Direct your eye right inward, and you’ll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography
-Henry David Thoreau
I’ve been thinking about methods to better inquire into spiritual matters, when I saw a book that focused on spiritual research paradigm, which covered ontology, epistemology, methodology, axiology, and teleology by focusing on interdependence, integralism, wisdom, divinity, social justice, and systematic inquiry.
Combining quantitative and qualitative analysis of “deep meaning” and the structure of human experience when it comes to interrelated interactions and their material components, but the question for how to explore fundamental questions regarding spiritual experience and growth, via metaphors and creative forms of expression expand the criteria for research data and validity.
While we tend to limit research to physical, perceptible realms that cannot reveal nonphysical aspects like expanding consciousness, the phenomenologically observed subjective experience is itself derived from an ecological model of experience that integrates subjective and intersubjective metaphysics, so that a “spiritual research paradigm” can provide a holistic model and set of approaches to conduct humanities research while interpreting reality via mixed methods.
“In this way, they can begin to gain insight into what kind of self-awareness, if any, such practices have the potential to inspire, what learning self-control can accomplish, or what forms of inner strength and abilities one might be able to access. Researchers willing and able to use themselves as test subjects for such experiments and experiences have the potential for far greater understanding of what they are studying and the mental and emotional states that result than do those who merely observe, ask questions, and collect data.” (69)
Spiritual experience, we can say, is phenomenologically rooted in human subjectivity:
- Sensorially and perceptually experienced
- Peak experience and heightened performance
- Wholeness integration, cosmic harmony
- Imbued with heart-qualities like compassion, love, kindness, joy, etc
- Registers as a sense of sacredness and ecstasy.
- Extraordinary clarity and insight
- Charged with creativity
On the other hand, a loss of connection might be known as alienation or rupture, with lifelong practical implications. Egoic structures may be put in the service of living as well as possible within the context of the circumstances that exist. Neglecting interiority then may not address alienation or the “ontological insecurity” resulting from division of human and natural worlds. In this regard, spiritual experience, or loss thereof is known through an ontological disturbance whose effects can be signaled in various ways.
If spirituality is an integral part of human subjective experience, then it is necessary to reclaim subjectivity methods to better understand the roles of metaphor and narrative, the intuitive, prereflective, artistic, effable, and sublime. These are phenomenologically sensitive data, descriptions of experience of intrinsic relationship that are interpretive and emergent rather than predictive and prefigured.
Attention must then be paid to proprioception, inner awareness, and feeling of phenomena arising from subtle senses:
- Affective, somatic, spiritual, cognitive, intersubjective
- Sensations and feelings, emotions and cognition
- Energy expressed, covered by layers of egoic structure
- Outcomes of socialization and cultural conditioning (institutional oppression, lifecourse)
- Inner work and self-cultivation
One can see too how spirituality serves as a foundation for economic, political, and cultural energies shaping and reflecting sociocultural institutions and contexts that themselves may require transformation, and can be holistically integrated through ecological framing of spirituality and spiritual methodologies.
“Researching the spiritual involves working directly with the egoic structures in the service of understanding the sub-identities that exist within us and that need to become integrated into a wholeness that is increasingly and deeply human and humane.”
Finally, I thought I would just include I little web I put together on the subject to mind map some of these thoughts.