> To me, spirituality is about pausing the labeling and interpreting part of my brain, and...
No need for "and", just stick with that.
No need for "and", just stick with that.
Music has existed for far longer than we’ve had the ability to scientifically describe the acoustic properties of music.
If I described Beethoven’s 9th symphony to someone who’d never heard it in terms of frequencies/pitches and durations, or handed them a piece of sheet music (assuming they don’t have the training/ability to read music and hear it in their head), they might conclude that music is fundamentally boring.
If that same person sits in a concert hall and hears the Chicago Symphony Orchestra perform the piece, only then would they understand the impact of the music. The emotion, the resonance, the beauty, and all of the feelings that come with that as a listener.
This doesn’t mean that the musical notation or a more technical analysis of the sound has no place. Just that they provide a fundamentally incomplete understanding of the phenomena of music.
My point is that labeling and interpreting reduces reality to something less than it actually is. And when you stop limiting your experience of a thing to a low resolution description of it, it tends to inspire a sense of awe and wonder (at least for me).
And much like music tends to inspire people to create their own, or to play the music conceived by others, and much like musical notation enables the transfer of musical knowledge between humans, I think a scientific mindset and some kind of “spirituality” go hand in hand.
They’re not mutually exclusive, and each enhances the other.
To take all of this one step further, the awe and wonder increases when I contemplate my ability to contemplate all of this. There’s a time for labels, and a time for raw experience, and a time for appreciating the fact that I can label raw experience.
That's interesting, because to me awe and wonder are a low-resolution description of a thing. Yes, the world is immense, indescribably complex, it largely cannot be labelled or interpreted, but that is not surprising, profound or interesting. Awe fetishizes the unknown: upon realizing that the universe is not fully intelligible to the human mind, we immediately put that realization in a box and make it into an experience.
The truth is, the world is what it is, and what it is is too large to fit in any mind. In that sense, your statement that "you stop limiting your experience of a thing to a low resolution description of it" is actually impossible. No human mind can possibly do this. Anything we think or feel about the world is a flawed and limited interpretation, including awe and wonder.
This is your opinion based on your knowledge (or possibly lack thereof) of the world, and these are fundamentally subjective states. Used here, they instruct the brain to limit itself and humorously illustrate the broader point nicely I think. Plenty of people find these things interesting, which is again a subjective state. It's unclear what point you're trying to make here.
> Anything we think or feel about the world is a flawed and limited interpretation, including awe and wonder.
This misses the point. There are many concepts/ideas/labels that actively oversimplify the world and create misconceptions about it. Even just calling a tree a tree limits the perspective of the observer.
The point is not that we can ever fully experience or comprehend existence. The point is that there are many ways that we actively limit our experience of it, and that we can broaden our experience when we stop doing so.
This is not a claim that doing so allows us to experience all of existence in some perfect/pristine way. That's beside the point. Language filters experience when our understanding of the language used leads us to draw conclusions about experience that are less complete than they could be. Removing the filter can increase what we experience, but we're still fundamentally limited by our sense organs, brains, etc.
> Anything we think or feel about the world is a flawed and limited interpretation, including awe and wonder.
This is also beside the point. From a purely utilitarian perspective, awe and wonder are useful and enjoyable to experience, and inspire people to do things. More awe and wonder can be a good thing if it leads to outcomes that benefit the person experiencing them. If changing the way we engage with the world by removing the conceptual and linguistic filters we apply by default leads to more awe and wonder, that's a net benefit.
I'm not sure what it means for awe and wonder to be "flawed", unless you expect those feelings/emotions to somehow be a perfect reflection of reality, and I don't think anyone is saying that is the case. They're a tiny subset of a larger spectrum of emotional states we experience, but it seems like a non-sequitur to say they're flawed. As far as I can tell, humans can only experience a subset of reality, and I think this is what you're getting at, but by arguing against a point that was never made.
Simply put: less interpretation can lead to more awe and wonder. More awe and wonder feels good, and we like feeling good. Perfection is unrelated to the point.
And of course it's worth mentioning that "awe and wonder" are words tied to concepts that map to emotional states. Yet another linguistic filter on top of a much broader set of experiences/emotions/feelings. So in that sense, a description of awe and wonder is insufficient to communicate the phenomena. But this has no bearing on the actual experience itself, and again, they're just feelings, not some grand theory that explains existence.
> They’re not mutually exclusive, and each enhances the other.
Did you know that what we call "science" the Greeks and the Scholastics used to call "natural philosophy"? And that there are churchmen to this day studying the universe so they can come to understand God better?
In fact, it's not even necessary to switch off thinking. The key is to give no value to thoughts that come up (unless you're actually engaged in focussed thinking, eg intentional planning, problem solving, etc), or emotions. It changes everything.
An example: I've been suffering from melancholic thoughts for some months, carrying a heaviness with me I couldn't shed. I recently decided I'd had enough and I didn't want them any more. I decided they were nothing to do with me, much in the same way as I'd treat a fart - some process that occurs but which passes and I forget about. This has resulted in a subtle but significant transformation. The melancholy has been replaced by something difficult to describe but no longer heavy and depressing, and at times elating.
But I think that in the context of science, a deepening understanding of the complexity of existence or interconnectedness brings with it a kind of awe and wonder in and of itself which further enhances the impact of such practices.
I think there’s a certain irony in trying to put the notion of spirituality into a box, when I think the notion is about worrying less about the existence of boxes.
Buy ya, we are good to pause the entire mess.