Pretty good IMO.

are you taking an insulting tone with me for making the effort to respond to your thread?

No, your "terms" contained the assumption that spirituality must be experienced and that it was impossible to provide evidence for its existence.

Those two assumptions will (if you stop to think about it), render further commentary from you regarding spirituality pointless.

There is no insult here, merely logic.

yeah you nailed it. i've stated as much myself in this forum. kinda ironic that I bother posting I guess.

I just want to give someone like you an insight into what makes a rational, intelligent, educated born-and-raised secular atheist a "spiritual" person: and it is the spiritual experience, which will knock you for six and add an extra dimension to your worldview paradigm if you have experienced it, but remain a load of "woo-woo" to you if you have not.

I never chose to believe in any of this sh*t, and I certainly never bought it from anyone. I experienced something and have found no explanation for it outside of the spiritual traditions.

This is very true

Do you think such spirituality can be an illusion? Or maybe rather, do you think it is possible that it could be an illusion?

I'd be interested to know what experience you had and why it comes under "spiritual" for you.

I'm not sure what exactly would be classified as being spiritual or why. Did it involve "feeling" a particular sensation? If so why call that spiritual? Seems pretty emotional to me. Of course, that emotion could be attributed to a "spiritual" cause. I'm not sure why you'd do this though, considering how volatile our emotions our and how easily they can be manipulated.

Hint: There in no way has to be an external cause for any emotion you feel.

If it was some kind of experience where you saw or heard things, why discount hallucinations?

Maybe this has already been said, I don't know as I have read only a few replies.

To be spiritual means that your mind is not in the way of your actions. You do or say without calculating. You simply are just being. It comes within you, your actions are not influenced with any bias towards this or that.

Me personally? No. But of course I am biased, I will readily admit that.

I do believe however the reality behind the word "spirituality" is very subtle and complex and not at all as most people might imagine.

I am prepared to admit that, for example, the bigger metaphysical aspects of spirituality such as the existence of some sort of afterlife is speculative, and possibly false. I believe in the existence of an afterlife, but I accept that the concept could be an illusion.

Having experienced an NDE I do believe that our conscious flow of perception continues after our physical body has shut down, and this is a concept validated the world over by all or most serious spiritual traditions. I tend not to believe anything I have not directly experienced in some way or other, but to hold an open mind wrt those things.

You could of course tell me all you want that NDEs are purely the result of physical and physiological processes and are illusory by-products of our brain's response to the onset of physical death, but if you have not experienced one yourself, it is incredibly hard for me to try to relate to you the meaning contained in one, the affect it has on you as a person, the transformative energy it leaves you with after that completely changes your perspective and aspects of your character etc.

I do not discount the brain's role in these type of experiences. That a chemical process can be tracked precisely in correlation with a spiritual experience in no way lessens the spiritual validity of that experience, imo, the brain is obviously an integral part of the process, but is more of a biological machine that is just as much a part of the spiritual process. Pointing to brain activity as a spiritual experience is occuring only tells me the brain is playing a part in facilitating that experience, it does not reduce the entire experience to a series of synaptical firings that ultimately mean nothing, as (I would guess) you would believe (or not?).

I think a lot of deep spiritual truth has been bastardised by mainstream religion in a quest to water everything down for the masses and fit it into a system that will steer power in the direction of the church fathers, mosque fathers, etc. I am of the mind that it takes a lot of getting to grips with, a lot of personal searching, a lot of reading around obscure authors and books, and an element of inspiration/revelation to arrive at the real meat; the truth that lays in plain sight hidden behind a load of bullsh*t dogma that no longer actually means anything.

WRT the more "pedestrian" aspects of spirituality however, I am not necessarily prepared to accept the possibility of them being an illusion, as they are verifiable by personal experience, just as the existence of an afterlife will be, should it exist, only once we die; so are the more everyday aspects of spirituality here in our everyday waking life.

If you die and wake up in another place and time, are you experiencing an afterlife, or an illusion of one?

What about our waking lives? Walking to the shops, taking a piss, etc? Can this be argued to all be an illusion created by our brains? To an extent? Or are our brains the facilitators of the experience we call reality?

I had more to say but I kinda ran out of time and enthusiasm. Post would have gone on forever.

Well, atleast you don't refuse the possibility of spirituality being an illusion, even if you do not believe it to be so. That seems honest.

However, there was another part of your post that intrigued me...your mentioning of an afterlife seems to indicate (it does not say so directly, but it seems somewhat implied) a link between an afterlife and spirituality. What is this link and why is it there?

Not to be an ass, but I actually only accepted that some of the more lofty, untenable aspects of spirituality such as for example an afterlife could be "not true" or "an illusion" etc. As far as I am concerned the more "pedestrian" aspects of spirituality can be experienced undeniably and are not up for debate in my mind at least. Apologies for the annoying quotes, but they are there to represent less than adequate words which I can't really improve upon.

WRT the issue of a link between spirituality and some form of afterlife, which is not to be narrowed down to any complex view but only to mean the survival of some form of personality and awareness after bodily death, I would say the link there is simply that current secular and scientific models of reality do not account for this, but the views of most or all of the spiritual traditions do, and offer various explanations for it.

I think you're spiritual if you live under the assumption that the world is more that just material.

Enumerate everything that you can enumerate. When you are done, anything remaining is the spiritual. If you have nothing left, there is nothing spiritual for you.