ABSTRACT
A growing body of scientific literature suggests strong evidence of a spiritual reality at play in people’s lives, affecting our behaviours in various conscious and subconscious ways. This chapter therefore defends that we should recognise spirituality as a legitimate category of human needs and desires and expand the taxonomy of motivations in our map to add spiritual motivations. These belong to the aspects of human reality that are intangible and immaterial, related to the mysteries of human life and death. The extrinsic spiritual motivation is defined as the willingness to receive spiritual goods, such as life itself, practical wisdom, lasting happiness, peace and joy of spirit, and the intrinsic spiritual motivation is the desire to attain spiritual goodness, blessedness or holiness. The transcendent spiritual motivation includes the willingness to give spiritual good to others, bringing them peace and joy. There are religious and non-religious spiritual motivations.
