Introduction

In one of her last public interventions at a British Academy symposium on neo-evolutionary views of religion, anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that modern Man was not mentally more complex than 2,000 years ago; he was simply more confused. This thought is well illustrated by the recent history of the term ‘spirituality’, which is now widely used in an astonishing variety of ways and almost invariably with a positive connotation, although very few people seem to know what they are referring to. Central to the matter is a construction of spirituality as a universal feature of human experience addressing a feeling of a transcendent force or presence, which need not be framed within any particular theological or belief system but can instead rely solely on the individual's experience.

Many academics have embraced the popular understanding of spirituality as distinct from the religious, notwithstanding the very flaky historical grounds on which to base this differentiation. We can think of several reasons why the idea of spirituality has become socially agreeable and detached from that of religion. These include a sense of distrust and disenchantment with institutions, a search for meaning that appeals to our modern ‘homeless’ minds and sensitivities (Berger et al, 1974), and an awareness of commonalities in the different human cultures, expressed in terms like ‘global consciousness’ (Chatterjee, 1989). Spirituality is seen as addressing something deep and private within each one of us but which is also envisioned to be potentially shared by the whole humankind beyond racial, national and cultural distinctions.

However, the term elicits ambiguity, subjectivity and is read in a variety of ways within academia. The first part of the chapter discusses the major ways in which spirituality is constructed by academics. After this we move on to discuss the empirical attempts to assess spirituality as a universal experience. Our analysis of the literature, with a special focus on psychological studies, sheds a very different light on our understanding of spirituality. We suggest that the most statistically reliable measures of spirituality to date are simply assessing a human capacity to experience non-ordinary states of consciousness, a capacity which largely overlaps with partly inheritable personality traits of schizotypy or psychoticism.