I think spirituality is a fairly well recognized and understood term.
The problem many of us have is the claim that spirituality is something that can't be explained. Ask what they mean by spirituality, and they can't explain. Ask them about the spiritual wisdom they say they acquire, and you get nothing.
But what can't be explained? I can explain what I mean by spirituality in very specific terms. I can tell you about my pathway to discovery and what I learned. I can describe any experience I can remember, as can just about anybody else who is at least a little articulate.
But when you ask these people to explain, you get things like we've seen in thread already. If I want to understand spirituality, I need to study scripture. Explaining this stuff is like Japanese or butting one's head into concrete. Also common is "I know I communed with God, I just can't explain how I know that." OK, OK, nobody can explain a thing. Yet we're to believe that their having some inner experience which cannot be articulated at all.
So what are the rest of us to understand this to mean? That by reading scripture or following an ism or a guru that one gets hidden knowledge not readily available to others that just can't be put into words? Well, I rule that out from the start. If that were the case, we'd be hearing incredible insights from such people, and they should seem more content and fulfilled for the knowledge.
Let me illustrate how easy it is to describe an inner experience that one might call spiritual. If you know a little science and look up into the night sky and see a star, one can feel a sense of connectivity to that star by understanding that we are made of star stuff forged in now dead stars that had to die for us to exist. One feels a frisson run down his spine as he also experiences awe for realizing how far that drop of starlight came over so many years travelling at breakneck speed just to find my retina and announce its existence. And gratitude, gratitude that this is all possible and that one has been allowed to participate in it.
If I were like these people I'm describing, and I announced that I had had a spiritual experience last night stargazing, rather than give the description I just did if asked to, I'd have to say that it impossible to articulate any of my experience.
So, we explain it for them ourselves. No, you are not on any journey other than the one we're all on living life, accumulation experience, and trying to understand what it means, what we are, and what our relationship is to the cosmos. I can tell others what I learned. I remember tormenting a deaf girl in 5th grade along with a lot of other boys. We'd mock her deaf speech. Eventually, long after the last time I saw her, I had insights that caused me shame and remorse. Later, when trying to end my first relationship, I mangled it creating a lot of extra pain for her, and learned from the experience, never to do that again. How is this any different from all of the other things life teaches if we are alert and contemplative? This is how I learned about attachment, and the harm it can do - just from experience and observation. All of my "spiritual truths" are ideas just like that - right thinking, right behaving, etc. - what leads to happiness?
Yet I never use the phrase spiritual journey for that, and don't refer to special practices needed to acquire this knowledge. It isn't even necessary to read to learn how find happiness, much less consult arcane writings or spiritual mentors. I've concluded that if such people were on to something that I could benefit by emulating, they'd be able to explain themselves as I just have at least somewhat. But you get nothing every time. No reason to believe that they aren't having ordinary human experiences, but dressing it up in the language and mindset of the spiritual path, like something from Star Wars or The Hobbit - in search of some holy grail.
So, after asking so many people for so many years what they are thinking and feeling that they attribute to their spiritual life, and learning essentially nothing from them, I've concluded that there is nothing different or valuable there to me. Also, when somebody tells me that they just know that they have experienced God, but can't say anything to make me believe that they aren't simply interpreting mental states like the one I described stargazing, or some experience with hallucinogenics, as having received a message from "out there" that is actually completely generated by the brain "in here."
There'll be objections to such conclusions, of course, but no rebuttal - just a dismissal and often some claim to knowing things that just can't be explained at all. I suspect that the experience called hitting one's head into concrete is merely the frustration of not being believed that they have knowledge they cannot relate, and just want to be believed anyway. Yeah, trying to convince skeptics skilled in critical thinking would be like banging your head into concrete if you have nothing more to offer than the equivalent of, "I can't tell you a thing about my experience other than that it is a spiritual journey in pursuit of wisdom, just believe me."
