What follows is a series of random reflections I made several years ago (most of them probably date from 2000, I believe - don't let the date stamp fool you.) Two key terms I use here - "cultic" and "ontic". These are words describing two basically different conceptions of religion, one authoritarian & believing in a God "out there", the other determinedly non-authoritarian, consisting of a personal quest for ultimate meaning, for something that may be referred to as "the God within" (which can be misleading, as it implies a God who is "merely subjective", i.e. imaginary, which is not what is meant at all).
The first part is personal (perhaps embarrassingly so). This is followed by reflection on the nature of existence, some rather awkward attempts at philosophical argumentation, and theology.
Waiting for my PC to boot up or my AOL to log on I’ve been reading Gay Sunshine Interviews which I’ve had for years but never gotten around to…
The first interview is of William Burroughs by John Giorno. I’m glad I didn’t read this before coming out, it would have put me off any notion of solidarity with other gay men permanently. Burroughs is a paranoid old fart, an ex-junkie whose cut-and-paste surrealism awed the stoned elite of the fifties and sixties. Giorno is a poet and a Buddhist. The two talk at cross-purposes—Giorno wants Burroughs to confirm for him the futility of all desire, Burroughs instead talks about how acceptable boy prosititution was in the past and is in parts of the present world, and how dangerous the Manichean notion of good vs. evil is, how good may well be matter and evil anti-matter "and when they get together for a final confrontation the whole shithouse will go up."
This makes for ludicrous reading. Neither of them really identify at all with the gay movement; Burroughs thinks that young people just don’t know how lucky they are; Giorno sees the whole urban gay scene as enslavement to the wheel of becoming.
On the whole though I don’t know how much solidarity I now feel with other gay men. I’m forty-two years old. The idea that I have something called a gay lifestyle, and a set of values that are somehow a natural outgrowth of my being sexually attracted to men, strikes me as absurd. I lead the lifestyle of a lonely single man who for sexual relief turns to porn, because I’m not good at picking people up at bars, I dislike classified ads, and don’t know any other way of meeting someone I’d like and get along with. I belong to a gay church support group, but I don’t go to church anymore (apart from the meetings themselves). The members of this group are as close as I come to friends; but I don’t socialize with them outside meetings and in fact there’s no one I socialize with on a regular basis (my working definition of a friend). I was a member of a leather group for some time, which I deliberately joined thinking that it would be a Transformative Experience. But as with the other group, I didn’t socialize with any members outside group events. And while I had a brief affair with a leatherman who showed me the ropes (both literally and figuratively), I did not find myself Transformed. When I quit the group I didn’t think I was quitting the leather scene entirely but it seems to have happened anyway. I wasn’t very good at it—I didn’t quite have "the look" & was irritated that I needed to have a "look" or an "attitude" or a "masculine mien"; a cookie-cutter set of values just because I might be interested in a specialized form of fucking. Well, I was fucking myself so I decided not to pursue it any more.
There are dozens of "looks" available for people at the present time. Many of them are ways of saying "I’m better than you" to anyone who is not similarly attired, but what’s disturbing about most of them is that it shows that people are so insecure with their own identities that they have to replace it with some prefab group identity. If I’m going to hang around on Queen St. with my friends do I really have to wear black with wrap-around glasses? Well, so what’s so different about a leather bar? One of the things that began to put me off leather was the sense that the scene was moving away from guys trying to make each other hot by wearing their boots, harnesses, chaps and jocks etc. towards guys trying to prove what fuckingly extreme Sex Radicals they were by getting way too many piercings and tattoos. "I am a Sex Radical, therefore I am better than you." I have never, ever, liked people showing off.
Perhaps I need to get away from Toronto. I’ve lived over half my life in its shadow. I have a suspicion or a hope that the Contemporary Urban Snottiness that alienates me so is mainly true of this particular Urb. Toronto is Attitude City.
But none of my basic problems are going to disappear if I move.
I do not want to remove myself from the wheel of becoming, not just yet. What’s the point of that? What’s the point of a hundred billions lifelines all converging, eventually, to become yellow-robed monks (so to speak)? If my life is so completely futile that I should renounce it utterly and seek nirvana, then why even bother renouncing it? Isn’t the renunciation itself equally futile?
