Sometimes it’s for negative reasons. People work hard and don’t necessarily enjoy their work. Life can feel routine, unsatisfying and even painful. They think: There must be more to this mundane existence.
On the positive side, we sense that an intangible dimension exists. We want to connect to it. We long for a ‘spiritual’ experience.
Logotherapy operates in the spiritual dimension.Frankl writes: ‘Spiritual’ is being used here without any religious connotation, of course, but rather just to indicate that we are dealing with a specifically human phenomenon (in contrast to the subhuman phenomena that we share with other animals). In other words, the ‘spiritual’ is what is human in man (Unconscious God, p. 23)
Frankl writes the following about spirituality:
What is human in man is love, compassion, choice, the defiant power, the ability to laugh at himself, and infinitely more. In all of these ways man is not like an animal. Man has a spiritual dimension.
Thus, the answer to “What is spirituality?” is “What is human in man.” The answer to “How can we find a spiritual experience?” is “Access the human in you.”
Hence, spirituality that serves as a ‘vacation’ from ‘real life’ is not true spirituality. Spirituality is lending a helping hand or in some way accessing our higher self.
Spirituality is in the details, because love is in the details, and love is an aspect of the spiritual dimension of man.
We seek spirituality because we want to be human.