This article seeks to set out the main areas of human spirituality, seen from the perspective of deepening or going further.  It isn't a "How-to-grow" article - but at the same time, by attempting to give an overall shape and direction to spirituality, it suggests how we can identify what is superficial or peripheral in our own lives and journeys.

I first came across the image of an "N-curve" in the work of Alice Mann, a church consultant with the Alban Institute, describing the management of different sizes of congregation.  Since then I have come to see that has a wider usefulness, in representing a common and very important pattern in spiritual growth.  For example I have used it in the foundational articles on this site, The dimensions of forgiveness and The power to initiate forgiveness.  The main feature of viewing growth in this way is that it makes it easier to see that growing will involve - at some point - a significant change in perspective of the whole issue, a change that may well at the time seem like a reversal, a backwards or sideways step.

Not everyone finds that diagrams and graphs communicate as well as linear words, so both will be used here.  Anyway, think of the capital letter 'N'.  Let growing be symbolised as moving upwards, starting in the bottom left-hand corner of the letter and going up the left-hand vertical.  After a while, for some forms of spiritual growth, the movement upwards is replaced by a "back-to-basics" kind of move, in which it may even seem like we have gone back to a beginner's level, only in a new area.  We move downwards and diagonally, before growing upwards again.

The particular strength of using an N-curve or N-shape is that it emphasises the transition from one kind of growth to another, a transition which may well be or seem to be the hardest part of growing.  For example, when using this model for forgiveness, the biggest transition is from passive assumptions about forgiveness (which will be expressed in terms of healing, coping, moving on, getting on with one's life) to active motivators (where initiating 'undeserved' goods for other people becomes the new dimension).

Today 'spirituality' is no longer seen as the provenance of organised religion, and increasingly religious groups are learning from other religions and from non-religious spiritualities.  Twelve-step programmes for those who can admit addictions, women's spirituality, New Age wisdom movements and Jungian psychological individuation all illustrate the diversity of non-religious spirituality today.   One of the great prophets of this spiritual humanity was the Jewish thinker Martin Buber.   He explicitly wanted to break down the barriers between sacred and profane, and he discovered in the Hasidic traditions in Judaism the command to be ‘humanly holy.’  (See What motivates us to forgive? §6)

Spirituality is often described in two dimensions: awareness of transcendence, and involvement with fellow human beings - a vertical and a horizontal pair of axes.   In this view, spirituality is an awareness of something beyond the world, which may or may not be personal; and also a sense of connection or involvement with other worldly things, particularly other people. 

Nicholas Twigg, a professor of management at Louisiana University, has posted a very sane and helpful article on the Spirit at Work website, in which he and two colleagues try to set out a working definition of spirituality based on this two-dimensional approach.    (See A Redefinition and Reconceptualization of Spirituality at Work.)  They give a good overview of approaches to spirituality in the 20th century, and importantly they are not concerned to belittle religion, referring to it as " … the mother of spiritual giants, an incubator, and a reservoir of the most vital spiritual values." (D N Elkins)

The two-dimensional framework is valuable as far as it goes, but gives too much attention to individual human experiences.  (Extraordinary, even transcendental, experiences can also be one of the initial attractions in using recreational drugs.)   The alternative seems to be a religiosity which is highly intellectual, and against which new experiences understandably seem liberating and refreshing.  As we shall see, both approaches overlook the primary dimension of transformation of values.

World religions have built much of their own approach to spiritual growth by building onto personal experience, adding various aspects of intellectual knowledge, including reason/reflection, primary texts and traditional teachings.  In doing so they have gradually substituted rules about prescribed rituals, doctrines and personal labels in the place of spiritual growth. 

Indeed, one of the constant and most difficult issues for spirituality is that it wants to quite rightly express itself in some religious or quasi-religious activities.   A new form of spirituality may think it has gone deeper than established religions, only to find that it is becoming its own religion.  Even praying can be ritualised in this way.

The rituals are essential expressions of growing spirituality, but for many practitioners they come to be 'sacred objects' which they feel can be owned or defended, and gradually become the chief end of one's spirituality.   Knowledge and judgement can easily become seen as the highest level of spirituality, in two very familiar ways:

1. Religious practitioners can become highly judgmental, and confuse knowing about and labelling people with spiritual insight (which should release and empower other people).  
2. Dogma and doctrine, growing out of profound and often mystical insight into relationships with God, become weapons to attack and ridicule people of different groups and traditions.

It is important to give some attention to this tendency, because it is the level of spiritual growth which most people find hardest to move on from.  In the N-curve diagram, it lies at the top of the first movement of growth, but also therefore before a sideways step where it seems much might be 'lost'.  The possessive, defensive and judgmental reaction comes before a new level of growth.  To enter the perspective which helps us go beyond this, we need to see what kind of goal spirituality has has - namely personal transformation.  Transformation is the inner life of what - seen from the outside - is beyond the day-to-day world of categories, labels, techniques, skills and control. 

The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, a contemporary of Jung and Buber, constantly sought for the spiritual depth he did not find in organised religion.   He commented in his first work, the Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus, that a representation of the visual field does not include an eye in it.   But he then spent much of his life trying to include it – to place himself under scrutiny.    To put this in a way Wittgenstein did not use, mature vision must include the seer in the vision, interrogated by a constant dimension of personal transformation. 

Transformation is the inner life of what - seen from the outside - is out of the reach of our day-to-day world of categories, labels, techniques, skills and control.  What Wittgenstein did say was that, from the point of view of knowledge and judgement, the realm of spirituality and the meaning of life cannot be summed up in words.  He loved Tolstoy, and would say that art may use words to point towards spiritual life, but not in a judgmental way.  The Tractatus ends with the enigmatic and extraordinary sentence, "That whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."  To put this another way, the American composer John Adams uses a metaphysical poem by John Donne, "Negative Love" in his 1981 choral masterpiece Harmonium, which explores the paradox in Christian love, and includes the words:

If that be simply perfectest

which can by no way be exprest

but Negatives, my love is so.

Our overall representation of spirituality must not miss the crucial importance of personal transformation - expressed in different ways and traditions as becoming a new person, being born again, becoming 'god' or an enlightened one, and so on. 

And at the same time, we need to be realistic about our starting places: when trying to get an overall view of spirituality it also seems very easy to overlook or discount what is far and away the most common manifestation of spirituality, namely personal seeking and wondering - actually using the books, videos, tape cassettes, media programmes, conferences and courses which in various ways stimulate us to journey further.

So we can quite legitimately express spirituality in four areas, which I will title: Stimulus, Bonding, Awareness and Transformation.  In this view or model growth is along the path of an 'N-shape', and the deepest, or fullest, aspect of spirituality is personal transformation.  The key transition is from a 'this-worldly' to an 'other-worldly' mode of experience:

4  Personal and historical diversity

Of course, different people will grow - in practice - in fits and starts, and perhaps going on to awareness of God or a higher power quite quickly, before connecting up with like-minded seekers.  A St Paul-like Damascus-road conversion, which may need some years of reflection, preparation and meeting with people to make sense of the wonder of what has happened!  But most spiritual journeys follow something like the Buddha's path through journeying, study, community, and ascetic striving towards a final enlightenment, the Great Awakening under a fig tree (bodhi tree). 

6  Transformed into what?

Longer Articles