I Had to Leave Spirituality to Understand It
Intro
When I was an active spiritual practitioner, I spent an enormous amount of time looking outside spirituality for answers to spiritual questions.
The deeper my questions became, the more I found myself relying on fields like philosophy and cognitive psychology rather than spirituality itself.
And after I left, I started realizing that many of the problems I encountered in my spirituality weren’t unique to it. Their terms are too elastic, they’re not falsifiable, and they rely on myths about freedom rather than sober realities.
All of which has led me to wonder:
Is spirituality actually equipped to handle spiritual problems?
What spirituality promised
Regardless of their differences, most spiritual systems are trying to address the same recurring human problems.
People get trapped in destructive patterns. They lose direction. They become disconnected from themselves, from other people, from meaning.
Some people become consumed by status, possessions, resentment, or fear.
Others become paralyzed by self-reflection and lose the ability to act.
Sometimes suffering transforms people into something wiser and deeper.
Others become worse.
Spirituality promises that change does not have to be meaningless — that human beings can transform suffering into growth, reconnect with what matters, and become more fully alive.
But I’ve become increasingly skeptical that spirituality is able to make good on these promises on its own.
What I increasingly found
It’s not that spirituality completely fails to address these problems. The problem is that its strengths and weaknesses are often inseparable. The way it solves problems often creates new ones. And because spirituality often lacks clear mechanisms for self-correction, people can mistake these failures for growth.
For example, a lot of spirituality treats suffering through the lens of what can be solved through perspective, insight, or consciousness. That is a genuinely powerful way to approach suffering. But there’s a fine line between transcending suffering through thinking and denying it exists or matters. A lot of spiritualities do not contain resources to differentiate between the two.
Spirituality can genuinely decrease our sense of alienation and increase our sense of belonging. But it often does this by wrapping belonging in mythological or metaphysical language like “the universe” and “the self” that becomes difficult to question clearly.
These systems often emphasize values and intentions, but they’re not always good at cultivating the kind of judgment required to navigate real situations involving power, dependency, and conflict. In fact, some spiritualities deny the reality of power in their groups all together — which is incredibly dangerous.
Esoteric spirituality is interesting, because its symbolism allows us to form an embodied relationship with truth. Something science and philosophy aren’t great at. But it’s easy to mistake symbolic fluency for insight — to feel as though you are growing simply because you’re becoming more skilled at translating symbols into other symbols.
I’m not saying all spiritualities suffer all of the same problems or that none of them offer anything positive. But I’ve seen enough failures to wonder whether spirituality is really equipped to address any of these problems, especially under modern conditions where the problems are being exacerbated.
Why cognitive science/philosophy/etc. felt more serious
Much of the time I was a practitioner, I was studying cognitive psychology and philosophy. Those fields seemed to present a clearer definition of the problems and what solutions might look like.
They also seemed more capable of revising themselves when reality contradicted them. Spiritual systems often had to preserve mythic assumptions no matter what happened. Cognitive science and philosophy at least aspired to revise their frameworks when reality pushed back.
They treated human beings less like disembodied souls and more like vulnerable creatures shaped by biology, incentives, and institutions.
Ancient philosophy in particular often had a tragic understanding of human goodness. It treated character as fragile. It understood that intelligent, sincere people could still be corrupted by fear, status, dependency, and bad environments.
Especially after my experiences in a high-control group, that kind of assessment felt sane to me, even if it was at times grim.
The unresolved tension
On the other hand, I always felt an attraction to spirituality. Science could explain mechanisms clearly. But it didn’t replace what I experienced through ritual, participation, belonging, or beauty.
Science satisfies our curiosity. It can even produce feelings of wonder. But neither science nor philosophy has made me experience awe. That sense of being rocked back upon your heels. Impinged upon.
Science and philosophy have changed my beliefs. They’ve changed how I think.
But religious experiences changed what felt real to me. They changed my orientation toward existence itself.
And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe we shouldn’t give power to experiences to affect us that deeply. But I still wonder if there’s a place for that. If that can be achieved safely.
Open question
Maybe spirituality will always struggle with the temptation to transform every experience — even harmful ones — into proof of its own depth. Maybe its language will always remain dangerously elastic — capable of transforming every contradiction, failure, or harm into something spiritually meaningful.
I’ve started developing some tentative ideas about what a healthier approach to spirituality might require — ideas shaped largely by the failures I’ve seen.
But for now I’ll just leave you with the question:
Spiritual questions are never going to go away.
We will always have the hunger for wonder and even awe.
Is spirituality really equipped to handle these questions? Or do we need entirely different ways of approaching them?