Spiritual Epistemology

Spirituality is not only about what people believe, practise or experience. It also raises an epistemological question: how do people believe they know what they know?

Across spiritual and religious traditions, knowledge may be sought through reason and observation, but also through contemplation, prayer, intuition, vision, dreams, revelation, meditation, ritual, embodied experience, psychedelic or entheogenic experience, trance or other altered states. These are different ways of knowing: methods, practices or experiences through which a person understands themselves, the world, or what they regard as sacred or ultimate.

Closely related is the source of authority. A person may regard an insight as authoritative because it is understood to come from God, scripture, religious tradition, spirits, teachers, an esoteric system, nature, the body, personal experience, intuition, reason, science or a community. The way knowledge is accessed and the source that validates it are related, but they are not the same.

This matters because spiritual disagreement is often not only disagreement about beliefs. People may also differ about what counts as knowledge, how knowledge can be acquired, and whose - or what - authority should be trusted.