SPIRITUAL PRACTICE AS A WAY OF REALIZING PERSONAL INTEGRITY
HUMANITIES STUDIES 2023 DOI: 10.32782/hst-2023-16-93-04 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
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| Key points | Argues that spiritual practice, which cultivates physicality, sensation, feeling, thought, values, worldview, and the Absolute together, is what realizes the integrity of the person, while philosophy's conceptual tools cannot. Contends that shamanism embodied a body-spiritual synthesis that was later supplanted in the Upanishads and Sutras by a preference for thought, a shift from spiritual-practical to logical synthesis that led to the loss of personal integrity. |
Abstract
This work provides an analysis of the role of spiritual practice as a form of personal improvement; the role of physicality as an important factor in realizing the integrity of the individual is investigated. Philosophy operates with concepts, thought, which is one of the essential forces of a person, and therefore does not have the tools to implement their unity in order to realize the integrity of the individual. Spiritual practice is based on the cultivation of the entire range of essential human forces in their unity and interaction: physicality, sensations, feelings, thoughts, values, worldview principles and the Absolute. The transformation of physicality in spiritual practice is a determining factor in realizing the integrity of the individual. The theoretical foundations of understanding the nature of spirituality are presented, which are based on the ideas of philosophical and anthropological anthropology about the unity of essential human forces, formulated by Max Scheler; on the position of the need to include the existential-phenomenological and interpretative (philosophical hermeneutics) dimension of human existence as a form of understanding the content of spiritual possessions. The presence of a large number of publications devoted to certain aspects of human existence creates the need to understand the essence of man as a whole being, to show the dynamics of the deployment of his essential forces. Considering this dynamic, the spiritual practices of shamanism were analyzed, where the core of body-spiritual synthesis was identified, the development of which was later manifested in the spiritual practices of the period of the Upanishads and Sutras. On the examples of the analysis of the Upanishads and sutras, signs of a transition from a spiritual-practical understanding of reality, when physicality in spiritual practice retains its function of maintaining the integrity of all the essential forces of a person, are revealed, to a gradual preference for thought. It is shown that the spiritual-practical synthesis was replaced by a logical synthesis, which led to the loss of the integrity of the individual.