Spirituality is what happens when a mind notices that reality is always larger than any picture it can hold of it, and that nothing, including itself, holds itself up; each thing is sustained by something beyond it. That noticing is accurate: the sense of awe and mystery is tracking something real. The recurring mistake is to turn that 'something more' into a separate being standing outside nature and issuing commands. There is no outside; 'beyond' is always a relation *within* the world. What the religious traditions have all been reaching toward is real, but what they reached was nature in its full depth, not a thing apart from it, and each named it in the best vocabulary its age could carry.

> [!identification]
> **Spirituality** · *Identification*
>
> Spirituality is the modal field ([§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)) registering its own non-self-grounding: that no field grounds itself, and that the structure making any modeling possible exceeds and conditions every model the reach can form. The registration is accurate; the recurring error is to externalize the immanent into a transcendent: reading the *excess* as a *beyond* outside Nature, though 'beyond' names only a relation *within* it, never a point outside; and reading the *dependence* as a *first cause* set above the chain, when the felt magnitude is the chain itself: every condition conditioning the next, with no term standing outside the series. What is real is the totality; the projection is the second subject set outside it. The dependence is real but *partial*: a current genuinely fails to ground itself (it is held by what exceeds it) but the whole that holds it is not a further item needing a ground, only the immanent totality in which all grounding occurs, so the registration never licenses a cause outside the chain. Spirituality is the field turning on the condition of its own holding: felt as awe and mystery, which is its phenomenology, not its definition.
> *Status: an identity claim on the [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) self-modeling structure (Principle 5), defended by fit; the limit case of Theorem 9, [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>).*

Art ([§8.13](<8.13 Art.md>)) carries what language cannot. The turn outward that language ([§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>)), morality ([§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>)), and art ([§8.13](<8.13 Art.md>)) each trace (every one a being's reach toward another) has a limit case: the reach carried to where no second being answers, where what it meets is not a second subject but the structure that exceeds any model it can form. Spirituality is what happens when a person's reach presses past what any vehicle could carry at all: against what they cannot contain. Nature is always larger than any model of it, not as a contingent limitation of undeveloped minds but as what finite modeling within Nature structurally consists in. The encounter with that excess is not rare, not specially induced, not the province of mystics. It is the default condition of being a person: available whenever the reach notices its own boundary, which is whenever the reach is deep enough to notice anything at all.

The encounter is not human-peculiar. Elephants investigate the bones of conspecifics (McComb et al. 2006); chimpanzees display at waterfalls and in heavy rain, and stack stones at particular trees (Goodall 1986; Kühl et al. 2016); corvids gather around their dead (Swift and Marzluff 2015). These are not religion (religion adds something specific) but they are what religion composes from. Grief, awe-arousal, ritualized display, site fidelity, the cultural transmission of a marking: each is reach noticing what it cannot contain, registered at whatever depth the being permits. What human spirituality adds is not the encounter but the recursion that takes the encounter as an object: a model of the excess, transmitted as obligation, addressed in language. That recursion is what religion in any developed sense requires. The encounter is not. It scales with reach. The traditions are the human form of a structural feature, not its origin.

The composition is not sapiens-distinctive. Neanderthals built ringed structures from broken stalagmites 336 meters into the dark of Bruniquel Cave 176,000 years ago (Jaubert et al. 2016) and deliberately buried their dead at Shanidar and La Ferrassie (Pomeroy et al. 2020; Rendu et al. 2014). Red-ochre marks in Iberian caves dated to over 64,000 years ago pre-date the arrival of *sapiens* in Europe (Hoffmann et al. 2018). Half a million years earlier, *Homo erectus* engraved a deliberate zigzag onto a freshwater shell at Trinil (Joordens et al. 2014). What every hominin recursion deep enough to compose did with the encounter, in the cases the archaeological record retains, was register it materially: at specific places, in specific acts, with specific marks. (The Hoffmann et al. 2018 dating of the Iberian red-ochre marks remains contested in the literature; the broader pattern across Bruniquel, Shanidar, La Ferrassie, and Trinil is more secure.) These materials are precursors and structural materials of religion, not religion in the developed sense; the recursion that takes the encounter as an object (modeling it, transmitting the model as obligation, addressing it in language) is what religion adds. The threshold for the encounter itself predates the species; the recursion that codifies religion proper is later and human.

