Skepticism VS Spirituality

Okay, I apologise for baiting you with the title… But keep reading and I’ll make it up to you. I want to explain why skepticism and spirituality can actually work beautifully together. There is one thing, which, if present, can be used to reconcile and integrate ANY seemingly opposing ideas (big claim, but I’ll stand by it for now). That one thing is a love of truth. A quality that I’ve seen in most lovers of truth is intellectual humility, or open-mindedness. Funnily enough, most of us probably think we are more open-minded and intellectually humble than we actually are. It’s flattering to see oneself as a curious, interested listener, but not always so flattering to be one.

There is one reason, above all others, why intellectual humility (open-mindedness) is an essential quality in life (whether you care about truth seeking or not): If you aren’t humble and honest about what you don’t know, the richness of your life experience will gradually fade - suffocated within the invisible box of your own mental constructs. In short, you’ll be doomed to repeat the same behavioural patterns over and over, like a broken record. Maybe not everyone is as scared of this as I am… but personally I have a feeling that life (change) offers us individualised lessons which have the potential to free us. Sometimes life is like a dance partner, and other times, like an opponent in a cage fight - but in both scenarios, it offers the opportunity to adapt, overcome and transcend fear of change. And this is potentially liberating.

And so, the link between skepticism and spirituality begins to emerge. Both offer the potential for liberation - potential for a movement toward a more complete, expansive and well-rounded experience of self. Both require intellectual humility (if done right), which is inextricably tied to general humility. Those who take themselves very seriously, by default, keep their beliefs highly protected. If integrated, embodied beliefs are what forms a personality, then it is impossible to have a rigid personality and also be a true skeptic or spiritualist because the essence of both of these practices is liberation from suffering and ignorance through unconditional love of truth.

Let’s be clear though - this does not mean we abandon all beliefs willy nilly, or try to prematurely transcend ourselves to avoid getting muddy in life. To be skeptical is to hold beliefs strongly enough to advocate for genuine testing of their merits, but lightly enough not to delude oneself by clinging to what is dead. Likewise, there is nothing spiritual about turning a blind-eye one’s human pitfalls and lusty desires. Either by dance or by fight, we must integrate our animalistic and material desires with our highest values and philosophies. The one who avoids integrating the dark and the light; the deep and the shallow; the trivial and the dire, is preventing themselves from full realisation of their potential as an embodied consciousness (human being.

Lastly, unconditional love of truth requires such faith in truth that truth may as well be God. This faith is shared by both skepticism and spirituality. Skepticism is full of doubt and rigour only because skeptics are serious truth seekers. Skeptics sift through untested assumptions tirelessly not because they seek to somehow undermine the meaning of life but precisely the opposite - to discover it! Skeptics seek genuine illumination rather than ignorance, knowing full well that illumination is a process of abandoning untrue beliefs and not simply a destination. Oh wait, that sounds a lot light enlightenment, doesn’t it? While you are identified with ideas, you may glimpse truth for a moment between thoughts, but ‘you’ will never be liberated until your idea of self makes way for the truth of what is.

And so, skepticism teaches sacrifice of untrue beliefs and untested assumptions, and spirituality teaches sacrifice of untrue self and untested personalities. Both are equally willing to shed the ephemeral and superficial in order to realise the unchanging, and both are very much grounded in open-mindedness, because there is no better way to test the pillars of one’s reality than to welcome in other possible realities. I hope that this little exploration has shown you that these systems of living originate from the same place, and that there is no need to force science and art; skepticism and spirituality to sit down and fight to the death, because they are already happily married and always have been. All that we need for it to remain so is for those who identify as one or the other to practice some humility and keep the truth at heart.