Jonathan Rowson on Spirituality

RSA Spotlights - taking you straight to the heart of the event, highlighting our favourite moments and key talking points.
It has been said that the problem with the word ‘spiritual’ is that it means too much to some people and too little to others.
While some see spirituality as a form of psychological depth, others see philosophical confusion or an unhelpful theological relic. Some see the best of religion, free of uncomfortable doctrine; others see a lack of discipline and a loss of institutional support, community and tradition. Some see the profit motive of capitalism exploiting our restless search for wellbeing, identity and experiences; others see a deep critique of materialism in all its forms.
After a two year RSA inquiry involving a range of experts and public events, project director Dr Jonathan Rowson now proposes a framework for a post-religious spirituality that makes the spiritual less nebulous, while maintaining its inclusive ambiguity.
This new framework is based on a shift of cultural emphasis in four shared existential touchstones:
Love: from romance to rootedness
Death: from denial to confrontation
Self: from esteem to transcendence
Soul: from substance to perspective
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[@yoganandavalle]

I really like Jonathan, he's take on Jordan Peterson is very accurate

[@soosmate]

Amazing, thank you!

[@sachamm]

Allow me to save you 11 minutes of your life: this lecture on spirituality is like every other given by woo peddlers in modern times. He defines the term vaguely enough that he can say pretty much anything he wants, and tries to apply it to human psychology while simultaneously trying to sneak in as much woo as he thinks he can get away with and still maintain an air of intellectual respectability.

[@oliverdking]

can you send me a link to your talk on spirituality please? :) i'd love to hear it

[@nigelhard1519]

Did you not listen to the first few minutes?

[@shaynek7884]

I bet this video would get a lot more views if it was titled "Jonathan Rowson on Waking Up".

[@ScorchedEarthRevenge]

You don't have to believe anything on insufficient evidence to experience spirituality. It can come from contemplating the vastness of the universe and our place in it. It can come from meditation. Both Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins claim to experience spirituality. No mystical woo or religious nonsense is necessary.

[@JonnysToyRobot]

Are you responding to what this video says, or what you think it says because you didn't watch it? He's talking about a more holistic approach to our personal well being, and how quick some are to dismiss it because they tie it to new age, religion etc. He doesn't explicitly rule out the fetishism of disreputable pseudo academics as a kind of spirituality, so you should be fine!

[@ScorchedEarthRevenge]

Jonny Hunter LMAO. It's always hilarious to see an accusation of pseudo-intellectualism come from someone who lacks the reading comprehension skills to understand 4 simple sentences. Nothing I wrote dismisses anything he said. If anything it expands upon it. Although he didn't rule it out, Rowson did not mention the possibility of spirituality without wacky religious and mystical beliefs. I will criticise two points since you feel hell bent on whining. 1) He conflated reductionism with materialism, which are by no means the same thing. There is nothing about materialism that can stop a person taking a holistic approach. That's what systems theory is for. You don't have to believe in magic to understand that systems have emergent properties and are therefore greater than the sum of their parts. A materialist can believe in the mind as an emergent property of the brain and can even refer to it as a soul if he wants to use kooky language, though I fail to see what is gained by that. 2) He gave far too much credence to the institutions of religion which have shown themselves to be nothing more than corrupt bastions of political power using superstition to keep populations in check. He didn't at all explain how belief in organised institutions is any better than belief in fairies and the dialectical prestidigitation of Deepak Chopra.

[@ShaedeReshka]

2LegHumanist Just to respond to a few things you said: 1) Materialism is a form of reductionism in the broadest sense. It strips away most talk about metaphysics, ontology, teleology, etc. That's what he means about "holistic". His fault, honestly, comes from trying to bridge that is / ought dilemma through using descriptive scientific claims to try to talk about how we should behave. He should have stuck to a more philosophical approach, as science is very poor at informing what he's trying to talk about (which he himself seems to admit on several occasions). That's what made people like you use derogatory words like "woo" or "kooky" to describe his language. 2) A bunch of hyperbole. Yes, traditional religious institutions carry a lot of baggage. Yes, they have a dirty history. No, that doesn't mean that you get to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's a lot to be found in traditional religions / cultures / myths / beliefs / practices, and finding them doesn't mean you have to be as crazy as Deepak Chopra.

[@ScorchedEarthRevenge]

Metadigital Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all phenomena, including mental phenomena and consciousness, are the result of material interactions. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism Reductionism is a philosophical position that holds that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.[1] This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanation, theories, and meanings.[2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism ... In systems science, it is argued that the only way to fully understand why a problem or element occurs and persists is to understand the parts in relation to the whole. Standing in contrast to Descartes's scientific reductionism and philosophical analysis, it proposes to view systems in a holistic manner. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking There is nothing about materialism that rules out holistic thinking. It is therefore, by definition, not reductionist. Are you using a different definition of reductionism or materialism? As for religious institutions, the baby is a piece of glitter floating on a pacific ocean-sized cesspit. I'll happily throw out the baby with the bathwater.

[@Tsentralnaya]

2LegHumanist Aren't governments, and a myriad of other institutions, all corrupt bastions of political power using superstitions to control people? The myth of nationalism is just as mythological and powerful as what you would call the myth of religion.

[@arvinrobles1350]

CHURCH! The RSA #Spirit Spirituality:

[@arvinrobles1350]

@irnva can i get a Follow! Ty

[@ThatSlayn3]

Agreed.

[@SpectrumDT]

It bugs me that spiritual people very often come with generalizations of the type "we all have this experience". This guy says (about the soul): "We all kind of feel it. We know the soul when we see it." No. I don't. I don't recall ever having experienced something that I would consider a "soul". In my opinion, "spirituality" is class of subjective experiences that some people have. Not all people have these experiences.

[@carlosandresrojasrestrepo6140]

Is he the chessplayer?

[@AWT8900]

Yes