And I refuse to believe that life is futile. When you’re absorbed in some activity or pleasure, life is a delight. Life seems futile when you’re bored or frustrated, or when you’re doing a "profit & loss" statement using your past experience as data. Of course if I’m bored now it’s a sign that I should go find something interesting to do. But I don’t do that because I say to myself, "I should be living in a three-bedroom house now instead of this bachelor apartment," and fret about that. Because I can’t immediately move myself into a desired state of experience, instead of looking for one where I can, I obsess. In short life is futile only when the life you’re living is in the past, which can’t be changed, or the future, which can’t be reached.
Meditation, I think, is the art of living in the present, of finding the basic goodness inherent in this moment.
The summer I turned five I was visiting my grandmother in Cape Breton and one day we went to Louisbourg beach. I remember finding some funny stones in the sand.
They were nearly transparent, and green or clear in colour, different irregular shapes, but with smooth, rounded edges. It was explained to me that these were not actually natural, but pieces of pop or beer bottles that had been rendered smooth by the action of the sand and the waves. (On some of them, you could find traces of the original logo). I find this an odd reversal of the argument from design—an object supposed natural turns out to be something that had originally been designed, although most traces of intentionality have been erased from it.
Another illustration: A little girl has a beloved pet hamster which dies. She puts in a cardboard box and goes it to a favourite spot in the woods out back of where she lives and buries it. For a marker, she brings a large stone and places it over the grave, and tries to write an epitaph in crayon on it. Fifty years later, a naturalist comes across the stone. No trace of its original purpose remains; the cardboard box with the animal corpse in it have thoroughly decomposed, the crayon washed away. Insofar as the naturalist thinks about it, the stone is where it is due to completely natural processes, without a trace of intent. As we can see, that isn’t the case however.
"God sends the rain on the just and the unjust." "The rain falls on the just and the unjust." Both statements make the same moral point, but the first as well makes an assertion about the cause of falling rain which most people today would ordinarily regard as unnecessary. Rain falls as a natural consequence of the properties of matter. Water evaporates, as it evaporates it rises through the atmosphere, when the vapor encounters a cooler air mass some of it condenses and being now heavier than the air around it, falls to the ground. Or onto morally variable humans. Intention is not present at any point in the process.
Must a religious or a spiritual person still say things like that? If God isn’t directly responsible for a particular rain shower, perhaps S/He is the one who established the Laws of Nature in the first place.
I think the scientific account of the origin of the universe is correct, .
but one must recognize that this is essentially an atheistic account. There is no need or indeed room for God in it. I don’t want to be the sort of religious person who piggybacks traditional doctrines onto scientific fact, i.e. "God created the world through evolution", "the Star of Bethlehem may have been a supernova", etc
One may say that the scientific account is correct, but is it complete? Does it now account for everything we know of or could know of in the universe? I would dispute this on two fronts: (1) Science has yet to provide a convincing, complete material explanation for consciousness, one where nothing, in effect, would be left over. (2) Even if everything is ultimately reduced to material causes, I would insist that the very flow of conscious experience is still in and of itself unreducible. You cannot appreciate a Beethoven symphony by dissecting notes on paper, or describing the mechanics of sound production vis a vis that particular work, or analyzing what goes on in the brain when we listen to it. You can only appreciate the symphony by actually listening to it. The "appreciation" cannot be part of the explanation. Consciousness may be fully immanent but it is also genuinely transcendent. And one may name that transcendence, when we become aware of it, "God".
One may now come to understand "God sends the rain" as not a naïve causal assertion, but a recognition that there is a transcendent aspect to the most random events in our everyday lives. Usually interpretations of this saying run along the lines of: "Bad things happen to good people, and we don’t really know why, it’s a deep, deep mystery, but still we must have faith." What I am suggesting instead is "Whether good things happen to you or bad look beyond these random experiences to their transcendent core."
The classical formulation of monotheism was to define God as an infinite being who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. It is this formulation that creates "the problem of evil". The ancient Hebrews would not have had such a problem, in that for them Yahweh, though the ruler of the universe, was not all-knowing (Adam and Eve could hide from him in the Garden, he had to send messengers to investigate the rumours of Sodom and Gomorrah); his benevolence was not universal, it was limited to those Hebrews who kept his laws; and while conceived as the most powerful being in the universe, he was not "all powerful" in a strictly logical sense. (The classical God-concept may be said to be what you get when you translate myth-logic into math-logic.)
