The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
That's F. Scott Fitzgerald writing in 1936 (The Crackup). I saw this quote somewhere in Blogistan recently, and it's been floating in and out of my mind, especially in connection with Sunday's earthquake. When you consider a disaster such as this, the impossible contradictions in life can't help but make themselves visible:
That our bodies are incredibly strong self-regulating systems, and unimaginably delicate.
That lives are snuffed out in seconds, and survivors rebuild.
That the earth we stand on is solid and unmoving, and yet the continental plates can leap a hundred feet to the northwest at a time of their choosing.
That those plates sit on mantle rock which is neither solid nor liquid, and is thus both at once.
Coming to grips with the fact of these contradictions, I think, is what people mean by the word "spirituality": a sense of ineffability, or radical otherness, or total insignificance and insufficiency in the face of forces vastly greater than yourself. "Spiritual" applies to the "how" of these contradictions, the grappling with their existence. An existential reckoning, if you will.
"Religion" applies to their "why" -- what person or being ordered these contradictions into existence, and for what reasons? This is a reckoning on a completely different level. It can be used to supplant or hide the necessary existential reckoning, or (by highly evolved believers) to complement and structure it.
So somehow we must manage to maintain two things in our mind, two things that cancel each other out, and still function. George Orwell called this "doublethink", and decried it as a violation of simple logic, which seemed to him structurally and naturally necessary and inviolable. He even thought doublethink had to be taught, conditioned into otherwise logical human minds.
I don't think it's so simple: there is nothing built into the heart of all these somethings, a nullity we use every day to consider things that are not (my keys are not in my pocket) and things that are (I am limited, fragile, subject to whim of earth and muggers). To sit and consider these nothings, without inventing an absent something (god) to comfort me in their presence: that's the difficult thing.