I believe experiences derived via entheogens can broaden ones perception and perspective, particularly due to ego death.
I think art, music, astronomy, etc. can elicit spiritual experiences.
But how are we defining spirituality, though?
I like a very short and easily-read book by the eminent French philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville, called
"The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality."
Boiling it way, way down, first, we must consider something of fundamental importance, something that is absolute and immutable: life is full of variety, possibility, hope, let-downs, successes, failures, dreams and broken dreams, love, hate, art, the banal...and it is finite. Death is infinite and unchanging. It strikes me that it is quite natural that we humans -- who unlike other animals are aware of this -- should be concerned. And yet, as Mark Twain pointed out: “I do not fear
death. I had been
dead for billions and
billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
Within that context, Comte-Sponville seems to suggest that atheist spiritually can be summed up as an ethical and moral framework and the interaction of humanity and the individual with his own existence -- knowing who we are and exploring our relationship to all else. That exploration can take many forms, include philosophy, art (and within art, I might dare to include religion), and so forth.
It's a great oddity of us silly humans that we would be terrified of going into the past because, as our sci-fi tells, even a tiny alteration of the past could change the present dramatically. But we never stop to think about the corollary -- how tiny actions in the present could dramatically affect the future. And our spirituality should bring us to appreciate that the future is therefore a part of who we are, in that we are a part of how that future will unfold, even if we don't wind up in it.
And that, my friend, is a very spiritual thought.
