Spirituality as a subject

Spirituality as a subject is part of our lives

Considering spirituality as a subject means considering the possibility that it thinks of us, rather than just us thinking of it. This way of conceiving it allows us to better realize the limits of our freedom: we are limited because in many respects we are the ones being thought about, rather than the thinkers. One could even say that spirituality as a subject also thinks our thoughts, or that it created the world, is the origin of the world, its essence. This would allow us to better explain the asymmetries of the universe, with the advantage of not having to deal with a God who claims to be all-powerful and good without removing evil, but simply with a being, an object, that is the constitution of being. In this sense, the idea of us as objects of someone’s dream or characters in a novel that someone is writing doesn’t seem so far from the truth, with the difference that this someone doesn’t have projects or intentions in mind, but is just an object acting on its own, inanimate. Amidst all this, amidst all this evil, we try to realize our micro-subjectivity, micro-spirituality, that is, human spirituality, as opposed to universal spirituality. In this sense, I might sometimes appear ambiguous when talking about spirituality: what I have in mind may be human spirituality, thus what in our perception should be good, or in other cases instead universal spirituality and thus evil: the context of the discourse will have to remedy these inaccuracies.

This way of conceiving spirituality involves not only or not so much the idea we have of it, but above all our practice, for example, meditation, silence, where one will try to cultivate, to a large extent, listening, receptive consciousness, or at least interaction of our subjectivity with an impersonal macro-subjectivity.

All of this perspective should be considered not as a proposal for a metaphysics, but just as a hermeneutics that sometimes can be useful as an instrument of spiritual life.