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This quotation appears to just replace the word "spiritual" with "sacred," another word that I find to have nebulous meaning. It contains a lot of words, but appears to be saying vanishingly little of substance. Or maybe it's just over my head.

> Being a spiritual animal means being an animal embodied with consciousness, an animal that is aware of its existence in both space AND time.

So, you're defining "spiritual" as "conscious." That's fine, but why not say "conscious"? It's clearer that way.

Under this definition, I agree that we are spiritual (conscious) animals.

But I'm willing to bet that the original poster I responded to used the word "spiritual" in a different sense than you do, which is a problem. When you both sort out what you're actually saying, let me know!

Edit to add one more point:

> But that doesn’t take away from the fact that consciousness transcends evolutionary necessity

I think the phrase "evolutionary necessity" is problematic on its own from a biological perspective, but even if we ignore that, do you have any sources for this claim?

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5081170/

I believe the original quotation used sacred because “spiritual” implies spirit or soul, whereas all ideologies do not align with that specifically. I could be mistaken though.

I don’t think it’s over your head I just think it’s academic literary fluff from Eliade, but at its core it breaks down that developing consciousness meant that we also developed methods to conceptualize something that was more real than reality itself. For example, numbers do not “exist” in reality, but represent reality more accurately than it represents itself most of the time. That’s why they’re so useful.

There are truths that are abstracted out of reality, that is a commonplace in human existence - sacred, spiritual, divine, esoteric, whatever you want to call it, there is an innate connection between humankind and something that is beyond humankind (a sort of meta-reality) and that relationship has aided our development since the dawn of consciousness. Connecting that to any one religion would be a fools errand but it does describe how our very being is tied to something more than just the damned physical world, more than just animalistic instinct. It’s all abstraction.

That is my interpretation anyway.

>So, you’re defining “spiritual” as “conscious.”

Good callout, I wasn’t very specific. I think conscious is the baseline reality, it makes being spiritual a possibility. A prerequisite. Being spiritual would be the willingness to use that consciousness to abstract specifically on the human condition, and voluntarily conclude that we ourselves have a part to play in something that is more real than the reality in front of us.

I can’t speak for the original poster, but I am still developing what I consider to be my spiritual knowledge, and I don’t foresee myself learning all there is to be known any time soon. Still young in that regard.

Edit for your edit on transcending evolutionary necessity: No sources, but let’s say even if, for example, the theory that consciousness emerged in early hominids as a side effect of a brain that rapidly grew to visually detect snakes[1], even in that scenario consciousness is still the side effect. And that means that a prerequisite to spiritual abstraction would be just an evolutionary side effect.

We still do not understand the evolutionary emergence of consciousness and why it appears to be so rare, so I’m not going to act like I have the answers there. But billions of years passed on earth before a human first questioned their place in the universe, and to me that is self-evidence of a lack of evolutionarily necessity. I understand if that conclusion is not solid enough for most though.

And to respond to your edit:

The study you cited doesn't appear to have anything to say about the general appearance of consciousness, so I don't think it's really relevant to our discussion here.

> We still do not understand the evolutionary emergence of consciousness and why it appears to be so rare, so I’m not going to act like I have the answers there.

Yes, I agree 100%. But because of this, I don't think you're correct in claiming outright that consciousness transcends evolutionary necessity (this is a positive claim that requires evidence). It's OK to say we don't know!

https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00821

That example I gave of the emergence of consciousness being a result of a growing brain was just an example and not necessarily what I believe, but it was on based this article from 2016:

Which really just breaks down consciousness potentially being a byproduct of having a drastically higher number of neurological connections than lesser developed animal brains.

So combining the two, the growing brain, caused by an increase in size of the visual cortex to detect snake patterns, increased the number of neurological connections and as a result the brain gradually became consciously aware. That’s just one theory that I used.

And I 100% agree it’s okay to say that we don’t know, we don’t. And I don’t! But that won’t stop me from thinking about it like, a lot.

Edit: spelling

So do you agree with me that the statement "consciousness transcends evolutionary necessity" is not necessarily correct?

