There are pre-lingual grammars to the working of the spirit.
Many seem to have forgotten this, rather believing that dialogue, or dialogos, is the best path to spiritual transformation. This position is convenient to the YouTube-Zoom complex.
When pre-linguality is acknowledged, the body is usually emphasized. Embodiment represents a productive challenge to the domination of textuality, and stretches us beyond mere dialogos. But we should not stop there.
Fixing our gaze on the body’s movements and experiences is the atomistic reaction against the domination of the written and spoken word.
It ignores the vital context of the body.
If focusing on the individual word occludes the contextuality of the word’s meaning, focusing on the bounded body likewise occludes the contextuality of the body’s expression.
My suggestion here is that spatial practice is a powerful mode of spiritual transformation. Its grammar involves the manipulation of spatiotemporal experience.
Cognition is not only embodied, enactive, and socially embedded, but also extended into changing environment (Newman, De Bruin & Gallagher). In fact, some cognitive scientists believe that spatial thinking is the foundation of thought (Tversky).
The extendedness of cognition into the environment makes spatial practice a potentially powerful mode of spiritual transformation.
Actually, multimodal practice is the untapped potential—practice which integrates embodiment, enactiveness, embeddedness, and extendedness, into transformative manifolds.
Think the early philosopher strolling the stoa with a trusted friend, with the progression of columns keeping the tempo of contemplation and dialogue, and opening up each time onto the agora. The confluence of components is just as important as any one component.
However, the purpose of this post is to call attention to the transformative potential of spatial practice itself.
One under-appreciated consequence of digital screens is a narrowing of spatiotemporal experiences.
As we thrash about for meaning in the digital age, it is important to recognize that our (dis)alienation has formal causes which defy easy articulation. Only then can we begin to think spatial practice as formal cause. We can explore the different configurations of encounter which activate different regions of the psyche.
Here are a few examples:
When the first human left the earth’s atmosphere they experienced what is called the overview effect— “a cognitive shift reported by some astronauts while viewing the Earth from space. Researchers have characterized the effect as "a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus" (wikipedia). The pictures they took revolutionized how we think about our earthly inheritance. Carl Jung reportedly once had an out-of-body experience where he travelled high up above the earth, writing “The sight of earth from this height was the most glorious thing I had ever seen” (Jung). However, this powerful overview effect (real or imagined) is just an extreme example of a much more general phenomenon which may be called imaginative distancing (for later exploration). One cannot long for, and appreciate, something if one is entangled with it.
Spending nights in caves often stimulated the imaginations of early humans, and today people still very much enjoy spelunking and speleology. The monumental pyramids not only manipulate spatiotemporality through sheer exterior scale, but the interior system of chambers represents an elaboration of the more ‘accidental’ cave experience. “According to Napoleonic legend, the future emperor of France emerged from Egypt’s Great Pyramid pale and shaken, having spent hours alone in the King’s Chamber. He never revealed what had rattled him, but supposedly the episode changed his life” (Zelazko). Just as porous rock cavities (‘microcaves’) may have provided “an ideal hatchery for the origin of life” (Lane), the cave experiences of early humans are hypothesized to have incubated symbolic thinking (Miyagawa, Lesure & Nóbrega).
Ascending a mountain to witness the sunrise ‘on its level’ expresses the dignity of human consciousness. Dignity is joyful uprising despite the resistance of gravity. Nietzsche discovered the joy of philosophy not in his private study, nor in dialogue, but by spending days hiking the Swiss Alps. The ennobling ‘peak experiences’, the wandering of great heights, was mythologized in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and iconized by Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. It represents a unique form of spirituality which beckons you to ascend, and cautions you to “never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors” (Nietzsche).
There are countless other examples of spatial practice one could explore, from staring up at the firmament, exodusing from a familiar land to a promised one; to wandering the dessert for 40 days and nights; to breaking the sound barrier; to pilgrimaging to Mecca to circle the Kaaba; to worshipping under the vaulted ceiling of a Gothic cathedral; to pioneering a civilization land frontier; to hut-dwelling in the Black Forest, or by Walden Pond; to tearing down the Berlin Wall; and so on and so on.
My question for you is: How can technology be used to reengage humanity with spatial practice?
Not a trick question: where would you position virtual reality as a potential concealer or revealer of spatial practices?