Psychologists have identified specific stages and sequences in the growth of human cognitive capacities (Piaget) and moral reasoning (Kohlberg, Gilligan) that can be nurtured and facilitated but that are not the product of conformity. Are there equivalent, belief-independent, processes of spiritual growth that can be identified and studied scientifically across major religious/spiritual traditions?
If the answer is "Yes," and scientists can learn how to clarify methods and foster a shared human capacity for spiritual growth, the possible results might be transformational for politics and social progress, including peace and nuclear disarmament.
Historically, institutional religions can ally authoritarianism, conformity, and the political and religious Right and increase conflict. However, genuinely advanced spiritual leaders (e.g., Gandhi, Buddha, Bishop Tutu) connect to people across traditional boundaries and appear able to foster healing political solutions and social progress. Spiritual growth, in all traditions, may be one of our best investments.
It seems possible that all (or most) major religious traditions do recognize a similar capacity for spiritual growth and have discovered similar methods to foster it. For example by using what psychologists call "pattern interrupts" and that Buddhist teachers call "skillful means." Thus, a student who is oriented to material possessions may be given the vow of poverty; if attached to analytic reason, the question "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"; if physical pleasures, then plain foods and the vow of chastity; if sociability, the vow of silence; if self-importance, the injunction to service and the task of washing feet. However, these can be studied as cause-effect teaching methods, not conformist injunctions or the essence of spirituality - a raft to cross the river, not the destination. [Western liberal arts education (e.g., Socrates's method of analytical questions and challenges to social conformity and authority) may have a similar teaching logic.] There is a "twinkle in the eye" test to distinguish televangelists from spiritual leaders/teachers who are genuine.
Similar advanced ("mystical") levels of spiritual growth also might be recognized and explored with scientific tools from neuropsychology. These seem to involve shifts in visual processing, and possibly a diminution of internal/conceptual/imaginative interference in perception - e.g., a post linguistic sensibility, "enlightened," with clarity.
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Re Science and Spiritual Growth
Re Science and Spiritual Growth
Robert Thurman (Columbia), a US specialist in Buddhism, says that the movie Groundhog Day accurately depicts the process that Buddhists observe, theorize about, and seek to teach as spiritual growth and becoming Enlightened, across countless lifetimes and cycles of death and rebirth (with slowly increasing karma.)
By the end of the movie the personality of the weatherman, played by Bill Murray, has changed. Other people and the visual and auditory nature of the world around him also occur in a different way, what Buddhists describe as the "everything is different but nothing has changed" aspect of (belief-independent) Enlightenment.
The movie touchstone is exciting. Scientists can begin to agree about what they are observing (difficult from verbal depictions of Enlightenment), achieve inter-judge agreement in ratings, and - eventually - more rigorous measures. And science can start to take-off.
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