From that point yeah, “transcends evolutionary necessity” like you said, is a positive claim.

More accurate to my intent would be “consciousness is untethered by evolutionary necessity” maybe?

Yeah, all of this gets a big fat [citation needed] from me. I don't even know what a bunch of this stuff means. "Conceptualize something more real than reality itself" is nonsensical on its face, and you go on to describe numbers, which are simply an abstraction we use out of convenience, not anything that is "more real than reality itself" as far as I'm aware.

I don't know what "beyond humankind" means in this context, and I don't know what "our very being tied to something more than the physical world" means.

Again, maybe it's just over my head, but can you clearly explain what you mean by all of these things?

> Being spiritual would be the willingness to use that consciousness to abstract specifically on the human condition, and voluntarily conclude that we ourselves have a part to play in something that is more real than the reality in front of us.

And yeah, I'm definitely not in agreement with us being "spiritual" under this definition, because the premise that it's possible for something to be "more real than the reality in front of us" doesn't make any sense to me.

I’m not sure what you would like in the way of citations. Abstracting on its own operates outside of the physical world, the world of ideas is different than the physical world of events. You can choose to believe these are just electrical signals in the brain, nothing more, and that is the physical world, but my entire tangent here has been that I don’t believe that, and why.

Abstractions, at least ones that survive over long periods of time, like the use of numbers, or like human spirituality, tend to contain within them a large collection of truths. Large collections of truths are what I mean by a greater reality, because they are not reality, they are abstracted ideas that are based on reality, but serve a greater purpose.

Something being more real than the reality in front of us is not a new idea, idealism was introduced by Plato 2,400 years ago suggesting that true reality lies in the world of perfect ideas, otherwise put, a reality more real than the physical world.

Like I said though, all of this is my interpretations of readings and based on my own years of thought and experience.

I'd caution against comparing an actual, useful-in-everyday-life abstraction like numbers, with a vague wishy-washy idea like "human spirituality."

I'm familiar with idealism and I definitely got the sense that you were coming from that perspective. As you might have guessed, I'm a naturalist, and probably also a materialist, because I think naturalism most closely comports with what we understand about how the universe works. While idealism is interesting to read about, I have yet to meet anyone that could provide evidence for the fact that it is actually correct and naturalism is wrong, so that's why I was asking. I'm personally not that interested in philosophical concepts that have no evidence or application in the real world.

I'm also not aware of evidence for any "truths" that are themselves inherent to any abstractions we use as a species. For example, I can write an equation like so:

x + 7 = 10

I can solve for X and find that it is 3, and verify that my answer is correct by checking it against the original equation. I can do all of that using the abstractions we've developed and nothing more. But none of these truths are actually inherent to the abstraction of numbers; I could just have easily put seven apples in front of me, and added apples to another pile until I arrived at a total of 10 to find my answer.

Could you give me an example of an abstraction which contains a truth that does not ultimately derive from the material, as in the example above?

The comparison was risky, I’ll give you that. I think we’ve both already come to the conclusion that neither of us is going to prove much to the other, as you’ve stated our belief systems clash in multiple important ways. I would argue that my idealistic and (more importantly but not yet mentioned) my humanistic views of the world are not wholly incompatible with naturalism, given you are willing to give wide berth to aspects of natural forces like consciousness and what we do with it, which you may not be. On materialism, I don’t think we’ll get anywhere.

And to your apple example, I never implied that numbers do not originate in the material world or are not derived from there, only that their true utility is realized when they have been abstracted over all the other types of fruit, and animals, and crops, etc. What started as piles of apples becomes something like one level of abstraction higher than a pile of apples, it becomes 10. But you have specifically said you have no interest in discussing things of this nature so I’ll stop. But I’m leaving this paragraph because I took the time to write it.

Your request for an abstraction that does not derive from the material is a bit of an impossible task isn’t it? And like I said I never claimed that these abstractions did not originate in the material, just that over time they accumulated related truths to become greater than the material itself.