Socrates or Buddha?spiritual dimension. It’s that nebulous impulse, though no less
crucial for that. It comes from this sense that the other models
of what it is to be human – as consumers, as gene-machines, as
workers, as citizens – may be partly right, but they’re not big
enough. There’s an excessiveness to being human that needs
to look beyond what the biologist, the psychologist and the
economist together describe. Life comes to us as a mystery, one
deepened by all that we know. So we seek an eternal, infi nite
or perfected horizon that lies under or through the everyday: it
might fi nd expression in anything from an interest in astrology
and crystals, through alternative practices like meditation and
yoga, to converting to other traditions, particularly when per-
ceived as non-doctrinaire.
Being spiritual but not religious responds to a crisis that is
both personal and cultural. It’s as if the old ways of nurtur-
ing the spiritual dimension are failing many today, notably in
certain parts of the Western world, and so people are searching
for new ways of feeding it. It’s what Jung called ‘the spiritual
problem of modern man’. He argued that we live in a time of
shock, because while the benefi ts of technology and consumer-
ism are obvious, their failures are obvious too, be that manifest
in the wars of the twentieth century or the ecological fears of
the twenty-fi rst. That troubles at a cultural level, and at the per-
sonal: the birth of psychology and psychoanalysis are a product
of a corresponding desire to embark on a meaning-yielding
inner search. It’s a search that has become necessary because
we’ve become disconnected from the historic ways by which we
fed our souls – in the West, from the Christian story. Are tales
of Mary as the virgin mother of Jesus only slightly less strange
to us now than tales of Isis the incestuous mother of Horus? Is
the blood of the cross, as a symbol, going the way of the blood
of the bull of Mithras? These elements of the Christian myth
no longer feel immediately part of us. They tell us something
of where we’ve come from, for sure, but do they speak of where
we’re going? ‘The modern man has lost all the metaphysical
certainties of his mediæval brother, and set up in their place the