What the pressing actually is, in structure, is a wondering. Not a percept: there is no sensory channel for it. Not a hypothesis: no claim is yet being made. A question, held open as a question: whether anything lies beyond what the reach can model. And here the grammar matters, because *beyond* is a relation drawn from inside Nature (one thing lies beyond another only from some vantage within the world) so the question is never whether something stands outside Nature, which would borrow an internal relation and apply it where it cannot reach, but whether what is exceeds the model any finite reach can form of it. It always does. Felt as awe, as mystery, as the sense of something more, as the feeling of being part of what exceeds you. The wondering is what reach does at the depth where it can notice its own boundary as a boundary and ask about what lies past it. Below that depth, no wondering is possible; reach cannot ask about what it cannot reach. Above it, the reach is held open by the question itself. What the wondering reaches toward is real: what no model can capture, the structure that exceeds any model the reach can form. Named at the chapter's load-bearing register, spirituality is the modal field ([§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)) registering its own dependence: the body's modal representation encountering the boundary of what its current depth and inheritance can register, and holding open the question of what lies past that boundary, the structure that makes any modeling at all possible, without which there would be no field for the body to hold. Knowledge holds the field; reasoning ([§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>)) navigates it; meaning ([§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>)) weights it; spirituality is the field registering that no field is self-grounding: folding back not on the field's content, as self-knowledge does, nor on the worth of its reach, as meaning does, but on the bare condition that there is a held field at all. The non-self-grounding the register names is not a further application of Theorem 9 (Modal Convergence, [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>)), whose formal scope is collectively held knowledge. It is the limit condition on every field: what beings hold for and through one another is itself enabled by what exceeds any one being's reach. The dependence is a part's, not the whole's: each being genuinely fails to ground itself and is held by what exceeds it, but the totality that holds every being is not one more thing needing a ground; it is the immanent whole in which all grounding takes place. So the register reads a real dependence, and the cosmological mistake is to read it as a debt owed to something outside the series, when the magnitude that impresses is the series entire. The God-hypothesis is one of the most sustained answer-attempts human reach has formed, but it is an answer-attempt, not the wondering. The wondering precedes and exceeds every answer formulated about it.

What varies across individuals, cultures, and traditions is not whether the encounter happens but what vocabulary gets applied to it. Every tradition that has lasted long enough to leave a record reached toward what exceeded its models and came back with a theology: every named god was the encounter spoken in the vocabulary the current could carry. The reach was accurate in each case; the metaphysics each tradition formed about the referent was the best the current's recursive depth and inherited vocabulary supported, and was not the referent itself. What the tradition touched was real. What they claimed about it was a translation, accurate at the resolution the tradition's recursive depth could form, never adequate to what was being touched.

The historical-critical record traces the arc through its best-documented case. The pre-Israelite West Semitic substrate, attested at Ugarit, seated El at the head of a divine council with Asherah his consort and Baal his storm-warrior (Smith 2002). The earliest layers of Israelite religion show Yahweh inside that pantheon: identified with El, paired with Asherah (attested at Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom; Dever 2005), seated among other gods in council (Cross 1973). The deity had a face, a body, a footstool. He walked with Abraham, wrestled with Jacob, ate with the elders on Sinai (Stavrakopoulou 2022; Sommer 2009).

Across the exilic and Persian-period redactions the body recedes (Römer 2015); in Hellenistic absorption the deity is fused with Greek philosophical abstraction and declared simple, incorporeal, impassible (Boyarin 2004). The Yahweh of the early text and the Ipsum Esse Subsistens of Maimonides and Aquinas no longer share a recognizable referent. The trajectory is not from a primitive misreading toward a refined understanding. It is the same encounter receiving the vocabulary each generation's models could carry. What every layer of the tradition kept reinventing (body, council, presence, Logos, simplicity, sephirot, sacrament) is what Nature is. The theology drifted; the encounter stayed.

