Quick Summary of Outlooks in Religion and Spirituality

English: Sadhu offering charas to Shiva, India. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Too many people in modern industrialized societies have such a limited view of what religion is that their approach to thinking about, reacting to, and discussing religion can become counterproductive. Below is a rough sketch of a brief summary of some important distinctions to show what I mean. I use popularized terms and concepts such as "right-brain consciousness" for the sake of balancing clarity and expediency (more on my thoughts on that particular notion can be found here):

Right-Brain consciousness = holism, poetic sense, and creative response.

Left-Brain consciousness = reductionism, literalism, and logical analysis.

Spirituality = emphasis on Right-Brain experience and a focus on the depth of the present moment or on an expereince beyond time, broad and inclusive sense of connection and identification, sublime emotional states, non-judgmental, open to possibilities.

Anti-spirituality = emphasis on Left-Brain experience and a focus on the past or future or the immediate moment in terms of needs and desires, narrow and exclusive sense of connection and identification, reactionary emotional states, judgmental, fearful of differences.

Mystical/Contemplative Religion = embraces spirituality and shares impressions in artistic and poetic forms, seeks balance.

Fundamentalist Religion = anti-spiritual tendencies, attempts to interpret mystical and contemplative expressions through Left-Brain analysis, seeks domination.

Mainstream Religion/Liberal Religion = attempts to reconcile tendencies and history of a sacred traditions including their more mystical and fundamentalist aspects, tend to lean more towards spirituality.

Mainstream/Conservative Religion = attempts to reconcile tendencies and history of a sacred traditions including their more mystical and fundamentalist aspects, tend to lean more towards anti-spirituality.

(One could also go on to map things such as spirituality and anti-spirituality onto to different forms on non-theism as well.)

This brief and over-simplified taxonomy has implications for how people use concepts and terms such as religion and spirituality but also those such as faith, sacred, and the like. It is worth exploring or at least having a good grasp of because if the spiritual impulse in inherently human, it is surely a good thing to guide its expression toward healthier and more beneficial forms.