What makes a “spiritual experience”?

Recent discussions in the Think Tank have led me to consider the nature of “spiritual experience.” To gain some insight into the matter, watch the following video and then read on. You can stop the video after the routine. The rest is commentary.

http://mostexcitingplanet.com/figure-skaters-perform-perfect-routine-disturbeds-sound-silence-will-give-chills/

Ok, I admit it: Watching this was a spiritual experience for me. (That’s hard to admit because it’s a slippery slope; first you’re into figure skating, then you find yourself putting up pictures of ponies on your bedroom wall. I’m not into ice-skating and I’ve never found an ice-skating routine that moving before. Honest injun.)

I think I’ve figured out why this was a spiritual experience for me.

A fundamental human drive or even imperative is to reach for the infinite/Imitatio Dei. That translates into a transformation from the concrete and material to, eventually, the completely abstract. Over the millennia, humanity seems to be progressing in this regard, which gives me great hope. We came down from the trees completely into the concrete world. It took time and genius to make the first cave painting. To take something from the concrete world and make a representation of it was a brilliant leap toward the abstract—a spiritual leap. Since then, improvements in representational technique may be admirable, but they are not further leaps toward the abstract—they’re technical. Which is why the art that moves Rabbi Cardozo does not move me. It may impress me. I may find it beautiful. But abstract art moves me.

Any human endeavor to reach for the infinite/the completely abstract moves me spiritually. The figure skating routine we saw required so much appreciation for the abstract in order to be admired by the thousands of people who applauded it. Someone had to think of ice as a medium for beauty, not just transport. Someone had to think it worthwhile to train flightless humans to soar and glide, for no reason. Why do people want to see this? It does not put food into their mouths, or make them warm, or raise their position in the social hierarchy. It is an absurd act of defiance against the physical. It is heartbreakingly noble. We’re never actually going to get off the ground, but we never give up trying.

So why do I call this a spiritual experience rather than a religious one? Because it is informed by my instinctual recognition of this routine as highly abstract in its beauty. I posit that what turns a spiritual experience into a religious one is the training and preparation that creates a religiously shaped receptacle for an experience or at least a religious vector for channeling the experience. For the skater, the rigor that is required to become an accomplished figure skater does not create a religiously-shaped receptacle for the expression of the abstract. It creates something else (I guess). I imagine that it might be a spiritual high to finish that routine. I don’t think it could be a religious high, unless the skater also has religious training. Religious training channels the spiritual into a religious experience, and the occasional religious high.

And that’s why I love religion in general and Judaism in particular. Religion is an absurd act of defiance against the purely material. And the rigor of the training of a halachic life creates a receptacle or vector for channeling fleeting moments of spirituality into further physical religious acts in the material world that in turn encourage the continued defiance against that same world. (Of course, a further advantage of halacha is that even if it results in no awareness of defiance of the physical, it makes the physical world a better place. That’s good enough for me.) If having witnessed this routine—this beautiful, absurd, abstract act of defiance—encourages me to get off my chair and pray or remember to make a blessing after I eat, or to be nice to someone I might otherwise have ignored, then I’ll know that it was a religious experience, and not just a nebulous spiritual one.

I recommend reading William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience if you haven’t already. In any case, for the extreme summary, here’s a bit from Wikipedia:

There are four key characteristics of religious experience: ‘passivity’, ‘ineffability’, ‘a noetic quality’ and ‘transiency’. Due to the fact that religious experience is fundamentally ineffable, it is impossible to hold a coherent discussion of it using public language. This means that religious belief cannot be discussed effectively, and so reason does not affect faith. Instead, faith is found through experience of the spiritual, and so understanding of belief is only gained through the practice of it.

I think here that James is actually talking about spiritual experience, rather than religious experience, at least at the beginning of the paragraph. Maybe it takes reason, training, commitment, and rigor to transform spiritual experience into religious experience.

Last week, my fellow Think Tank member, Michael, shared with us “Before the Law,” a parable by Franz Kafka. He said that reading the Kafka piece is (almost?) a spiritual experience for him, leaving him moved but static and therefore sad. I think that if he’s ever inspired by the piece to try to push away barriers and reach for the better world he thinks is behind them, then reading the piece may move from the realm of undefined spiritual experience into the realm of religious experience.

The Kafka piece reminds me of this mashal of the Baal Shem Tov’s:

Note, in case at any point in this post it seems that I am came close to the position of theologians who claim that religion must be true because it is absurd (or at least that the highly improbable stories of religion are unlikely to be invented precisely because they are so highly improbable), I didn’t mean to. I think that human appreciation for absurdity is a noble reach for the Infinite, but that has nothing to do with God’s absurdity, of which I am less enamored.