Religion and the Spiritual Quest
Religion and the Spiritual Quest
From Closure to Openness
This chapter argues that culture is very nearly a second nature, and that the most ordinary effort is all but certain not to miscarry. However, awareness of this process may set human beings self-consciously apart from a no longer “natural” world which they strive to regain or surpass; the concerted effort to overcome this apartness is a cardinal condition of the quest. The very term spiritual is an index of this separation; for distinction from the body places the unhoused spirit in a state of incompletion and need. Whether or not the process of self-transcendence has its inarticulate origin in the protoplasmic beginnings of life, evolution can be comprehended as lying in the nature of spirit, which owes its existence to the separation that it continually strives to overcome.
Keywords: culture, human beings, natural world, separation, spirit, self-transcendence, life
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