Academic research is about becoming detached from its subject in order to attempt a more “objective” point of view. Spirituality is about a profoundly personal experience of contact with the Sacred which different cultures and epochs have interpreted in the most diverse ways. Can they cohabit in some useful shape or form in the University cloisters?
Four years ago Haifa University began the annual Conference for the Study of Contemporary Spirituality that gathers different disciplines to explore this subject in many of its aspects. Scholarly presentarions about the theme interpersed with lively discussions opened the space for the expression of very different perpectives. From a more intellectual position about the need for spirituality to give foundation to ethics, to Silo’s Message’s experiential bases and its understanding of the commonality of the spiritual experience and the diversity of its cultural, epochal and personal translations and allegorisations most participants emphasised the transpersonal quality of the spiritual experience leading to a hightened sense of fellowship towards the rest of humanity.
During the plenary session Prof. Ofra Mayseless, Dean of Faculty of Education explained that spirituality, being something that has no expression in the three dimensional world can be seen as beyond the real. Science is knowledge, Religion is belief, and it has been excluded from Academia. The capacity to discuss truth with other people, to accept critical points, recognition and acceptance by peers, critical thinking and being judged by peers in a democratic way, aids the persuit of truth.
So why is it not possible to teach beliefs and spirituality in academia? Humanities and social sciences can teach these things. Not as truths but as belief systems. Teaching the supernatural or the meaning in life beyond the here and now seem to create more problems in academia, but within the social sciences, anthropology and so on, it is possible to teach “weird” stuff as cultural. When moving to things that are applied problems arrive. E.g., psychology majors don’t know about Frankle’s Logotherapy
Not talking about things that people believe means that a whole realm of human experience is put aside, not discussed in these disciplines.
Prof. Mayseless recalled that when she started her own spiritual journey she wondered how come not everybody was enthused by such wonders. Then she realised that lots of people were scared of the subject; major fears of an unknown possibility which would entail such a major change in their world view leading to who knows what radical change in their lives. Her proposal for Academia to concern itself with this kind of knowledge responds to the fact that such experiences exist, and it would not be the role of a University programme to tell people which way to take, but to impart the knowledge that there are different ways to enter this realm.
She reported that Columbia University has opened a programme for clinical psychology which is spiritualy oriented, “the first swallow, other multicolourful birds are coming”.
In the multicultural, multiethnic and multireligious environment of the Conference we were reminded of Silo’s words: ‘you go deeper into yourself and I go deeper into myself, and there we shall meet’.