There are different conceptions of God throughout the history of religion.
The history of religion may be seen as a movement towards universalism. The ancient Hebrew tribal deity Yahweh becomes the One God, and then the all-pervading spirit of the universe.
Garden of Eden story: If God is good, why aren’t we in paradise? … God in the story is not yet the Omnigod, He is a very powerful, immortal being, humanlike both physically and emotionally, but he has limitations. The usual answer to the question is: Because Adam and Eve disobeyed God, i.e. they committed the sin of disobedience. While that is partly true, I think that there is a more significant way of interpreting the story. It is clear from the type of story this is that Adam and Eve must inevitably fall. God has allowed them to eat of the Tree of Life, presumably conferring upon them immortality, but they must not eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Why the ban? Theologians of the Omnigod rationalize; God of course had Humanity’s best interests at heart. The species simply wasn’t ready for the godhood that the fruit of both trees would confer on it, so God in his infinite wisdom and mercy took the gift of immortality from them by evicting them from Eden—for their own ultimate good, of course.
But this interpretation simply isn’t borne out by the story itself. What the serpent tells Eve is, strictly speaking, true: Eating the forbidden fruit will not (in and of itself) kill them, in fact they will become like gods. However, as it happens God will brook no rivals (as is also clear from the Tower of Babel story as well), and so to prevent this from happening He has to expel the first couple.
What the story tells me is that no matter how well disposed people may be towards each other, when there are significant differences in power among them there will be tensions ultimately leading to conflict and alienation. At the time the story was written there was as yet no resolution of this dilemma, except perhaps "contractual" (i.e. the Law).
To put it more formally: Multiple entities must be finite. Finitude implies the possibility of destruction. It also implies that as I am I, and you are you, and they are they, our thoughts are hidden from each other. When there is a power differential, at least, this leads to mutual suspicion and hostility.
THE EMANCIPATION OF DIVINITY
The idea of divinity: Consciousness considered as a pervasive, fundamental, unitary phenomenon.
Because the gods were entities conceived as existing above, beyond, behind the phenomenal world, and were thought of as beings, not just as forces, the early intuitive notions of divinity became associated with them to the point of identification. But while one may refer to divinity as "God" (a name which emphasises its personal quality), the gods of myth and religion—including, I am afraid, the God of the Bible—are at best crude symbols for it. And unfortunately these symbols have historically been confounded with the Reality towards which they they have been made to point, and still are confounded.
The God of authoritarian religion has nothing to do with Divinity. If anyone tells you "God demands such and such" or "God abhors such and such" ask them how they know. If they tell you it’s in their Holy Book, ask them how they know the Holy Book is reliable. If they tell you they know it in their hearts because they have faith, ask them how it is that someone else from another tradition can make contrary assertions yet justify them using exactly the same argument.
The quest for a special experience purports to be a way of seeking to know or become one with Divinity, but it is really a search for the security of certainty. Because the quest is represented as heroic, difficult, sacrificial, and long, it excites admiration in our masculinist society (a society ultimately based on military virtues, whether these are overt or sublimated). But by definition the Divine is always with us, always here and now; so why is it so hard, why is it even necessary, to find it? The indefinite deferral of fulfillment, coupled with the unattractive nature of the path (despite the professed admiration for those who take it), means that only a small minority can ever hope to succeed at it. Authoritarian religions have found it easy to sponsor and control such minorities, and thus retain their role as unchallenged guardians of the divine essence, selectively channeling it to those who are deemed worthy.
We know Divinity by reflecting upon It. The Divine does not need to be found, we merely need to recognize it in our lives, which we can do (fairly easily) by quieting ourselves, clearing our minds of distractions, and "letting ourselves be". That is the positive value of prayer and meditation, and what the Sabbath—the day of Rest—is about. In fact we cannot know It today by any other way. The long-unchallenged authority of religion has collapsed in the wake of the scientific revolution. Some still appeal to special experiences as authenticating faith, but unless you’ve had such an experience, this is an empty appeal—one might say it’s special pleading. Moreover it is certainly not immune from reductive scientific critiques either (whether these critiques are always sound or not is not the point).
The only alternative is a non-reductive interpretation of ordinary experience—where specifically it is consciousness that one refrains from reducing to something else, and the implications of that are explored.
Our relationship to the Divine is analogous to that of leaves to a tree.
