- Jul 23, 2007
- 55,920
- 10,830
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Atheist
- Marital Status
- Single
- Politics
- US-Others
Inspired by my other thread. While I left the definition of spirituality vague and open to personal interpretation, I am curious about the different types of spirituality out there.
In my mind there are two base ones. One I call hyper emotional empathy that has to do with concepts such as love and caring for others. While the other has more to do with submission to a higher power. Both themes you can find within Christianity and other popular faiths.
From my personal experience as a theist I leaned more to the former. Personal reasons led me to develop a great distaste for submission and I even actively choose to purge as much of it as I could in my spiritual life. Interestingly despite grasping spirituality intuitively as a kid, I never even engaged in submission back then. There were a few instances of my Christian life where curiosity got the best of me and I allowed myself to embrace the submission side of Christianity. I will report the spiritual experience was quite different than my usual emotional empathetic one. One big difference is that emotional empathy is easier to control. You meditate to feel it, and if you no longer want to feel it the spirituality is easy to opt out of. While with submission I found that I had uncontrolable after effects for hours.
Submission also produces a "drunk" like feeling. Which the phrase "drunkenness' in the spirit" probably refers too. While I have limited experience with this spirituality, it is one where I think it might be possible to obtain trippy experiences with and possibly see visions. Things that I was not very adapt at with my Christianity due to avoiding submissive spirituality.
One might wonder what I mean by emotional empathy and spirituality. I think one example is that one can feel spiritual when with a big crowd of people, like a rock concert. You are able to achieve this with your mind if you can see God within everything. Just as a being with a crowd of people can overload your emotional empathetic senses, seeing God everywhere can do the same. Which, when it comes to empathy themes of love and caring for others are quite relevant. Although to be fair, maybe submission requires empathy, although might be the more cognitive kind and isn't quite the central theme as well.
I am curious about the types of spiritualty others see, and perhaps practice themselves? Understandable this can be a difficult topic to explain (especially with me and my language disorder), but we can try our best. Given the difficulty of the subject many of us have probably come up with custom language to best describe our experiences.
In my mind there are two base ones. One I call hyper emotional empathy that has to do with concepts such as love and caring for others. While the other has more to do with submission to a higher power. Both themes you can find within Christianity and other popular faiths.
From my personal experience as a theist I leaned more to the former. Personal reasons led me to develop a great distaste for submission and I even actively choose to purge as much of it as I could in my spiritual life. Interestingly despite grasping spirituality intuitively as a kid, I never even engaged in submission back then. There were a few instances of my Christian life where curiosity got the best of me and I allowed myself to embrace the submission side of Christianity. I will report the spiritual experience was quite different than my usual emotional empathetic one. One big difference is that emotional empathy is easier to control. You meditate to feel it, and if you no longer want to feel it the spirituality is easy to opt out of. While with submission I found that I had uncontrolable after effects for hours.
Submission also produces a "drunk" like feeling. Which the phrase "drunkenness' in the spirit" probably refers too. While I have limited experience with this spirituality, it is one where I think it might be possible to obtain trippy experiences with and possibly see visions. Things that I was not very adapt at with my Christianity due to avoiding submissive spirituality.
One might wonder what I mean by emotional empathy and spirituality. I think one example is that one can feel spiritual when with a big crowd of people, like a rock concert. You are able to achieve this with your mind if you can see God within everything. Just as a being with a crowd of people can overload your emotional empathetic senses, seeing God everywhere can do the same. Which, when it comes to empathy themes of love and caring for others are quite relevant. Although to be fair, maybe submission requires empathy, although might be the more cognitive kind and isn't quite the central theme as well.
I am curious about the types of spiritualty others see, and perhaps practice themselves? Understandable this can be a difficult topic to explain (especially with me and my language disorder), but we can try our best. Given the difficulty of the subject many of us have probably come up with custom language to best describe our experiences.
Last edited: