From Notes on "Spirituality"

One of the myriad problems surrounding many contemporary attitudes to "spirituality" is that the doctrine of an Ultimate Reality (by whatever name - the Absolute, God, Allah, Atman-Brahman, Nirvana/Sunyata, the Tao, Wakan-Tanka) and the elaboration of a spiritual method attuned to our relationship therewith, are left out of the picture altogether!  What we are offered instead is a notion of "spirituality" as some kind of subjective inner state, a kind of "warm fuzzy glow", sometimes harnessed to formulations such as "the kingdom of Heaven is within you" - as if by these words Christ meant that the kingdom of Heaven is of a psychological order!  This is all of a piece with the notion that "spirituality" is a private affair, and that the spiritual life can be fashioned out of the subjective resources of the individual in question. Some of the factors which, over several centuries, have conspired to create a climate in which such ideas could take root include the rebellion against all authority, the cult of the individual, the humanistic prejudice that "man is the measure of all things", the triumph - even in the religious domain itself - of sentimentalism over intellectuality, the shibboleths of "egalitarianism" and "democracy", and the emergence of a rampant psychologism which usurps functions which properly belong to religion.  In recent times we have seen many attempts to assimilate spirituality into the domain of psychology, a move which fails to distinguish between the contingent plane of the psyche and the inviolate Self, or Spirit - this failure generating confusions of all kinds, on full display in "occultist", "New Age" and purportedly "Eastern" movements which lay claim to some kind of spirituality but which scorn traditional religious forms and practices."

- Notes on "Spirituality", Harry Oldmeadow