Vagueness In Spirituality, Anyone else notice this Options

I have been noticing a common practice with anything "spiritual", be it one of the many yogas or occult groups or religions. They are all vague about what joining or practicing will do/accomplish/benefit. "Make you life better" sound nice but it is not much to go on. Perhaps I am spoiled, having come from academia where everything is laid out with what is taught, why and what you can get out of the course.

Recently while talking to several priests, Taoist and Buddhist, about empowerment, classes and what I can expect, I was met with almost dismissive vagueness and tired cliches. After talking with them I am just as uninformed as when I started - having no better idea of why such and such a thing is done or what it enables. Looking back, I find a lot of my current practice where not explained, and lacking that it took much longer to gain anything from them, only after long practice did I have enough knowledge to judge their worth. Indeed many that look promising turned out to be useless to me after months of work.

Vagueness in spirituality is necessary to some existent, but with a little application the people who run these orders, and organizations could explain things clearly.

This post has been edited by fatherjhon: Apr 5 2012, 10:06 PM

I don't think spirituality is suffering from vagueness any more or less than other fields of study and practice are. Look at how vague Psychology or Philosophy is. Psych struggles to be scientific by clinging to statistics and philosophy doesn't try to be scientific but nearly everything about it breaks down to pointless semantics. Essentially they share the same "problem" that spiritualism does; they don't naturally have empirically definable variables. This has been the whole argument against spiritualism for the last 200 years. There just isn't a whole lot of evidence for it.

But more to the point of what you mentioned, the vagueness in spirituality, is interesting. I think that magic is a really, really complicated structure that exists in nature but isn't understood by most people. I think people try to take the sort of structure science has and then use that for a guideline for how magic works, but I think that's a problem. Different fields of study and practice have different ways of working. I just can't practically use my knowledge of computers to intuit the structure of, say, government, aesthetics or anything else. I think this is a common error in the way people tend to think about spirituality. I do agree though, that interdisciplinary knowledge is necessarily. Leonard Berstein said that nothing can truly be known in and of itself, in regards to a field of study (in his example, music and linguistics). But I think that the the development of neural nets is basically the underlining issue when adopting this interdisciplinary perspective, not the development of the ability to simply overlay different structures onto each other.

I don't believe in "faking it until you make it"... most of the time. C.S. Lewis talked about how some "advanced" Christians prayed without words and how inexperienced Christians would see this, be impressed, and then do the same thing but fail because they weren't able to understand the real connection that was going on and how it worked, they only understood the superficial aspects, mostly in terms of how it looked. I have read about psychologists (I don't know who off the top of my head) that believe that the process of acting out a series of actions will lead to the feeling that those actions would have brought about had they been natural. Noel Coward (actor for theatre) talked about how that happened and can happen to actors. He makes the point that when you start to feel what you're acting you stop acting... and obviously start being. I agree with this but have a problem with it. I don't think that, in magic or spirituality, the ends justify the means. I believe that experiences are better discovered without too much imitation. I suppose this is just preference though.

To avoid vagueness in spirituality I try to have current goals with defined variables. When I define the variables of my goal and neatly order them by taking into consideration my experience, desires, and capability, I end up with the parameters of my practice of magic. I think that structured context and clearly defined variables is the result of successfully making use of interdisciplinary knowledge, and that it is this system that helps people avoid the issue of superficial ambiguity in any field of study or practice.

I think Baldwin describes the issue and solution pretty well from 4.37 to 5.25 (the video starts at 4.37 if you click the link below)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_NbdeE2zU#t=04m37s

This post has been edited by ☞Tomber☜: Apr 7 2012, 03:00 PM

I don't think spirituality is suffering from vagueness any more or less than other fields of study and practice are. Look at how vague Psychology or Philosophy is. ... Essentially they share the same "problem" that spiritualism does; they don't naturally have empirically definable variables. This has been the whole argument against spiritualism for the last 200 years. There just isn't a whole lot of evidence for it... I think that magic is a really, really complicated structure that exists in nature but isn't understood by most people.

That's valid. Remember though that in Psych you get a rubric and and are told you will be able to diagnose illness and treat it at the end of the degree program. You know you are taking a course in existential philosophy because they tell you the class deals with the nature of existence. Spiritual teachers seldom do. I have even seen large retreat planers take people to Nepal with the promise of "meditating in a mystic country" and nothing else. The difficult nature spirituality should not excuse teachers from laying out clearly what they play to teach, how, and why. Aside from whether or not they understand what they teach themselves, "why" something is taught should be simple enough for anyone to communicate. It is the only way to know if you can learn from them, and on a more basic level, if you can trust their teachings.

To avoid vagueness in spirituality I try to have current goals with defined variables. When I define the variables of my goal and neatly order them by taking into consideration my experience, desires, and capability, I end up with the parameters of my practice of magic.

A vary practical way to approach it. I dare say you would do better than many teachers I have talked to lately. Sadly only one has felt the need to take a methodical approach to teaching.