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Paul’s post made me think about my own past, and what I now think about the relation between the intellectual and the spiritual.

My family is Hindu and I grew up reading the Bhagavad Gita and talking about it with my parents. From high school to college, the structure and meaning of my life (as I then thought of it) was given by the aims of seeking realization, and the people I most looked up to were Hindu philosophers, monks and mystics who devoted their life to peace, human flourishing and ultimate knowledge.

As I now look back on it, I realize that college was a bit of a shock. The Hindu categories in which I had conceived of my life were nowhere to be found. My professors didn’t disagree with those categories; rather, they just didn’t engage with them, didn’t know about them and felt that they were not appropriate for the intellectual conversations taking place in the philosophy department. I remember thinking, “Not appropriate? What could be more appropriate!” But I didn’t know how to make that point.

I don’t think the professors were personally at fault. Their lack of interest in my background assumptions was actually fueled by a broader cultural misunderstanding shared by both my teachers and my family. Different as they were, my family and my teachers seemed to agree on one thing: spirituality and intellectual inquiry were separate domains, which mainly just got in each other’s way. My family initially resisted my being a philosophy major, partly due to concerns regarding jobs, but mainly due to the thought that academic philosophy would be an obstacle to personal, spiritual growth. My teachers likewise resisted my bringing spiritual concerns into the classroom, thinking that mind, language, ethics and so on were best understood freed of the dogma of spiritual and religious traditions.

My educational experience thus has been to some extent schizophrenic; I belonged to two worlds which insisted on defining themselves in opposition to each other. I experienced this rift not as calling for my just choosing one side, but as a rift within myself. I felt that to let go of either the spiritual or the intellectual life was to lose myself, but I could not make sense of how this could be given that it seemed as if both could not co-exist.

Now the unconscious view of thinking seems to me to help make sense of how both can co-exist. When a family member thinks “western philosophy is meaningless playing with words which gets in the way of spirituality”, they have a conscious belief which they feel certain is not in need of further reflection. It is a belief which has become petrified; a belief which they treat as bedrock and on which they aim to build their spiritual life. Similarly, when an academic philosopher thinks, “spirituality is a lower form of inquiry which is to be supplanted by reason”, they too have a petrified, conscious belief upon which they aim to build their rational edifice.

But neither kind of conscious belief is actually essential to spirituality or rationality. In fact, both kinds of beliefs are inimical to spirituality and rationality. For spirituality, if it is defined by anything, is defined not by particular beliefs which are to be held fast to, but by an openness to the divine spirit in the world which is beyond even our most passionate beliefs. Similarly, reason and scientific inquiry, as exemplified even by the pagan Greeks or the atheist Enlightenment thinkers, is not defined by particular beliefs but by the activity of self-critical reflection and so being forever open to growth.

It now seems to me that spirituality and the intellectual life—as with all wonderful features of human life including art, family, relationships, and so on—are defined by the space they create for each individual for greater and greater growth. This is the space that makes possible being open to God, Reason, Truth, the Tao, the unconscious, or whatever it is one wants to calls it. What matters most is not what one calls it, or how one makes it into that space, but that one is in that space of openness, which makes us be kind and open to every aspect of ourselves, other people and the world.

Could it be that truly pursuing the spiritual or the intellectual path means getting beyond dichotomies such as the spiritual and the intellectual? Could it be that to the extent that we think of a view or a person that they are deeply confused, then to that extent we are caught within a web of impulses and beliefs from which we do not have spiritual or intellectual distance? Could it be that “the spiritual” and “the intellectual” are just the names of very sophisticated tribes fighting with each other, and that the only way to stop fighting is to not identify exclusively with either?

I am thankful that in the course of my education I did not side exclusively with either my family or my teachers (and I am thankful that neither my family nor my teachers forced me to make such a decision). I felt that if I made a choice between spirituality and the intellectual life, then I would lose myself. And now I can see why. For to make a choice like that would have been to take one of my conscious beliefs (either about spirituality or about academia) and make it the petrified, bedrock of my life; and though I would have done it in order to be more free to pursue my true path, I would have defined my path in opposition to that of others, I would have chosen my path by implicitly judging others on a different path, and with that I would have thwarted my own growth into peace and openness.