The Spiritual and the Psychological
What do you think the relationship between them is?
Some related questions:
Does “spiritual” presume belief in the supernatural?
What kinds of experiences belong in the spiritual category?
If the spiritual is in some sense more fundamental or essential than the psychological (as per a comment on this thread) . . . how so?
Some related questions:
Does “spiritual” presume belief in the supernatural?
What kinds of experiences belong in the spiritual category?
If the spiritual is in some sense more fundamental or essential than the psychological (as per a comment on this thread) . . . how so?
Posted by Paul at 11:33 PM Permalink
13 Comments:
seriously Paul..i cannot go into deeper studies there :)
wishes,
devika
SCOTT HANKINS: As a priest, do you ever encounter this question in one form or another?
TINKERBELL: So the spiritual is more fundamental or essential.
VINCENT: Why the two words?
I was just saying my incapabilities in those areas :)
devika
Spiritual and psychological are words coming from different backgrounds, growing up, as we might say, without being related.
When these words are uttered, the real thing that they point to must be the same thing. The difference is not in the referent of these words but in the perspective or preconceptions of the speakers.
Spiritual cannot presume anything. It is a word, a tool used by a speaker to indicate something to a listener, nothing else.
I think we have had similar discussions many times before Paul, where I accuse you of treating a word as if it corresponds to an actual entity in the world; whereas to me it's an instrument to help a person express something, and may well, like the words chimaera, cockatrice and unicorn, not correspond to anything in the world at all.
VINCENT: “When these words are uttered, the real thing that they point to must be the same thing.”
Why must this be so and what’s the same real thing you see them as pointing to?
Yeah, every day i do.
Our (i use the WORD advisedly) answers go near this -
"what is, is."
The "word", "supernatural", ugh. Angry, every time, they are.
In the mean time, "i don't know."
Our species, geographically and historically, exhibits such a variety of characteristics (as evidenced by the accounts of human experience) that it’s easy to think that people are more different than they really are.
Some believe in spirit and give no credit to psychology; others explain things in terms of psychology and have no time for the spiritual; others again attempt to reconcile the two, as you are currently doing in this forum.
Are we to assume that there are differences in their brains, minds or souls, leading them to such contrary views? Surely not. People are the same underneath the beliefs fostered by language and culture.
There is a single spectrum of experience. What one person calls a spiritual experience, another will call a psychological phenomenon. I assume this is the basis of your question: that is, “what’s the dividing line between the categories?”
You may find this an interesting question, and so it is, to sociologists and ministers of religion.
But imagine a group of people from different cultures discussing the colour of something. In their different languages, the colour-words are of course different; but they have different categories too. A certain tribe may have one word which covers both “yellow” and “brown”, but two distinct words that we’d translate as “blue”. These differences may interest linguists. But no one doubts that they have the same eyes and see the same colours.
That’s where I stand on this.
To me, spiritual does mean supernatural.
I guess I'd say, if you look at a sunset and feel closer to God, this would be a psychological experience, and perhaps also a spiritual one. But if you have an experience that is not a reaction, is not originating within yourself, I'd call that spiritual/supernatural, not psychological.
It's all pretty arbitrary, though :)
This doesn’t mean that making distinctions can be meaningful or of interest only to people who specialize in specific subject areas like anatomy, botany, psychology etc.
Distinctions between things that are very similar can be matters of linguistic and cultural convention. This doesn’t mean that all or most distinctions that humans make are a matter of cultural or linguistic convention.
CRYSTAL: That’s my guess too – that behind the word spiritual, there’s usually at least an implicit belief in a supernatural force or entity.
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