DO
CAN-OPENERS
IMPLY
CATS?
Arguments for the irreducibility of consciousness:
First note that the assertion that everything can be explained in terms of material processes is as much an article of "faith" as the assertion that everything cannot.
However if consciousness is just the accidental product of evolution, and need not have occurred (as Stephen Jay Gould is fond of pointing out, if you ran the tape of evolution backwards and started the process over again, there is absolutely no reason for thinking it would play out the same way. Intelligent, conscious entities don’t "necessarily" evolve, they just happened to have, and perhaps only once in the history of the universe.) But think how decidedly odd this is. A universe might have started out with a big bang, expanded, evolved; in small isolated backwaters developed highly complex entities (created by the forces of random mutation and natural selection acting on self-replicating molecules); entities wholly lacking in the attribute of consciousness (just as it’s quite conceivable that no creature on earth might have evolved the ability to fly); these thrived for a few billion years or so, perhaps attained space flight and expanded out through their own galaxies; but eventually became extinct, as all the stars went out one by one and the entropic heat-death of the universe occurred. All this without a single observer to note any of this happening.
In what sense, then, can anything be said to have happened in such a universe? We could conceive of another sort of universe where there is a Big Bang, but matter and energy is so evenly distributed that no stars or galaxies ever coalesce out of the void. Beyond the atomic level, nothing would ever, ever happen in this universe. But again, there is no observer to notice how boring everything is, or to notice how different it is from the other unconscious universe.
What I am trying to get at is that there is an absurdity in the very conception of unconscious events. Scientists (along with all the rest of us) have assumed that their descriptions of the world refer to "things that happen" & these things need not be observed in order to happen. What an appalling idea to think of a God who not only numbers every hair on our head but is aware of absolutely every little last "thing that happens" (every neuron that fires, every radioactive atom that decays, throughout the entire universe from the beginning to the end of time). "Common sense" (and abstruse philosophy) causes us to reject this extreme Berkelian position. So: The idea that events can occur without being witnessed rids us of this bugaboo. Quantum physics introduced a degree of strangeness into this notion, by recognizing that the very act of observing a thing happen causes it to happen in a different way—depending on how one chooses to observe it. Electrons scatter in a particle-like configuration when you fire them through one slit, but in a wavelike-configuration when you fire them through two. Moreover, certain "things that happen" can’t, even in principle, be directly observed (such as an electron jumping orbits) and we shouldn’t even try to visualize them, except in the precise mathematical terms physicists have developed to describe them.
Perhaps some of this strangeness might go away if we could rid ourselves of the notion that these descriptions refer to "things that happen" or "events", perhaps they refer to certain sorts of mathematically describable relationships, of which events may be the um, eventual outcome. We cannot visualize such "events" or "things" because they aren’t either. Let us instead define an "event" as something that is witnessed, directly or indirectly. If no one sees a tree fall in the forest (direct witnessing) someone may eventually see that it has fallen (indirect witnessing), and even if no one ever comes into the forest before the fallen tree has rotted and mouldered to soil, its fall has had a tiny, but nonetheless real impact on the whole environment in which we live and have our awareness. I will use the oxymoronic term "unconscious witnessing" to refer to this latter. It is important for my argument that the field of consciousness be seen as affected by these minute events, even if such effects are not noticed.
I come down with the flu. My sickness is a matter of "direct witnessing" to me. I stay home from work, leaving a message with my boss to tell her what has happened; my absence & the message constitute indirect witnessing of my sickness for people at work. I go to the doctor and he tells me that I’m sick because a certain microorganism has invaded my bloodstream—such microorganisms have been directly witnessed (under microscopes), but more importantly their actions have been witnessed indirectly and their effects analyzed inferentially. (In the sense because I manifest just the sort of symptoms such microorganisms have been observed to cause, the doctor examining me assumes that it’s present in my bloodstream. He probably doesn’t do any further tests unless I’m seriously ill.) Where in the morning I (knowing nothing at the time of the germ theory of disease), was only an unconscious witness to the microorganism, by the afternoon I could be said to be an indirect witness. ("If I feel this way it’s because I have the flu bug." "If the tree is lying on the ground, it’s because it must have fallen.") Of course I cannot directly witness the flu bug causing my sickness; even sophisticated in vitro nanoscopy would only at best show me a few flu bugs attacking a small section of my tissues, whereas sickness is a "global" phenomenon.
