Is every human being spiritual in some way?

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What does it mean to be spiritual? I could give an answer derived from all kinds of theologies, but let’s take it all the way down to the rarely-thought-about fundamentals. Humans have two basic types of thought, cognitive and limbic. Cognitive generally deals with rational things. Rational means you can connect them together and understand the connections.

Limbic thought hides the connections. You can connect thought-items just fine with the limbic system, you just can’t quite distinguish why the things are connected. At some level, ‘you just know’. I shall refer to this henceforth as ‘justification’

What we consider ‘reality’ is a mix of these two types of knowing. Persons who identify as spiritual, in general, place a kind of importance on a system of knowing that runs heavily through limbic justification. People that do this can recognize other people that do this and so this forms a strata of human society that can all understand each other at a deep level.

It is impossible to get by in life with purely-cognitive forms of justification. You’d think that brain damage to the limbic system would do the trick. Well, it doesn’t. Our brains value limbic-justification so much that the brain will recreate limbic ‘centers’ in the forebrain should the mind not be able to directly access the limbic system. Every human being on this planet has access to some form of limbic justification.

And with limbic-justification comes systems of thought that fundamentally derive from it. To a religious or highly-spiritual person, these systems of thought are fundamentally identical to actual spiritual or religious frames.

And so you can recognize the broad forms of the systems if you’re attuned enough for it. We speak of fan ‘canons’ without realizing that ‘canon’ is a theological concept going back like ten thousand years. For as long as we’ve been writing, we’ve been canonizing theologies.

This canon serves to communicate abstract ideas that are only communicable using the stories and knowledge provided. The canon King Arthur stories provide a crucial part of the so-called Matter of Britain, a set of foundational myths upon which the whole notion of Britishness was founded.

Anybody can write a King Arthur story, but you have to stick to the forms and tropes of the Arthurian cycle if you want it to be a recognizably Arthurian legend. Themes of courtly love, chivalric duty, and inevitable fall must be involved. It’s theology in all but name, ‘selling’ a particular way of looking at the world that’s distinctly limbic in justification. You know an Arthurian legend when you see it.

And so we can now examine exactly what ties the random ideas that are involved in limbic justification together. The links are abstract, but they’re a particular kind of abstract. Mathematics are abstract, but aren’t part of the domain of limbic justification, mathematics are purely cognitive.

No, the links that tie together spiritual ideas are rather transcendent in nature. They seek to unify rather than divide. To tie up the reasons why things happen in a single, beautiful, yet convoluted bow. Nothing really unifies maths. Not even the most commonly used set of axioms can purport to describe all of maths.

And so everyone has broad ideas about things that tie their worldview together, that they wouldn’t necessarily term as spiritual, but is nonetheless. Any time you try to specifically define the concept of justice, you are engaging in a theological pursuit, that of defining an idea in the absolute. We humans are so deeply swimming in the spiritual that we have to come up for air in order to discover a world that we can pretend isn’t spiritual.