ABSTRACT
There are several ‘received’ views about spirituality. One of them is that spirituality is primarily an epistemic notion — that it is concerned with knowledge of oneself, or, quite simply, knowledge of the self, and that achieving such knowledge requires efforts of very special kinds. Another received view of spirituality is that it has to do with knowledge and techniques of dealing with the presence of ‘spirits’ in the material world — ‘spirits’ which intervene in our day to day life with erratic regularity and unpredictability. ‘Phenomena’ such as these and others, e.g., telepathy, a person’s capacity to tell accurately, or even relatively accurately, what is happening somewhere at a great distance from where she is located used to be the subject of both conceptual and empirical enquiry of the discipline named ‘Extra-sensory Perception’ (ESP), fairly popular in the West in the early part of the 20th century. Techniques were also developed to ‘communicate’ with ‘spirits’ of dead persons, which, although devoid of physical bodies, were thought to be somehow entrapped in the physical world — a subject which also featured in fictional writings of various kinds. In this paper I shall not be concerned with this second view of spirituality, although perhaps it still has an interesting presence in some of our religious thoughts and practices.
