In my sophomore tutorial "Lives of Contemplation" this morning, we looked at the charming "Tree of Contemplative Practices" of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, designed by Maia Duerr. It's a nice enough representation of a range of spiritual technologies, most originating in religious traditions, now available for secular use.
I was ready to talk about what the underlying "secular ethics and secular spirituality" might means, as well as what such a tree image conveys, explicitly or surreptitiously, but one of the students did me one better, discovering that there was an earlier version of the tree which didn't scrub these practices of their religious origins: sand mandala, centering prayer, Sufi dancing, insight meditation, gathas, tonglen, metta, Shabbat, vision quest... (Still marked by particularity in the new tree: lectio divina, yoga, Aikido, Qigong, t'ai chi ch'uan.) Ceremonies and rituals based in a cultural or religious tradition has become a lower-hanging branch including only spiritual or cultural traditions.
The tree-image question stands: is religion the root, which eventually produces secular fruits? Or, as implied here, is religion a phase in a longer, basically secular story - roots and trunk are secular (communion, connection, awareness). Some branches might be religious, but leaves and fruit, now that the tree has grown some more, are secular again?
I was ready to talk about what the underlying "secular ethics and secular spirituality" might means, as well as what such a tree image conveys, explicitly or surreptitiously, but one of the students did me one better, discovering that there was an earlier version of the tree which didn't scrub these practices of their religious origins: sand mandala, centering prayer, Sufi dancing, insight meditation, gathas, tonglen, metta, Shabbat, vision quest... (Still marked by particularity in the new tree: lectio divina, yoga, Aikido, Qigong, t'ai chi ch'uan.) Ceremonies and rituals based in a cultural or religious tradition has become a lower-hanging branch including only spiritual or cultural traditions.
The tree-image question stands: is religion the root, which eventually produces secular fruits? Or, as implied here, is religion a phase in a longer, basically secular story - roots and trunk are secular (communion, connection, awareness). Some branches might be religious, but leaves and fruit, now that the tree has grown some more, are secular again?
