What is spirituality? What do we mean by "spirit", and how are these things different from religion? Why does the word "spirituality" itself make so many rational people cringe?

In 1982 I sat on a beach watching my best friend devour a book. “This is great!” he kept chuckling to himself, not allowing me even a peek. Finally he went for a swim and I grabbed it, read the first chapter, and was immediately both immersed in and desperately hungry for that world.

The book was The Tracker, by Tom Brown. In the first chapter he tells of setting out one winter day to buy milk. On the way, he notices the characteristic marks and tracks left behind by a feeding junco bird, and wonders if that’s the same bird that’s been taking all the food out of his backyard bird feeder. He tells us quite matter-of-factly how he reads the pressure releases in the snow, the angle of seed droppings from a branch, the lightly layered brushings of snow, seeds and bark under a tree, and thus reconstructs not only the path of this little creature, but the characteristic ways this particular bird has of hopping and eating and looking over its shoulder. He proceeds to track this bird – as yet unseen – through the air, through the woods, through the trees, and finally to his own back yard where sure enough, there it is, happily munching.

That book opened for me the world of mystery-with-an-explanation. Here for the first time in my experience was an invitation to “commune with nature” without relinquishing my intellect. Here were seemingly miraculous and impossible interactions with the natural world, with an understanding of how they are accomplished. And for me, an Objectivist with a capital O (i.e. an advocate of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism), a computer programmer, a rational thinker, an atheist – for me, the understanding was necessary. It has only been after many years of tracking its source that I came to see that the mystery is even more necessary than the understanding.

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During one of those wonderful tennis battles at the Wimbledon finals, before TV advertising necessitated tie breakers, McEnroe and Borg were in about the 10th game when Borg made one of those balletic diving returns. It was a good shot, deep to McEnroe’s backhand, but Borg’s racket flew out of his hand, completely out of reach as McEnroe’s return shot came back over the net. Borg drew back his leg and hit a beautifully formed return with the side of his foot.

At that time I had just recently finished reading and being completely enchanted by Ayn Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. In this little book, Rand shows how human knowledge is based in reality, and describes in detail the process by which individual items are mentally grouped together, ignoring their differences and binding them by their distinguishing characteristics to form concepts. Once properly formed, a concept designates not only every item that went into its formation, but all of them that might ever exist. “Tree” stands for all trees, past, present, and future.

The essential characteristics of a good tennis shot had been built into Borg’s very being, such that without thinking about it, he executed a beautiful shot without what one might have thought would be an essential ingredient: a tennis racket!

Tom Brown looks at what I would have called a messy snow bank, and sees the clear and unmistakable signs of a bird. Not just any bird, a junco bird. Not just any junco bird, the specific one that’s been hanging around his backyard feeder. After a few zillion hours of “dirt time”, as Tom calls it, those signs just jump right out at him. After observing enough animals hopping around, and then going over to see what marks they left, Tom reads tracks like you read this article.

The trees, the animals, the air and the earth speak in a language that’s been all but lost. We ourselves speak this language as well, usually unwittingly. With practice we can learn to understand it.

If your tennis game is not as you wish, you can “go back to the fundamentals”, re-form the habits, re-practice the basic strokes until they once again become second nature to you. Can the same be done if your “life game” is not as you wish? What would it mean to “go back to the fundamentals” in re-forming the basic brushstrokes of your own life-painting? In the same way that the act of concept formation must be performed consciously and correctly – honoring what is so – what about the formation of those now-automatic relationships we have with our careers, partners, children, neighbors, our selves?

In pursuing these questions and tracking my own life path, I found my way to the indigenous people whose early culture and practices incorporated the kind of respect for each other and for life that has been so devastatingly lacking in our society. One of these, a teacher of Iroquois descent, looked around a room full of wannabe trackers and spoke to us of our society and his. He looked into each person’s eyes for a few moments in complete silence, taking his time, making individual contact with each one of us. “Before you came here”, he said, “we had a constitution, we had laws, we respected individual rights and free trade. The difference between your society and the one that you tried to kill is this: ours has spirit, yours does not.”

Spirit, I thought. Dirty word. Wouldn’t it be against the separation of Church and State to incorporate spirit into our society? Of course, the spirit this man talked about was here long before either Church or State. Is there a way to incorporate the spirit of peace, of cooperation, of a healthy community into our society without running afoul of religious or political taboos? As the years have passed and I have seen so many children growing up with no respect for life at all – their own or anyone else’s – I wonder whether some spirit might be a good thing.

In working with my wife as a volunteer mediator, I’ve seen so many families torn apart by anger, failure to communicate, lack of ability to hear the quiet, almost-silent singing of that inner honest voice and I’ve wondered whether perhaps some spirit would be a good thing.

About 10 years ago, in fear when my heart was in seemingly permanent arrhythmia, I sought my own deepest complicity in this living out of sync with my heart and I began to wonder if maybe a touch of spirit would be a good thing.

Throughout 20 years of marriage I have been amazed, educated, challenged, and ecstatically delighted at the infinite variety of ways in which two people can incorporate each other into their lives and form something called a relationship, which seems to have a life and a priority of its own, and I wonder what the role of spirit is in this miracle of joy.

