Chapter 1:
Spirituality
for Technical People
People who have technical minds have a hard time understanding spirituality. We have formulas for understanding electricity, but we do not know what electricity is. We know only what it does. The same thing is true for spirituality. We will never know what spirituality is. We can know how spirituality does. If you are spiritual, your life experience is much better.
For most technical people, setting down to sort through some 4,000 religions and belief systems does not make sense. But instead of tackling the problem head on, there is a series of studies that can accomplished this seemly impossible task of becoming spiritual and remaining technical at the same time.
First we need to learn something about semantics before we get in a tangle with so many conflicting ideas. Knowing about the nature of words and how they express meaning can be a great help in sorting out what seems to be true.
Semantics is the study of the meaning of words. The book March's Thesaurus, sorts words by their meaning. Words with similar meanings are grouped together. The nuances between words can be examined. Words are grouped into categories according to their meanings. The book is written in two columns of small print and contains over 1310 pages. It is an excellent tool to explore the meaning of words.
A branch of semantics, called General Semantics is a scientific study of how words affect our thinking process. It teaches that words are like maps which represent a real territory. They include only some of the features of the territory such as roads, lakes and cities but not the details. Words point to a meaning but are never the real territory itself. This may seem obvious, but words used in religious groups often confuse the map and the territory. For instance, some people believe that the Bible is completely true and written by God. Thus the Bible stands on it own, and is both a map and a territory at the same time. But in reality, it is a book written by people. It is the map, and what it describes is the territory.
The Bible teaches how important love is. Love is actually so essential that without it a baby may die. René Spitz, an Austrian-American psychoanalyst, conducted studies on infants in orphanages in the 1940s. He observed that infants who lacked close, nurturing contact with caregivers exhibited a condition he called "hospitalism" or "anaclitic depression." These infants showed high mortality rates, stunted growth, developmental delays, and severe emotional distress despite having their basic physical needs (food, shelter) met.
To avoid the tangle of religious beliefs, we can concentrate on how we experience our inner life. By learning about our soul, mind, emotions and our heart, we can see the underpinnings of spirituality. We will cover this in Chapter 2, the Inner Soul which is in process of being written. It is almost completed.