Yesterday I had a conversation with a friend and he asked me what I meant by being "spiritual." The question made me curious to examine the things I've been doing and the philosophy toward action I've developed over the years—what the different terms mean, and how I might explain them more precisely.
To me, the underlying desire I've been living out is simple: becoming myself.
I think there's a recognizable process in the growing up of young people that you could call domestication. The influencing factors are our parents, school, friends, media we consume, the cultural group we belong to, among others. Through this process we construct our worldview and picture of reality. This includes our sense of morality—what is good and bad. Our desires—the things worth wanting. And our ideals for a good life. None of this is inherently wrong; it's how humans have always formed. But most of it happens unconsciously.
The question I've pursued since I was around 14 years old has been: how do I peel back the layers I picked up without choosing them, and make my own decisions about how to construct my worldview? This means questioning my desires, my moral compass, my ideals—not necessarily rejecting them, but examining whether they're truly mine.
You can sum all of this up as the quality of being you choose to live out. Or simply: who do I want to be in the world? This ties into our sense of identity.
What I learned along the way is that you can consciously craft and choose your identity. It's a sum of different parts of your psyche, and instead of treating it as a given, you can actively shape it. There's a tension here worth naming: if we're all products of our environment, what does it even mean to find your "true self"? I don't think the answer is that there's some pristine, untouched self buried underneath. It's more that there's a difference between a self that was assembled for you and a self you've consciously chosen to inhabit.
The means through which one goes through this process is inner work. To me, this is a mix of asking yourself questions (reflecting), and cultivating practices to sense into what's happening not just in your mind but in your human system more broadly—your body, your emotions, your intuitions. The underlying condition that makes this possible is stillness and solitude. You don't answer these questions in conversation; you discover them within yourself when you actively query your mind and system with the questions that matter to you.
Inner work is not spiritual per se. Everything I've described so far is rather well-studied phenomena of psychology and human development.
To me, spirituality starts with the question of the non-material aspects of human existence—words like soul or spirit. And this is where some people draw the wrong connection: that inner work is only for people who believe in souls, God, or some higher power. It's not. As a baseline for any human being, I'd strongly recommend the process I've described above. Some psychologists use the term individuation to describe related processes—becoming a differentiated, whole self.
But I do think that when you follow this line of inquiry long enough, a deeper confrontation with questions like "why am I here?" and "what matters in life?" becomes inevitable. And this is where spiritual interpretations may start to enter the picture. In this post, I won't go into those questions deeply—they deserve their own discussion.
The bottom line is this: I deeply believe in the process of becoming conscious. This means actively grappling with the questions of self, the beliefs you adopted, and the forces that shaped you—in pursuit of becoming yourself.
Many people never begin this process. My guess is that for some it's fear: the moment you question the fabric of your worldview, your cultural group, or your society, things can get disorienting. So it requires courage to examine things that may take years to fully grasp, if you ever can. But I also think many people simply aren't exposed to the idea that this kind of work is possible, or valuable. It's not always avoidance—sometimes it's just never having been invited.
Here's the reward though: James Hollis said we are all given two lives. The one that starts when we are born, and the other one that begins when we start to get conscious. I think your second life is the most exciting one there is.