What Do We Mean by “Spiritual”?
It’s a loaded word.
Traditional religion.
The New Age movement.
Meditation.
Transpersonal psychology.
Psychedelics.
Near-death experiences.
Mystical encounters.
Kundalini awakenings.
Animism.
The Bible Belt.
Shamans.
Prophets.
Few of these communities agree on what spiritual actually means.
Then there are the materialists and atheists — and even modern individualists and humanists — who reject the category altogether. Skeptics. And we are right to be skeptical. There is something in all of us that is vulnerable to ideology dressed up as spirituality.
So let’s be careful as we navigate this treacherous ground.
Spirit = Breath?
A striking pattern emerges when we look at the original languages from which much of our spiritual language comes.
Again and again, we find the same cluster of meanings:
breath, wind, vitality, aliveness
“The Spirit is like the wind. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.”
— Jesus (John 3:8)
- Latin — spiritus
Breath, wind, life-force. To be “in spirit” was not to escape the body, but to be animated — alive, moved, inspired. - Greek (New Testament) — pneuma
Breath, wind, air. When Jesus speaks of spirit, he compares it to the wind: unseen, moving, known by its effects rather than grasped conceptually. Pneuma is not abstract belief — it is living motion. - Hebrew — ruach
Breath, wind, spirit. In Genesis, ruach moves over the waters before creation takes form. Spirit here is not moral purity or doctrine, but creative stirring — the movement that brings life into being. - Sanskrit — prāṇa
Life-breath or vital energy. Yogic traditions do not treat spirit as separate from physiology. It moves through breath, nerves, and sensation. Prāṇa is trained, not believed in. - Arabic — rūḥ
Often translated as spirit or soul, but rooted in breath and divine animation — what enlivens the human being, not what floats above them. - Chinese — qì (氣)
Breath, vapor, vital force. Qì animates body, emotion, and mind alike. Spiritual cultivation here is regulation and flow, not transcendence.
When cultures separated by geography, language, and history all point to the same thing, it’s worth paying attention.
It suggests something simple — and quietly radical:
Spirit may be breath-like.
Always moving.
Always animating.
Rarely noticed.
It passes through the body unseen, sustaining life without instruction. We can learn to feel it. And when we do, it often brings energy, clarity, and release.
Which raises a question:
Do you really need anyone to tell you what breath is?
Do you need doctrine to explain it?
Or books to mediate it?
You can feel breath directly.
You can sense it moving, sustaining, regulating — without interpretation.
So why is spirituality so abstract, contested, and divisive —
when breath is simply what it is?
If breath is a reliable metaphor — echoed across languages and traditions — then one thing becomes clear:
spirituality is available to everyone, everywhere.
Just as you don’t need to belong to a special club to breathe, spirituality (whatever that word ultimately points to) appears to be intrinsic to being human.
It also suggests something awkward:
If you are alive, you already have spirit.
So what does it even mean to “be spiritual”?
As if it were possible not to be.
As if some people are spiritual while others somehow aren’t.
And why do certain books, movements, lineages, religions, or individuals feel more spiritual than others?
What are we actually pointing to when something carries that quality?
Let’s roll the question back even further.
What does spirit feel like?
Perhaps that question doesn’t belong to doctrine, debate, or definition at all.
Perhaps it can only be answered directly —
quietly,
personally,
in your own body,
in your own experience.
Where Western Thought Hit the Wall
Chances are you’ve been shaped by what we loosely call Western thought — modernity, rationalism, scientific realism. Even if this sounds dry, it matters. It’s the water most of us are swimming in.
Western philosophy eventually articulated something that many spiritual traditions had long intuited:
There is a difference between what we experience
and whatever reality might be in itself.
When philosophy finally named this distinction, the consequences were both catastrophic and strangely illuminating.
Immanuel Kant arrived at this insight as the Western world was rapidly shifting from faith toward reason, from revelation toward science. He was personally religious, but he could see that traditional metaphysics could not survive the intellectual rigor that was coming.
Rather than defending belief, Kant did something more radical:
He placed strict limits on what reason is allowed to claim.
He distinguished between:
- Phenomena — the world as it appears to us, shaped by senses, language, and cognition
- Noumena — the “thing-in-itself,” whatever reality may be beyond our perception
Kant’s point was not that the noumenal does not exist.
It was that we cannot know it in the way we know objects, facts, or mechanisms.
“We can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them.”
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
This single move shattered centuries of confident metaphysical claims.
And yet — paradoxically — it preserved mystery.
What Kant removed was false certainty.
What he left intact was depth.
Another Path
If rationally working out reality — logically trying to determine what life is, what God is or isn’t — doesn’t bring us any closer to spirituality, then what does?
Recall the breath.
Always present.
Intrinsically part of life.
Yet strangely unnoticed — until you attend to it.
Which brings us to phenomenology: the study of experience as it appears.
At first glance, this sounds like another intellectual detour. Aren’t we just analysing life instead of living it?
But that wasn’t Edmund Husserl’s aim at all.
Phenomenology was not about explaining experience.
It was about getting out of its way.
It insists on slowing down.
On suspending assumptions.
On allowing experience to show itself before interpretation rushes in.