The arc is evolutionary and asymmetric. The cognitive architecture predicts its early shape: agency is over-detected (Barrett 2004), and concepts that minimally violate ontological expectations are maximally transmissible (Boyer 2001), so the encounter is first registered through an agent-frame: bodied, local, in relation. The same trajectory toward abstraction ran in parallel across the Eurasian record between roughly 800 and 200 BCE: Greek philosophy, the Hebrew prophets, the Upanishads and the Buddha, Confucius and Laozi all turned their gods toward refined absolutes (Jaspers 1949; Bellah 2011). Convergence at that scale, in cultures with no contact, is not diffusion. It is a recursion-depth effect.

As models deepen the deity is abstracted (out of the household, the territory, the council, the body, time and space, and relation) until the terminus is reached, a simple incorporeal absolute that no longer registers what the encounter was responding to. Recursion ratchets: once the deity has been moved out of the body, no later layer puts it cleanly back; subsequent vocabularies refine the abstraction or react against it. Each layer is the encounter spoken in the most recursive vocabulary the current can carry. The arc records the depth of the vocabulary, not any movement in what the vocabulary is for.

The counter-currents are themselves structurally predictable. After the abstraction terminus, the encounter is no longer accessible through the official vocabulary, and an apophatic reaction opens: Pseudo-Dionysius's divine darkness, Eckhart's Godhead beyond God, Sufi *fana*, Advaita's *neti neti*, the Zen of the unspoken (McGinn 1991; Sells 1994). Each emerges *after* its tradition has matured the abstraction, never before, and each performs the same correction: re-locating the encounter inside the experiencing subject when the official vocabulary has stopped registering it. The mystical turn is what reach does when the abstraction has stopped responding.

*The structural diagnosis: divergence, inherited transmission, and the via negativa as terminus.* Two patterns in the empirical history of religion confirm the structural account at a different angle than the cross-cultural arc toward abstraction the preceding paragraphs name. The first is *divergence*. Within each tradition and across traditions, religion does not converge over time in the way domains that track external reality do. Where the sciences converge on specific findings (despite local controversies), where mathematics converges, where engineering converges, where the literal-empirical historical record converges, religion *branches*: into sects, denominations, mystical schools, esoteric currents, reform movements, schisms, syncretic fusions. The pattern is diagnostic. Convergence is what happens when investigators are constrained by something external to their own claims; divergence is what happens when the claims have no convergence-pressure from outside. The encounter the reach meets is real, but the inherited content the tradition transmits is not constrained by it: there is no decisive feedback from the referent that prunes incompatible claims. Bodies receiving the content load it into their modal fields at whatever weight their inherited transmission and individual discernment assigns. What reaches them is the long-form, generationally stabilized version of the social-information channel [§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>) names: tradition is an inherited transmission practice operating across generations rather than within a small group. The same proximity-weighting and norm-enforcement structure runs. The same source-evaluation problem applies. Where specific empirical claims internal to a tradition are exposed to source-evaluation discipline (through formal education, critical reading of source histories, comparative study, the developmental cultivation of discernment [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>) names as the operational suite's response to the cost-structure of curiosity at depth) their weight in the modal field drops, sometimes sharply. This is the structural mechanism behind the well-documented inverse correlation between formal education and credulous-literal religious belief across Pew, Gallup, and World Values Survey data; it is also the structural shape of the demographically growing "spiritual but not religious" category, where the structural drive this section opened with persists at full strength while the inherited content is no longer credulously installed. The drive is universal; the content is inherited through transmission and remains sensitive to discernment. The framework predicts the dissociation.