And it is in that wondering about spirit – not religion, not God, but spirit – that I have embarked upon the journey of which "Woodcuts" is the first journal. My goal is to illuminate the subject of spirituality in a rational and objective manner, and to invite you to embark upon a similar journey of your own.


Many people experience spiritual values deeply, yet have no rational vocabulary with which to hold them. This leads to a terribly uncomfortable conflict between one’s inner life and one’s conscious mind. Typically, people deal with this by compartmentalizing – one says to one’s self “Oh, well, this is art, it’s not an intellectual thing, I just enjoy it”.

Now, listen: if you are an advocate of reason, I’m talking to you. If you know that reality is objective and really exists, that this life we’re living right now is the only one there is, and that reason is our only means of grasping it and dealing with it, I’m talking to you. You need a spiritual practice and you need to be able to call it by that name without embarrasing yourself, without contradiction, and without evasion. It’s to you that I say spirituality is not what you think.

Why? Because your spirit is the essence of who you are. Your fundamental choices in life – career, family, purpose, and vision – are all expressions of your spirit.

Your spirit is what gets you through the difficult patches in life. Not your intellect, not your emotions, not your body. When you’re stuck on a problem, up against the wall, feeling like just packing it in and going into the aluminum siding business, what brings you back to your desk, your workbench, your easel? Commitment, one might say. Sure, and what is the source of your commitment? It’s the essential, driving, living force, the “fire in the belly”, the fuel of your passion for your life. I’m not talking about only your career – I’m talking about the in-your-heart-of-hearts deepest experience of who you are.

You fuel that passion by exposing yourself to your deepest values. This may take several forms; for example, going to a concert or a museum, sitting on the beach enjoying a sunset, taking a walk with your Honey, reading a great book, just to suggest a few. But even if you do that regularly, do you call it a spiritual practice? Is your purpose specifically and consciously to strengthen your spirit? Perhaps you do it because it feels good, deeply, and because you recognize the benefits. For some of us, the benefits are increased productivity, enhanced personal relationships, deeper sense of happiness. For some there are direct medical benefits – lower blood pressure, improved digestion, less stress and thus fewer stress-related problems.

But most rational, productive people in my experience do not consider it necessary, beneficial, or even acceptable to engage in any practice solely and specifically for the enhancement of the spirit. Those who do are generally a little embarrassed about it; they call it by some other name and positively bridle at the suggestion that they have a regular spiritual practice. Inevitably, this is taken to mean some kind of religious observance – understandably, since the religions of the world have thus far succeeded in conveying the idea that they control the realm of the spirit exclusively, and that God (meaning a disembodied, omnipotent, omniscient, separate being) is the universal spirit and the object of all spiritual pursuit.

So we’ve become smugglers. We tell ourselves that we watch sunsets because they feel good and have pretty colors and it’s good to take a break from work once in a while. We dance alone in the living room because it feels good and it’s good exercise and it’s culturally beneficial in some abstract way. We listen to that one particular concerto because it’s so interesting musically and because it feels so good and because the good guys win. We float in the ocean because it feels good and because it’s good to get away from the office once in a while….

But we are reluctant to identify these activities as explicitly spiritual practices, because of the connotations of that term. By implicitly accepting an irrational interpretation of “spirit”, a rational man denies himself the full pleasure of pursuing a spiritual goal as an end in itself, for the pure joy of it. We do it anyway, of course, but we don’t talk about it – even to ourselves. And so we deprive ourselves of the full consciousness and acknowledgement that it is rational and healthy to invest time and energy in spiritual practice. And worse than that, we deprive ourselves of the ability to consciously, intentionally return to the fundamentals of spiritual strengthening in those times when it’s needed the most.

As advocates of reason we must learn to identify, explicitly and intentionally, the values of exaltation, reverence, joy, and benevolence – not as the altruistic, self-crushing surrender claimed by religion, and also not as the unnamed, unacknowledged seeming exceptions accepted by so many rational people. We must learn to pursue and master the art of living spiritually in a religious society, with full rational integrity, and without conceding the high ground.

There is no reason to be embarrassed for engaging in a spiritual pursuit. You can leave God out of it. Religion has nothing to do with it. I’m talking about the essential life force that burns within you, the inner true self that responds at the deepest level and directs your path. There are some who would say, “That is God: the God within you.” They’re welcome to say that, and if what I have to say on the subject is consonant with that belief, that’s OK. However, my premise is that spiritual matters can be grasped without reference to any other reality but the one we all know, and without reference to any being who might be described as God. If you believe in God and practice a religion, I don’t doubt that this book has a great deal to offer you nonetheless; through its pages I hope you will discover a deeper and more meaningful and practical form of spirituality than what is offered by religion.

To hear some of my intellectual buddies talk about “spiritual values”, you’d think this was a synonym for clear thinking, well-formed premises, and self-esteem. They’re very clear about what constitutes an objectively uplifting experience, and why. All well and good – however, the source of that uplifting-ness is not a theory or a premise. It’s quite a bit deeper than that. It’s what underlies the choices you make in forming those theories and premises. The source of spiritual strength is not the content of your choices and values; it’s what gives rise to that content. It is, in short, not what you think.