Spirituality Is Inherently Dehumanizing: A Note From My Notes
⏱️ 6 min read | 🎧 Audio version below
This essay is another journal entry from my Notes app. I’m playing with the idea of sharing more of these journal entries here, getting back to my purest form of writing—which is not multiple-sides-argued, as my more controversial pieces endeavor to be. I only do that to make my message more palatable to detractors, for it is they whom I most hope to reach.
But there’s another writer in me that longs to preach to a choir, to be read and understood by those who do not detract but resonate, whether they agree with me or not. I see you. I know you’re there, as I am there with you.
I earnestly seek out viewpoints different from my own. But it is also precious to me when I stumble across a thinkpiece I already understand, like viewing my brain from outside myself. It is calming, thrilling, and oh so very affirming. And so I may share these more unfiltered thoughts on occasion, a series here I’ll call Notes From My Notes. Uncensored, as these notes stumble from my brain to my fingertips. Notes I write for me. Because many of you seem to love them, I am inspired to share more. (Their audio versions will be just as unpolished—you may hear my cat purr at some point, for he is cuddled up alongside me. Releasing myself from the pressure of perfection is what frees me to remember why I write in the first place.)
I hope you enjoy these Notes, whether or not you agree. Agreement should not be the point, but self-understanding and self-acceptance. This is what leads to self-love. I have learned to love myself through other’s writings and can only be tickled to imagine that my writing might play such a role for someone else.
Spirituality is inherently dehumanizing. It looks at us as spirits and not the animals we are, warring against the drives of our biology with shame and condemnation.
To be spiritual uses words like transcend, overcome, elevate, and enlighten—all words alluding to the denial of the flesh, to borrow a Christian descriptor from my first language.
To be animal uses words like succumb, degrade, mortify, and indulge—words alluding to a surrender to that which we shouldn’t.
Says who, really? Our gods? Us?
Can we not be, perhaps, a bit of both mystery and skin? Instead of transcending our biology, can we not find enlightenment through it?
This was my biggest takeaway the time I did DMT and “got out,” as only those who know DMT will understand: Enlightenment is found through the body. Not by denying or transcending it. It is through our cellular makeup, our neurochemistry and hormones, that we experience ethereal-sounding states like “transcendence,” “wonder,” “awe.” LOVE.
It is through denying ourselves food that we begin to hallucinate. It is by putting ourselves through extreme cold that we can reach mental clarity previously unknown. It is with the aid of plant chemistry that we attain profound and life-changing insights.
These are all done through the body. Not beyond it. Not outside of it. Purely with the body.
Spiritual language tends to minimize the body’s role, calling it a temple for the soul, as though a soul is truly what is liberated or being explored or “remembered.” No, my loves. It is the body. Your brain. You. Not something outside yourself you need only to deny your flesh to reach. You are your body. Your body is you. Denying this, and denying yourself pleasure and food and nourishment and sex and rest, is to deny your temple that houses no spirit at all but your cellular essence, your beautiful genetic assortment of individuality, that makes you YOU.
Spirituality strips us of our humanity by asking that we “remember who we really are.” This implies that we are not a beautiful mess of apery, but something invisible and unattainable in our mortal form, yet that which we should aspire to anyway.
What horseshit. What a debasing, impossible-tasking, set-you-up-for-failing curse.
Spirituality numbs our compassion and empathy by telling us to view one another as souls on soul-journeys. I can think of few things crueler than believing that others are suffering voluntarily so that those of us who are not might understand compassion, or have opportunities to clear our own karmic debts by showing kindness to sufferers given no such mercy. I startle at such theories, a shiver of warning rippling through me about anyone who believes such humanity-erasing ignorance. Such calloused denial. Such desperate cowardice.
Face your fellow man. Love who is here, not that which you want to place outside of reality.
Many say that spirituality is what facilitates compassion, that viewing someone as a soul is what enables them to let go of baser transgressions and see through any wickedness or sin into the “pure,” “love and light consciousness” of who resides beyond the flesh and bone.
No, my friends. That is wicked. That is the epitome of un-acceptance, of denial, and of conditional love.
I’m Alice Greczyn, an author and speaker, but first and foremost, a writer. This newsletter is free because I think helpful information should be free as much as possible. Please subscribe, and if you’d like to donate to my costs (news subscriptions, image licensing, audio recording, etc.), I’d surely appreciate it. Thank you.
Coincidentally (unless you know Mark), Mark Vicente addressed a very similar topic on his "WTF Is On My Mind" podcast this week. His take was that a lot of spiritual thought systems now-a-days teach you to hate your physical body because it is bad and the spirit is good. He says that we can have more enlightenment and less anxiety if we accept that those traits we are taught are bad are part of all of us, and that accepting that we all have them helps to prevent self-loathing and loathing others for exhibiting traits that we are suppressing in ourselves.
Most of the people I encounter in my day-to-day life would find this idea abhorrent and look at people who believe it with condescension or at least pity. I feel less alone when I read or listen to posts like this.
Many people think we lose out on the wonder of the universe when we don't believe in souls or spirituality. In my opinion, knowing that I can experience love and awe and other complex emotions even though there's no such thing as a soul is more wonderous than chalking up that vast complexity to a simplistic, undefinable concept like a soul.