But if you ask them for a precise distinction between spirituality and religion, the responses are something like:

• "I believe in something bigger, but I don’t like labels."
• "All religions are basically the same, so I just take what resonates."
• "God is within me, I don’t need a middleman."

Taken together, these statements form a pattern:

It is basically a “Religion of the Self.”
By the Self, for the Self and in terms of the Self.

Please understand I am criticizing the underlying presuppositions of such a claim, not any persons who make this claim. I’ll qualify my criticism…

• By the self: The path is self-initiated and self-designed. It is separate from a lineage, a tradition, or a community of practice that carries epistemic or existential weight.

• For the self: The orientation is primarily inward (personal healing, empowerment, self-actualization). Others may benefit, but they are not the axis of concern.

• In terms of the self: The criteria for what is meaningful, true, or sacred are internal (intuition, resonance, felt-sense). There is nothing that contradicts, challenges, or exceeds the framework.

It is a religion reorganized around “me”.

So when someone identifies as "spiritual but not religious," they are often (though not always) enacting a spirituality that lacks any real other(s).

It bottoms out as being an isolated self attempting to be its own source of authority, value, and transformation.

And when that fails (which it inevitably does) people think they are the problem.

• "I didn’t meditate enough."
• "I wasn’t aligned with my truth."
• "I didn’t manifest properly."

But the failure is not individual.
It is structural.

The real question is whether your worldview is structurally open to Otherness:
To be shaped by something you did not and could not author on your own.

Here is where 4E cognitive science can help us:

Our brains are not cameras passively recording reality. It is a prediction engine.
It is constantly anticipating what matters, what commands attention and what deserves attention.

This machinery of anticipation is what constructs our world, and in doing so, it also constructs our sense of self.

But left alone, this engine becomes self-reinforcing.

The more our brains predict a certain pattern…

• “I am a certain kind of person.”
• “This is how the world works.”
• “This is what matters.”

…the more we notice things that confirm that pattern.
Our brains will continue to confirm what it already expects if left to its own devices.
This is called confirmation bias.

We start tuning our awareness toward only what fits the model.

This is how our salience landscape (the field of what “stands out” to you) narrows.
Our sense of what is important, meaningful (or even real) can only collapse inward.

Without enough disruption, we become trapped in a predictive loop, because our brain is doing its job too well.

The only way to reconfigure this predictive machinery is through error:

When prediction fails (when something doesn’t fit our expectations) we experience that as surprise or confusion. This happens naturally through contact with information, perspectives, and practices that we could not have generated on our own.

This is why other people, other perspectives, other practices, are crucial for error correction.

They allow you to see what you could not see, precisely because they aren’t you.

And if your spirituality is…

• Designed by you.
• Filtered through your preferences.
• Evaluated only in terms of how it makes you feel

…then it is a closed system. 

Your brain will predict what you expect to be meaningful and then interpret your experience accordingly.

You can only be confirmed, not confronted.
Moved, not changed.
Comforted, not transformed.

You’d be alienating yourself from undergoing the disruption required for growth.

This is why participation is structurally necessary for transformation:
It brings you into contact with perspectives, insights, and patterns of meaning that you cannot reduce to your preferences.

And in that contact your frame begins to shift.
You start to say things like:

• “I thought I was being authentic, but I was just reinforcing my own comfort.”
• “I realize now how much I’ve been avoiding the hard questions.”
• “I thought I was being rigorous, but I was just defensive."

These moments might hurt. But they are also the necessary preconditions for growth.
For better or for worse, transformation requires the self to be re-shaped by something that exceeds it.

Ultimately your brain is not static, it is adaptive.
But it only adapts when its predictions are challenged.
And those challenges cannot come from within your own preferences.
They must come from participation.

From otherness.