Book: Sceptical Spirituality

What is this?

Is the ultimate spiritual/gnostic question

What is this thing called experience? (Artwork by the author.)

If you have the answer to the question, then you are ‘enlightened’, as there is nothing further that can be asked of anything, and everything is illumined. (This is meant to be an opening gambit and a provocation, though by the time we have defined our terms, you might decide that the situation is not quite what you thought it was.)

What does ‘what is this?’ mean, in strictly metaphysical, spiritual, Buddhistic and gnostic terms? It means to question what the ‘ultimate meaning, purpose and value’ of the ‘experience of experience’ is supposed to be. Now we’ve combined together the concepts of ‘ultimate meaning, purpose and value’ into a single entity to represent the idea that, having somehow discovered that ‘what’ of ‘what is this?’ any question whatsoever relating to ‘ultimate meaning, purpose and value’ would (or could) be answered intellectually, existentially and metaphysically such that nothing whatsoever would remain hidden, or unanswered, or uncertain. And the reason for coining this multisyllabic conceptual combination is because we don’t have a vocabulary which in any way adequately identifies and labels the ‘that’ which could answer the ultimate question. In many instances, we don’t even know how to frame an ‘ultimate question’ — we usually…