1. Knowing and Un-knowing: Extending the Spectrum of Meaning to Include what Really Matters
Environmental Spirituality and Wellbeing - Integrating Social and Therapeutic Theory and Practice - Jeff Leonardi
Jeff Leonardi [+]
University of Wales Trinity St David
Description
As a student of spiritual experience I am much exercised by the question of the status of such experience: on the one hand it is often seminal and transformative for the life and understanding of the subject, and on the other it can be dismissed as purely subjective, as if this decisively reduces its validity in any wider sense. The issue raised here goes beyond spiritual experience as such, into the human sense of relationship - or not - with our bodies and the environment. Both contemplative spirituality and psychotherapy seek to guide the subject from alienation to integration, from a divided self to a wholeness which includes all the dimensions of human being and awareness. In this chapter I shall suggest that these insights demand a wider consideration of the value of subjective experience, feelings and intuitions, and that this in turn suggests the need for an expanded paradigm for what counts as truth.