スピリチュアリティーの学際研究コミュのスピリチュアリティ発達の二つの位相

II. SPIRITUALITY AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL VARIABLE


As the respondent wrote spirituality itself resists being defined in a philosophical consideration. However the nature of spiritual development has been examined and several educators have proposed tentative definitions. In the United Kingdom Ofsted explained that the development of a pupil’s ‘spirit’ was described as the development of ‘soul’ or ‘personality/ character’ (Ofsted, 2004). In the United States the Search Institute proposed the three processes of spiritual development; awareness, connectedness, and a way of living (Benson and Roehlkepartain, 2008). According to these representative definitions of spiritual development, spirituality seems to have two dimensions; an essential and existential dimension, which is referred to as soul, awareness, and connectedness with the transcendent, and another dimension which is observed as personality, character, a way of living and connectedness with people and nature. Both dimensions of spirituality have their merits and demerits as a psychological variable in educational settings.
Soul is considered to be an essence of spirituality and sometimes the word is used in the same way as individual spirituality. Soul is invisible and not the object to be judged including both the yin and the yang. Emphasizing the dimension of soul as spirituality means to concentrate on non-material values. In the context of secular education not in a religious training, this teaching possibly causes the students’ tendency to focus only on the transcendent dimension neglecting the social value and responsibility in one’s belonged world. Another risk for emphasis on soul is to expose the students to dangerous/unhealthy aspects of spirituality with its non judgmental character. This problem relates to the difficulty of the assessment of spirituality.
In order to determine the criteria of spirituality, another dimension of spirituality, personality, arises as an important variable. Personality can be assessed by observing one’s behavior and is easier to assess comparatively to the dimension of soul. Personality maturity or character strength, in other words virtue, as a psychological variable of spirituality has a problem related to morality. Morality requires the will to grow. Emphasizing this dimension may cause the neglect of grace, which is related to spontaneous joy of being. Virtue or moral also is the context determined concept and is difficult to find in the universal standard. Both soul and character are important dimensions of spiritual development and each dimension compliments one another. Single use of soul or character as a variable of spiritual development has unavoidable problems described above.
The scientific study and the evaluation of the practice need a variable which includes both dimensions of spirituality, and which should be measurable, and free from values. Connectedness itself is exclusive from a value system and that is why the scientists use the term ‘connectedness’ as a key word of spirituality in health science. Meta-physical connectedness which include soul’s dimension is described as vertical connectedness, and physical connectedness which includes personality’s dimension as horizontal connectedness in this model (Fig.1). Connectedness, which has two dimensions of spirituality and is value-free, could be a useful variable of spirituality in a secular educational setting.