The real question is can things occur that are never witnessed, in any of the ways I have given above? Well, obviously I can’t give an instance of such a thing, because all the things we know of are… known of, i.e. witnessed. We could hypothesize a sort of thing that never is or ever could be witnessed, but we could never establish its existence, nor even, I think, describe any of its attributes—because its attributes would need to be, by definition "unwitnessable" and we don’t have any instances of that. (Say, what the universe was like before the Big Bang.)
But some would argue that the line of reasoning I seem to be pursuing here is fallacious. Am I not about to say that because every event we can conceive of is observed (in some sense or other, including the very tenuous sense of "unconscious witnessing"), events must imply observers? In certain households, every time you use an electric can-opener out of nowhere a cat or two will appear. Do can-openers imply cats? Ridiculous!
I agree. But it is equally ridiculous to suggest that cats imply can-openers. Observing that cats and can-openers have a close relationship with each other doesn’t allow us to make any conclusions about causality. If we only know of cats and can-openers, is it necessary to argue that one is only a version of the other? That a cat is an "emergent phenomenon" of a can-opener? Or perhaps the truth is that a can-opener is an illusion generated by the hard-wired linguistic shortcomings we have in describing cats. Or a can-opener is a kind of mental projection that cats make, an expression of cat-karma. I may see a clear and close relationship between the two but I don’t see an identity. Should we not treat the two as two until we have good reason for believing that (a) is made out of (b) or (b) is made out of (a)? Or perhaps there is (c), which we don’t yet know, out of which both (a) and (b) are made. If we never do know (c), then we must resign ourselves to being cat/opener dualists; that, or assert our blind faith in the unknowable (c). (Bertrand Russell, who was certainly did not see himself as a promoter of outmoded superstitions, put his dibs in for (c).)
Many believers found their faith on revelations of truth that were made in the remote past. All materialists found their faith on revelations that are yet to come. I can’t say that one party is more deluded than the other… Towards the end of the 19th Century it was believed by many materialists that within a few decades everything in the universe would be explained by deterministic laws and there would be no need to posit a creator or first cause. In the first decades of the 20th Century this faith in the triumph of determinism was shattered by the discoveries of the quantum physicists. There is still no need to posit a creator or a first cause; nor is there a need to envision what an electron looks like going around the nucleus of an atom; nor should there be a need (on the part of scientists) to feel that their works are only justified if they lead to an explanation of absolutely everything in the universe.
Back to ABC. If (a) is mind and (b) is matter, what is the difference between them? Basically, consciousness. Mind is conscious, matter is not. But we talk about one’s "unconscious mind", and obviously if materialists are correct, matter can, upon occasion, become conscious. Looking at the "unconscious mind" first: we infer its existence because of things that can be brought into consciousness, directly or indirectly, or that we were once conscious of and might again become so. It is close to what I meant by "unconscious witnessing", and clearly can have a material component (but that is not necessarily all there is to it). To talk about mind/matter as the basic duality (from which we try to establish unity) is misleading and almost always leads to an attempt to reduce one to the other. (A cat is nothing but a sort of can-opener.) (I’d also suggest that the reductionist attempt appears to be more successful on the materialist side, not because materialists are correct, but because they can actually do hands-on experiments with their primal substance! Charts and tables are very impressive.) I suggest defining the basic duality as conscious /unconscious. This immediately identifies the two as mutually exclusive, and points to the basic dilemma involved in any unification project, to wit: (a) cannot be (b) and (b) cannot be (a), and what would (c) be if it is not one or the other?
To return to the problematic term "unconscious witnessing". (Perhaps I should just reject it?) I am sick, because of a flu bug in my bloodstream, of which I am utterly unaware. I am witnessing the effects of the flu bug, but not the bug itself. One could do a substitution here: Effect-witnessing instead of unconscious witnessing. What is an effect? It is the result of an action or event. That is, it is the action itself radiating out in time and space. We can see that all other forms of witnessing, inferential, indirect, and direct, are forms of effect-witnessing, differentiated by degree of remoteness from the core-event (if there is a core event?) Then what is unconsciousness? In respect to consciousness it is the separation of entities in space/time. Are there then necessarily conscious entities? I don’t see that every entity needs to be—I don’t see that the flu bug, for instance, needs to be. But we can only define unconsciousness by what it is not, namely consciousness. A separation in space/time of entities is otherwise just geometry. Is geometry the (c) that unites (a) and (b)? Well, geometry seems fairly unconscious, and what is unconscious can only be defined in terms of what is conscious. So… no, I don’t think so. If unconsciousness can only be understood in terms of consciousness, is the reverse true? That would be very Zen, wouldn’t it?
