Beyond East and West

Mervyn

You say in The Formation of Critical Realism that religion is not the same thing as spirituality and that even at the time of your spiritual turn you ‘did not hold any deep or specific religious convictions’, ² yet as we know you felt it necessary to go via religion to develop an account of a spirituality that could appeal to unbelievers as well as believers. What would you say is the difference between religion and spirituality?

Roy

I am going to begin by saying a bit about transcendence, because spirituality is essentially concerned with transcendence whereas religion is concerned with the transcendent. The two are connected at the limit in the notion of the absolute, but they are distinct in important ways. Transcendence is concerned with overcoming dualism; sometimes it sublates it, sometimes it just overcomes it. Dualism and duality here stand for the whole spectrum of terms of oppositionality I discuss in an appendix to Plato Etc., including contradiction, antinomy, etc.; ³ transcendence is concerned with overcoming them. In the philosophy of metaReality (PMR) I talk about four forms of transcendence that overcome the dualities that are characteristic of the world of duality: transcendental agency, transcendental identification in consciousness, transcendental holism and the transcendental self or ground-state.