A Course in No Miracles, Just Explainable Magic

Though I’m plenty spirited, I’m not spiritual. I experience lots of magic and awe. I just assume it’s explainable magic, not miracle. When I’m high on life, I don’t leap to the spiritualist’s conclusion that I’m experiencing some miraculous supernatural dimension sticking its thumb into nature. I assume it’s nature. There’s enough magical mystery without claiming some supernatural wildcard.

So when people act like you can’t be spirited without spirituality, I find it as annoyingly unconvincing as someone saying you can’t have experienced true joy unless you’ve tasted their favorite soup. Enjoy your soup, but there are plenty of ways to get joy. The spiritual don’t have a corner on spirit.

“Spiritual” and ‘respiration” come from the same root. Spiritual typically means some supernatural something—a vital force, higher power, or spiritual energy— breathed into and acting upon nature. To the spiritual—not religious—this supernatural something isn’t a man-shaped god with a white beard. The spiritual are proud of that cosmic cosmetic alteration.

Pride aside, the spiritualists aren’t assuming their vital force or higher power is a physical force like pounds per square inch or voltage. Rather like the religious, they assume there’s a supernatural will coaxing things toward good outcomes, a supernatural thumb on the scale tipping nature toward its higher, or ultimate purpose.

Which purpose? As with religion, any purpose you can dream of. After all, the supernatural is beyond nature and therefore beyond objective analysis. That’s some of the fun of it. The supernatural realm is a wild card—open to interpretation, as is obvious from the vast range of people’s conflicting supernatural “revelations.”

That’s also some of the fun of it. It’s exciting to crusade for your supernatural truths about the unknowable. No one can prove you wrong. The supernatural is a trump card, too, since it’s super—above and controlling nature. Like the religious, the spiritual can say the supernatural will is unknowable and then act like they know what it wants. Very exciting!

By that definition, I’m not spiritual. Still, I have my equivalent. Call it my non-spiritual practice. I’ll explain.

About 30 years ago, I was your typical California counter-culture spiritualist who had fallen into a deep midlife crisis. I was counting on spirituality to see me through it, but it wasn’t working.
If not spirituality, what else could reorient, ground, and get me through the crisis? I figured science. I got deep into evolutionary theory, especially evolutionary psychology. I started to learn all its technical terms and how to combine them into explanations for everything.

And then one day it hit me. There’s no behavior evolutionary psychology couldn’t explain. Just guess which one of my habits was selected for by natural selection and assume a genetic mutation made it possible. Where there’s a will there’s a mutant way.

Damn. Another wild-card trump card. No wonder I found it so exciting. I call it Insightment, the excitement of some big insight that makes you feel like a genius authority on how everything works, ready to incite some social transformation. It leads to a lot of “insight overreach,” the sense that an insight explains far more than it really does.

Around that time I met Harvard neuroscientist, Terrence Deacon. He had done important work on the evolution of human language and was just turning his attention to a bigger mystery: How did living beings, struggling for their own existence, emerge within nothing but chemistry? In other words, what are selves and trying, and how did they start?

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Now most folks assume science already solved this. Beings are the products of imperfectly replicating DNA molecules selected by natural selection. Terry knew DNA and natural selection explain lots, but not how beings and trying emerged within chemistry. Natural selection explains how beings and their struggle for existence evolve, but not how they emerge. And DNA is a molecule. It’s not struggling for its own existence, not trying to do anything.

So there I was, self-obsessed and doubt-ridden, always trying to figure out what I should try to do. And there he was, trying to explain selves and trying from the ground up. So I joined forces with Terry. I’ve worked closely with him for 26 years.

What I learn in our collaboration, I apply in my personal life. It’s my non-spiritual practice, and for me deeply personal.

In this work, I humble myself before nature, not the supernatural. I hold no higher gods or powers above nature. I pray to nature by researching it, trying to understand it better. My non-spiritual congregation and communion happens in discussing and debating with others curious about nature, curating our assumptions as we speculate as carefully as we can about the universe and us in it.

Many of my colleagues think that it’s dangerous to apply their insights to their personal lives, since their personal bias might taint their research. And they’re right. Many of my research colleagues also have other commitments, some of them religious or spiritual. They just want the truth, but it has to conform to their exciting source of insightment.

Still, I think there’s a way to make a non-spiritual practice work. I want my analysis to shape my personal growth and advocacy. I do not want my personality to shape my analysis. I don’t want my personal biases to blind me to nature. I want nature to give me insight into my personal biases.

Our research has made me an ironist down to the bone. All organisms struggle for their own existence, trying to regenerate themselves faster than they’d otherwise degenerate. Trying is iffy, not guaranteed. Life is a serious, dubious, deadly, slapstick proposition.

Nothing has brought me more equanimity than recognizing that irony is not just the human but the living condition. I came through my midlife crisis not by eliminating doubt but by lowering my expectations of certainty, since I don’t think there’s any to be had in nature, except through a bogus reliance on wild-card trump cards.

My “calmfidence” comes from accepting that doubt is inescapable. My greatest equanimity comes of worrying equally about opposite possibilities, that I’m too much or too little of some behavior for the situation at hand, for example too pushy or not pushy enough. I’m at home in doubt, trying to do right knowing that I could be wrong.

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