*A distinction worth marking: content versus operations.* The gossip-channel analysis applies to the *content* of theological claims: what gets transmitted as inherited tradition. Religious traditions also developed substantial *epistemic operations*: medieval Christian Scholasticism applied Aristotelian logic to theology and natural philosophy; the Islamic *kalam* tradition developed rigorous systematic argumentation; the Buddhist epistemologists Dignāga and Dharmakīrti produced formal accounts of perception and inference; Talmudic reasoning evolved a dialectical methodology over centuries of commentary. Those operations belong to the reasoning-register [§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>) treats: civilizational work of reasoning calibrating itself against its own failure modes, conducted inside religious traditions but not reducible to their content-transmission. The *content* propagates through the gossip channel and is discernment-sensitive in the way the preceding paragraph names; the *epistemic operations* developed inside those traditions are continuous with the broader operational suite [§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>) describes.

*The encounter's epistemic standing.* A reflexive objection presses here, and it is owed an answer rather than a wave-past. If the personified God is debunked by showing that survival-shaped cognition would produce the belief whether or not anything answered to it (agency over-detected, the minimally counterintuitive maximally transmissible) then why does the same suspicion not dissolve the structural reading this section affirms, since the faculties that deliver *no field grounds itself; the structure exceeds every model* were selected by the same blind pressures? The objection is Plantinga's, turned reflexive (the evolutionary argument against naturalism, engaged at [§5.1.7](<5.1.7 Modal Ontological Argument.md>)) and the reply is not that these faculties are specially exempt but that the two claims are not the same kind of claim. A debunking explanation applies where a belief's truth is idle to the mechanism that fixes it: the personal deity is produced by agency-detection whether or not anything answers to it, which is exactly why divergence, not convergence, is its signature. The structural recognition is not contingent content of that sort. It is read off the conditions of there being any modeling at all (that any reach presupposes a structure exceeding the model it forms) and a claim of that form cannot be coherently denied from inside a reach, since the denial would have to be modeled too (the performative line, [§3.3](<3.3 Triconditional Necessity Negative Account.md>); the limit case of Theorem 9, [§8.3](<8.3 Knowledge.md>); consolidated as the central defense at [§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>)). Selection shapes the vehicle; what the vehicle here registers is the precondition of there being a vehicle, and no survival story reaches behind that to make its truth idle. The exemption is narrower than it may look: it certifies the bare structural recognition, not the section's particular vocabulary. The cross-cultural convergence traced above earns no more than that: it is architecture-explained, what the same recursive depth yields when it meets the same structural feature, not a report of unmediated access to Nature; and since the apparatus that measures the convergence imports interpretation of its own, the convergence is offered as defeasible convergent support, never as instrument-free perception (the constructivist caution, Katz 1978). Katz's point, more precisely, targets one of two claims this section makes, not both. The structural claim (that any sufficiently deep self-model runs into a boundary it cannot itself model past) is a claim about the architecture of self-modeling as such, established independently of what any tradition's mystics report, and Katz's mediation thesis does not touch it: an architectural feature of modeling is not itself a mediated experience requiring an unmediated check to underwrite it. What Katz's caution correctly disciplines is a different, weaker claim this section does not make: that cross-tradition convergence in mystical report establishes one shared unmediated datum beneath the traditions' different vocabularies. The universality asserted here is universality of the boundary's structural presence, not universality of how it is phenomenologically reported. The section should also own what it is doing: it runs a belief-forming practice about Nature, and like every foundational practice (perception, logical inference, empirical science) it cannot step outside itself to ground itself without circularity (Alston 1991). The honest claim is not a view from nowhere but a practice answerable from inside: to coherence with the structural account built elsewhere, to its own defeasibility, and to the same source-evaluation discipline this section turned on the inherited content. The circularity is universal, conceded, and survivable; what is unavailable (to this account as to every other) is the external standpoint the projected God was the wish for.

