┌─╷─┐
╵┌┼┐╵ polyphanes.smol.pub
╷└┼┘╷ by polyphanes
└─╵─┘

return to homepage

return to post index

───╢※╟───

The Anthropocentrism of Spirituality

To my mind, it seems obvious that all spirituality, both religion and mysticism alike, is anthropocentric at least to one degree or another. This isn't just as a coincidence, but it's a necessarily result of how we develop it all to begin with, because we as humans have to make sense of the stuff in a way that makes sense to us as humans. It's just that, once we can successfully do just that very thing, only then can we learn our proper place in the cosmos, and then learn to center the gods as well as to take into account other forms of life or existence from non-human perspectives. We have to work to get there from where we already are, which is from a human perspective, rather than trying to start from another place where we bring over our already-anthropocentric assumptions of humanity but in an unspoken and uninspected way.

Consider how we went from a geocentric understanding of the solar system to a heliocentric one: we first started with the (fairly reasonable) notion that the Earth is at the bottom and the heavens are above, and that things revolve around the Earth. But once we learned a bit more, we then learned how it's really the Sun at the center of the solar system, even if we still perceive things from here on Earth as the "center" of our perspective. Both are useful relative positions, both at different stages or for different ends! And even then, on even grander scales, the Sun is not the center of all things, either, but itself (and thus the Earth) rotates around even bigger, grander things to be centered. It's a gradual evolution of perspective: when you know better, you can then learn even more.

"Know thyself" is the first step, but it is still only the first step. Once you know yourself, then you learn your place, and what that place is in relation to other things. In the end, we don't have the option to be absolutely self-centered, but we still have to relate all that exists to ourselves at the center of our own experiences.