“As an Atheist, a Non-believer, my most pressing concern is just that. I worry about my own, my family’s and my friend’s deaths. The concern arises from my inability to conceive, not of a world without me or them in it, but of the phenomenology of not being. I have a terrible fear of being stuck in limbo subject to an eternal tedium and stillness in an inescapable darkness. I maintain my drive to reunite with my loved ones but lack being or any ability to act upon my situation. It is for that reason that I have always clawed at this area, this in-between space of post or corporeal spiritualism.” (Manthorp, 2020)

Each religious individual has their own understanding of faith, a personal, spiritual reality of embodied experience. For example, regardless of the format or process of the act, the physical experience of prayer, is completely personal. Even identical actions are perceived by different bodies in different ways. Layers of this individualised, corporeal experience of; prayer, pilgrimage, communal eating or drinking, marriage and death etc, form individuals’ Spiritual Realities. These internal mindscapes allow their hosts to escape the mundane, explore the world, establish kinaesthetic empathy and outsource decisions.

Over thousands of years, humans across the globe have invented supernatural phenomena and developed highly complex religions which have, in a multitude of ways, facilitated our social development as a species. On a more intimate level, religion has created and still binds our communities through charity and it’s early iterations of counselling and wellbeing. But as reports of mental health issues are rising and a general sense of moral decline is rife, a yearning within post-religious society is palpable. The godless crave process and experience- we long for the ability to escape the mundane, explore the world, establish kinaesthetic empathy, and outsource decisions (see what I did there?).

That is not to suggest that everyone should frantically reach for a religious text. I observe that ‘experience of’ and ‘belief in’ mean very different things- in the example of prayer, if we remove the deity, one’s experience would theoretically stay the same. I have come to categorise this corporeal/spiritual experience or Corpo-Spiritual (after a brief flirtation with Post-Spiritual, disposed of due to it’s implied atheistic certainty). Corpo-Spiritualism is the bodily experience of activity using the vernacular of the ‘spiritual’. It is neither sceptic, nor religious, maintaining the unknowable nature of the supernatural. As with individualised Spiritual Realities, the layering of corpo-spiritual experience or corporeal affordances form our Corpo-Spiritual Realities.

But I think there is still more to be said and done by any others who wish to take up the batton:

“Within this context, as a designer, a Nomadic Local accountable For my participants and arrogant enough to believe in my own practice, I take on the agency of a post-spiritual [corpo-spiritual] leader. Upon accepting this responsibility, I believe that participatory designers and all those working within a participatory field can take upon themselves the mode or medium of corporeal affordance- the right to afford the experience of phenomena associated with the spiritual- The right to create new ways to escape the mundane, explore the world, establish kinaesthetic empathy, and outsource decisions- The right to design new strands of corpo- spiritual reality.” (Manthorp, 2020)