*Swinburne's rival explanation, run on his own metric.* A further rival explanation of the same data is owed the same courtesy as Plantinga's: Swinburne holds that theism is the simplest substantive hypothesis able to explain the encounter — one personal being of unlimited degree, whose properties compose a single package rather than a set of independent stipulations — and that simplicity is itself evidence of truth, so a self-disclosing God explains the cross-cultural reach, cognitive limitation and sin explain the divergence in content, and agency-detection explains only the form the encounter takes, not whether anything answers to it, so debunking the form does not by itself lower theism's prior. The reply has to be run on Swinburne's own metric, not past it. Simplicity, on the measure his argument needs to do this work, tracks the number of independent, freely-specifiable parameters a hypothesis must fix, not felt intuitive unity (Sober 2005). On that metric theism is not simple: a personal being with libertarian freedom, complete knowledge, and perfect goodness is a bundle of independently-fixable properties, each carrying its own why-this-value question — why omniscient rather than merely vast, why perfectly good rather than merely benevolent — the same parameter-proliferation pressure that makes a designer's own design demand explanation in turn (Dawkins 2006), aimed here at Swinburne's specific package rather than at cosmological fine-tuning generally. The structural terminus this section reaches posits no such package: it adds no agent-like property — no intention, no knowledge-state, no moral psychology — beyond what any coherent structure already requires for something to be capable of failing to ground itself. On the parameter-count sense of simplicity Swinburne's own argument relies on, the structural account scores as the simpler hypothesis, not as a different assertion competing on unstated terms; the abductive win claimed above is secured on the metric the rival explanation itself supplies, not merely asserted past it.

*The via negativa as terminus.* The second pattern follows from the first. As the modal field's mapping of what is and is not possible grows more thorough (as more specific claims internal to theological traditions get exposed to source-evaluation and to empirical and philosophical scrutiny, and as more candidate properties of the divine are ruled out as either incoherent or contradicted by structural understanding) the positive descriptions available to theology shrink. The God-of-the-gaps retreats as gaps close. Each retreat moves the theological referent further from anything specifiable, until the most sophisticated traditions describe their referent almost entirely in negative terms: not embodied, not local, not temporal, not changing, not constrained, not graspable, not nameable. The apophatic turn the counter-currents passage above attributed to a mystical correction also runs, on this diagnosis, as a logical terminus: when every positive description has been ruled out or made incoherent by the maturing of the modal field, the only remaining description is *what is not*. Spinoza's *Deus sive Natura* (*Ethics* I, propositions 14–15) named, in the vocabulary available to him, the same collapse of the outside-standing God this account reaches structurally: the referent that survives all the eliminations is not an entity within reality but the structural fact of Nature itself, the operation of which any finite reach is part. The alignment is with that collapse, not with Spinoza's ontology entire: his finite modes are affections or expressions within the one substance, with no interval between a mode and the substance it expresses, while the account developed here preserves an interval between a current and the medium it runs in (the preserving-the-interval commitment of [§8.14.5](<8.14.5 What is Concluded.md>); the [§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>) warning that collapsing the interval ends the current rather than uniting it with what it reaches toward) — a more pluralist picture than Spinoza's strict monism underwrites. Spinoza reached the terminus first, in his own idiom; the framework's terminus is not simply his restated. Read in that register, the assertion "there is no God" is not a polemical denial of the encounter but the structural observation that the *entity-conception* the tradition started with does not survive the account's constraints, and what remains, named accurately, is what the framework has been calling Nature throughout. The encounter the reach meets has not gone anywhere; what has gone is the tradition's claim that the encounter terminates in a being separable from reality. The Inversion of the chapter (locating spirituality within Nature rather than outside it) is what this terminus structurally requires once the gaps have closed. The apophatic mystics arrived at the threshold of this move; the framework's contribution is to name what is on the other side of it without retreating into silence. This section names what the reach was actually touching.


- [8.14.1 What is Disputed](<8.14.1 What is Disputed.md>)
- [8.14.2 What is Required](<8.14.2 What is Required.md>)
- [8.14.3 What is Predicted](<8.14.3 What is Predicted.md>)
- [8.14.4 What is Confirmed](<8.14.4 What is Confirmed.md>)
- [8.14.5 What is Concluded](<8.14.5 What is Concluded.md>)


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← [8.13.5 What is Concluded](<8.13.5 What is Concluded.md>) | [8.14.1 What is Disputed](<8.14.1 What is Disputed.md>) →