Amazingly, the reverse is not true, because we have the option of taking consciousness as a "given". In fact, we must take it as a given, because here we are. Or here I am, and there you are, more accurately. (But perhaps it there’s another "given" that precedes this "given"—what is it then?) From where I stand, I am the given reality, inference of the existence of other entities leads to the concept of separation in space/time, which leads to the concept of unconsciousness. When I fall asleep in the evening and wake up in the morning, there is a "disconnect" in the flow of my conscious experience. If I didn’t have others around me to tell me that I was asleep (i.e. unconscious) I would probably think of it as something like a "jump cut" in a movie. But as others do tell me this, I learn to say "I was asleep" instead of saying "suddenly it was morning". While multiple conscious entities (or a single entity that exists over time) imply the existence of conscious/unconscious duality, a single entity does not imply multiple entities. It merely infers them! Consciousness cannot be understood in terms of unconsciousness.
Have I used a hidden premise here? Didn’t I define an "event" as something that is witnessed, and haven’t I somehow trickily argued my conclusion based on that arbitrary premise? I don’t think so. My definition of "events" was intended to generate a definition of unconsciousness that goes further than saying "that which is not conscious". The crux of my argument relies on the identification of the real duality that we are dealing with in this debate, not mind/matter but consciousness/unconsciousness. An analysis of the two terms shows that one is given (it is our experience) and the other is derived from it. That the derived term, unconsciousness, can be re-presented in terms of space/time geometry, and geometry does not (at least not obviously) imply the possibility of consciousness. If it did we would be able to say that consciousness (like gravity) is just a consequence of the geometry of space/time. (Einstein of course did not on a whim assert the latter, he argued it mathetically. Where are the corresponding arguments for the relativity of consciousness?) (a) Consciousness is a given; (b) consciousness and unconsciousness are mutually exclusive terms; (c) therefore neither is reducible to the other; (d) unconsciousness may be re-presented in terms of geometrical relationships between entities but (e) geometrical relationships among entities cannot be re-presented as consciousness (f) what we think of as "the material world" has been described as geometrical relationships among entities (g) therefore consciousness is not reducible to matter.
I’m not putting this forward as some sort of conclusive argument. It seems to me that in this debate, people try very hard to believe just what they want to believe, materialists as well as non-materialists. I’m only putting it forward to show why I think it is reasonable to believe that consciousness is not reducible to material processes.
That was "what to believe".
The basis of belief cannot be authority, nor can it be special experiences, which leaves certain sorts of reflection.
In wondering "what’s going on here?" one comes to two broad possibilities: (1) Whatever’s going on, it’s essentially pointless & accidental. (2) Whatever’s going on is ultimately positive, in some sense.
Nothing going on in the world is going to help us choose between those possibilities. Believers sometimes try to argue that we are living in "the best of all possible worlds" while unbelievers argue that life’s as bad as could be expected in an accidental universe. The former seems like rationalization and the latter like realism which would give unbelievers an edge. But some believers have been able to face the hard facts of the world as well without trying to deny them or argue them away. That leaves them with "the problem of evil". The basis of their faith, however, is not in an interpretation of what’s happening but a consideration of what it is to be a person. One stubbornly persists in believing that something about personality is irreducible, and of absolute value. As the "I" in me does not come from the material processes of this world, and as I do not believe I am self-creating, my being must have a source, a Creator, who is not less of a person than I am.
But what do I do with this fact? It’s impressive, certainly, but is my life any different for knowing it? If I am not going to submit to the yoke of authority & I am not willing to renounce the world in the quest for a "special" experience of God, what then is the point of my calling myself a believer?
I must set time aside regularly to commune with God—that is, to reflect.
I must see my life as one of an uncountable number of journeys of discovery that embodied Spirit makes through the universe. I must bear witness to the journeyers around me, in some way or other, help bear their burdens, share their joys.
