Spiritual Courage

and why modern life is ethically incoherent

Wondering about spirituality, and what it means for everyday life, has been a pastime of mine for my entire life, just about. Even when I was a hardcore materialist atheist, I was still kind of exploring spirituality. Just from an anti-spirituality perspective.

As many of you will know, I’ve been studying some of the spiritual traditions of India for the last couple of years. It struck me the other day that, at least in the traditions I’m studying, there is no gap between theory and practice.

This is most obviously true in the more extreme sects. The Kāpālikas, for example, were pretty extreme. They did all kinds of weird and wonderful things - drinking blood from hollowed-out skulls, hanging out in cemeteries and smearing themselves with corpse-ash, and on and on it goes.

The thing about the Kāpālikas, though, is that these extreme acts were underpinned by a philosophical theory. This theory was to do with life-force energy and the idea that, ultimately, everything was one. So it didn’t…