesses and flaws of the real world she secretly condemns.

If she’s beyond good and evil and not beholden to ordinary laws and norms that are fit for the victimized hoi polloi, she has no compelling reason for altruism. On the contrary, if she’s a monist she can excuse any of her actions as a necessarily selfish vagary of the underlying lone Self. It’s no accident that many gurus are exposed as frauds. They have the opportunity to exploit people’s gullibility and desperation, but these charlatans may also be convinced that nothing really matters, given the “spiritual” view of reality.

According to that view, all suffering and change are illusions, only the divine Self is real, and nothing opposes that Self’s impulses except its further impulses and its avatars’ ignorance-based imprisonment by illusory matter. The spiritualist who professes her liberation from these delusions, when she announces that love is the answer to everything should be free not just from animal cravings but from morality.

That’s the shocking truth of “spirituality.”