Spirituality and education; inner and outer realities

There is a persisting tendency in attempts to define spirituality, to adopt a dualistic point of view which sees the spirit as somehow impenetrably inner, innate and introspectively perceived, interacting with the outer world through the body. As well as a strong intuitive sense of the correctness of this philosophical point of view, it also is supported by psychotherapeutic perspectives that speak of the private inner being. In this paper I will argue that this view is logically, epistemologically, morally, and psychologically problematic. It will be argued that the concept of an inwardness to our mental life can be distinguished from the view of that life as interior. The perspective that we have of our inward selves is learned and conditional upon a sense of an outer self, functioning and communicating in the public world. Rather than an ego centric conceptualization of spirituality based on the idea of the spirit as inner and logically inaccessible, I we might adopt a sociocentric perspective in which the supremacy of the ego is dissolved in favour of an understanding in which we see ourselves as part of the social and natural outer world in which we exist.