In the broadest sense, in truth-seeking one cannot be "agnostic". One has to choose which road to follow, if one is to move at all. One either decides to take the road that is supposed to lead to the City of God or the road that has no destination at all. If one is persuaded that both roads lead nowhere, one will either decide to go nowhere at all or will take the latter, but merely out of boredom or curiosity; or on the speculation that even though the road ultimately doesn’t go anywhere, there may be better prospects further ahead. If one is not so persuaded, one will take the first road.
To put it another way:
Two people are lost in the woods. They’ve had an accident some time in the past, a large heavy branch fell on their heads and they’ve lost their memory. So they really don’t know whether they’ve always lived in the woods, or if they’ve ever been anywhere else, indeed, whether there is anywhere else to be. Occasionally each of them will have fantasies of different prospects than this dark and tangled forest, visions of rolling fields and green pastures under bright sunlight. Visions of great cities with immense towers and straight roads and ornate public buildings and squares. One of them thinks that these daydreams represent real memories, or perhaps they are prophecies of things to come, and suggests to the other that they try to find a way out of the forest. The other insists that they have been having mere fantasies, which are delusive & distract from the day-to-day business of surviving. Probably such fantasies do have survival value in themselves, says the other, which is why we evolved to have them; but from all that we’ve learned about woodcraft in the past few years, we can see that they aren’t really true. Well, says the former, while I’ll admit I know less about woodcraft than you do, I really don’t think that it’s possible to use it to make that sort of conclusion. Until you persuade me otherwise, I’ll continue to look for a way out.
In this example I don’t want you to think that I’m presupposing which of the two viewpoints is correct. I don't know myself.
WHY IS THERE ANYTHING AT ALL?
Why is there anything at all? The question presupposes that there is a possibility that there might be nothing at all, absolutely nothing. However, "nothing comes from nothing"; therefore, there must be something.
The real first question should be: What is the least that "something" could be, and still be the source of everything there is today?
Another sort of question goes along the lines of "Does life have any meaning?" Again this seems somewhat absurd. What is meant by "meaning"? However, this is not fully absurd, as one can answer the question, at least to ones own satisfaction: "Meaning" is that which affirms us as persons, even in the face of the knowledge of death. "Meaning" is something that seems to transcend death.
To say that life has ultimate meaning, and that there is a God, is to say the same thing. God is ultimate reality conceived of as in some sense personal. "Meaning" is the ultimate affirmation of the personal.
Each person must discover God in his or her own way and in his or her own time. The day of authoritarian religion has passed.
God has created nature as autonomous and we emerge within nature as self-directed individuals. I think this is logically necessary: a sentient individual is necessarily self-directed, and self-direction can only occur in an autonomous medium.
The self-directed being can move away from the source of its existence or towards it. One way results in disintegration; the other in realisation.
The movement toward is also known as love.
The central principle of any genuine moral system is the recognition that other people are just as real as the moral agent.
Traditional theism has it that nothing can happen without God willing it or at least allowing it; God is an absolute control of things. This stance is necessary when one conceives of God as essentially separate from creation. But in a panentheistic framework one can recognize that evil occurs without God either willing it or specifically allowing it. God is the force of integration, being resisted by the forces of disintegration.
Gods of ancient religions, including the religion of the Hebrews, were powers that one served in order to ensure survival and perhaps attain prosperity for the worshipping community. The above conception of divine reality emerged out of such traditions but I think is fundamentally distinct from them, even though mystics of all faiths will try to express their convictions using traditional language, symbols and conceptions (thus helping ensure their own survival).
R U (1) (2)?
There’s religion & religion.
Religion (1) is the belief in external powers that govern our lives & who can be influenced favourably if we treat them well.
Religion (2) is the belief that life has inherent meaning, i.e. a basic positivity or affirmation, that we can experience to the extent that our worst fears become meaningless.
Religion (2) had its origins in Religion (1) and has tended to express itself in the language of (1), although tending to emphasize that this language is meant metaphorically, not literally. Understandably, this has led to confusion.
The trouble is, there is today no reason for believing that Religion (1) has any validity. There are no gods. And I would add, there seems to be no God, if one means by that word a kind of cosmic Superman, who can do absolutely anything He wants to but chooses not to.
Can (2) survive without (1)? It will have to learn, as (1) becomes less and less plausible to more and more people.