In that sense, phenomenology is less a theory than a discipline — a discipline of restraint.
This is why it resembles contemplative practices, especially Buddhist mindfulness. Both invite us to notice sensation, thought, emotion, and perception as they arise — without immediately naming them, judging them, or needing to make sense of them.
The instruction is simple:
Listen — without talking over what is happening.
Phenomenology doesn’t try to understand experience.
It tries to stop misunderstanding it.
And that difference changes everything.
“Don’t think, but look!”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Perhaps simply noticing experience itself is already a way of noticing spirit.
Psychedelics — Turbocharged Phenomenology
Psychedelics and spirituality share a great deal of ground. This overlap is exactly what draws some people toward them — and turns others away.
Research with end-of-life patients has been especially revealing. Across studies, psychedelic experiences have reliably reduced anxiety around death, often accompanied by a felt sense of something larger than the individual — and a deep acceptance that death itself might be okay.
So what happened to these people?
Psychedelics disrupt ordinary brain organisation. In particular, they reduce activity in the default mode network — a system many researchers associate with the ego: coherent self-narrative, stable worldview, ideals, and the sense of how things are supposed to make sense.
And how things are supposed to make sense — isn’t that the core function of reason?
When psychedelic experiences are held well, they tend to reduce habitual rationalisation — the attempt to conceptually grasp reality — and instead amplify direct engagement with phenomena: sensation, emotion, memory, image, and meaning, arising without immediate explanation.
In this way, psychedelics often turn down the thinking mind and open another mode of knowing.
If breath is a useful metaphor for spirit, psychedelics turn down the dial on thinking about breathing and turn up the dial on experiencing breathing — directly, viscerally, without commentary.
“The psilocybin occasioned mystical experience is the single most important factor in determining long-term positive outcomes.”
— Roland Griffiths, Johns Hopkins
It is no surprise, then, that a substantial body of research shows psychedelics can reliably occasion what psychologists call mystical experiences.
And that term matters more than it might first appear.
Mystical Experience
Mystical experience has been studied by psychology and neuroscience, and according to anthropologists, it is as old as humanity itself.
Aldous Huxley was among the clearest modern thinkers to take this seriously. Through his own experiences — famously described in The Doors of Perception — and his synthesis in The Perennial Philosophy, Huxley examined world religions, indigenous traditions, psychology, and philosophy.
What he found was not chaos, but convergence.
“The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality which underlies the manifold world of things and lives and minds.”
— Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy
Across cultures and centuries, the same core experiences appeared again and again.
His conclusion was provocative but restrained:
Mystical experience is not a cultural anomaly.
It is a foundation of human meaning-making.
To understand this, we must resist premature interpretation.
Rather than asking what mystical experience means, we should first ask:
What does it feel like?
What Is a Mystical Experience? (Phenomenologically)
One of the most widely used tools in contemporary research is the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ). Importantly, it does not measure belief.
It measures experience.
Across cultures and contexts, mystical experiences reliably include:
- Unity — a felt sense of oneness, where the boundary between self and world softens
- Noetic quality — a sense of knowing, felt as more real than ordinary cognition
- Transcendence of time and space — time and location lose their usual structure
- Ineffability — difficulty expressing the experience in language
- Sacredness — a sense of reverence or deep significance
- Positive mood — peace, love, acceptance, often accompanied by reduced fear of death
- Ego-dissolution — the quieting or disappearance of the narrative self
These features appear remarkably independent of worldview, religion, culture, age, or prior belief.
Mystical experience, in this light, looks less like ideology and more like a human capacity.
Every one of these characteristics can be understood as what happens when phenomenology is intensified — when attention and awareness move beyond their usual thresholds.
Mysticism, from this angle, is not belief.
It is experience stripped of commentary.
The Spiritual as Raw Experience
At the risk of sounding dogmatic, I’ll try to bring these threads together.
Just as breath is intrinsic to human life, so too may be spirit — not something added on, but something already present.
What seems to have changed is not reality, but our relationship to it.
Somewhere along the way, we lost the ability to simply sit with experience and began to think about it instead. Rationality became immensely powerful — and then quietly became our master.
We forgot how to experience life directly.
We learned instead how to explain it.
If Kant was right, the noumenal cannot be grasped conceptually. Reality-in-itself cannot be captured by doctrine or theory. Philosophy can orient us and dissolve false certainty — but it cannot deliver us to what is most real.
At that point, there is only one way forward:
back into experience.
Phenomenology, in this sense, is not another abstraction. It is a return. A discipline of noticing life before interpretation rushes in.
And here the threads converge.
If psychedelics reliably amplify phenomenology —
if they reduce habitual rationalisation —
if they often culminate in mystical experience —
and if mystical experience is cross-cultural, belief-independent, historically foundational, and central to spiritual traditions worldwide —
then a simple conclusion emerges:
Spirituality is not belief.
It is not doctrine.
It is not metaphysics.
Spirituality is direct awareness of reality as it is encountered through experience.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.”
— William Blake
Like breath, spirit can remain unconscious or become conscious.
Nothing new is added.
Only awareness shifts.
And perhaps that is the heart of spirituality:
not escaping life,
not explaining it,
but finally meeting it.