Bishop Robinson (in his once-controversial bestseller Honest to God) defined God as the name we give to ultimate reality, "considered as in some sense personal".
What is personal? As a bare minimum, the personal implies consciousness. One cannot avoid the metaphysical question of the nature of consciousness in this debate. If consciousness is no more than an activity of certain kinds of large, complex brains, then it cannot be regarded as ultimate reality.
Yet there seems to me nothing more absurd than seeing consciousness as ephemeral. As an individual conscious personality, I may be ephemeral, but the Awareness that "illuminates" me is not. Any experience that points towards this bedrock Awareness is what we tend to call "meaningful", whether it is a sunrise or a symphony.
The first characteristic of Religion (2) is that it involves cultivating awareness of Awareness through various means.
Secondly, it has a redemptive dimension. That is, one isn’t just cultivating a. of A because it’s a very trippy thing to do (though let us not dismiss that either). One is doing so because the alternative is death – in religious terms, not primarily meaning the death of the body but the death of the soul; that is, the soul which is swallowed up by despair and meaninglessness.
Thirdly, because it has a redemptive dimension, it also has an ethical dimension. No one can selfishly pursue genuine enlightenment.
Christianity makes a specific claim about Jesus as the ultimate focal point of faith. Jesus is the Redeemer, the Son of God. In Paul Tillich’s term, he is the final revelation.
From an R1 perspective, this claim must be seen in today’s world as being arbitrary. Is Jesus the final revelation, or is the Koran? (To name just two alternatives.) There’s an elementary "undecidability" about R1 truth claims; and, as I said above, the entire R1 worldview seems to lack validity today.
What does an R2 perspective make of this claim?
One notes first of all that R2 theologians have tended to de-emphasize the historical specificity of Jesus. (Meister Eckhart’s "The Son of God is being born in each of us each moment" is a good example of this approach.) However, if they deny history entirely, they generally cease to be Christians in any meaningful sense. (Look at how the God is Dead movement imploded).
The R1 narrative of Christ’s life is this: A supernatural entity reproduces itself with a mortal woman; the child, who is seen to be identical with the Father, grows up to proclaim himself as the redeemer of humanity; allows himself to be crucified which in some mysterious way brings about the longed-for redemption; following which he is resurrected & ascends to heaven.
An R2 narrative might go like this: There seems to be a divide between the source of our existence and ourselves. We experience meaning from time to time, but our lives are still spiralling down into meaninglessness. Insofar as we consider God to be external to us, and somewhere other than here, this is inevitable. "God with us" is the answer to this, an archetype that denies this division. There is such an archetype, it has been around for 2000 years & is called the Christ.
The Jesus Event created this archetype, which obviously owes a lot to the man Jesus of Nazareth. It is clear from reading the New Testament that the early Christians did not think of themselves as worshipping a ghost or an angel, but of quite literally being themselves the earthly embodiment of the Christ.
This is panentheism, isn’t it – but can one not be a panentheist without being a Christian?
The redemptive dimension of R2 implies that one experiences oneself as lost; in need of rescue from despair & death. This rescue is accomplished by being grasped by an archetype, the Redeemer. But the Redeemer is not, cannot be, merely a "symbol" – if so, it is swallowed by the same kind of self-referential meaninglessness that afflicts atheistic existentialists and post-modernists. The Redeemer must have, or have had, some concrete embodiment in the real, historical world. (At least this is what we must assume to be true). This is the difference between fantasy and hope.
Now you need to plug some name in here. Either the Redeemer has been here, or not. The historical reality of the Christ archetype implies strongly the former. The name to plug in, then, would be Jesus, however much or little we may know or think we know about him. We know something about him, at any rate.
Perhaps there have been a number of Redeemers, Jesus among them (or conceivably – not among them). Isn’t Gautama Buddha such a figure? Isn’t Mohammed?
In a certain sense, yes, of course: These two are Redeemer figures in their own particular traditions every bit as much as Jesus is in his.
I believe that at all times and in all places God has been revealing Himself to those "with eyes to see and ears to hear". Moses, Zoroaster, and Mohammed (to say nothing of Joseph Smith) all brought messages from God to their respective peoples, and all promised various kinds of redemption. All of these involved adopting certain practices, ethical and ritual. As such, they are embodiments of the R1 spirit. With Jesus, the medium is the message, and the response to the message was "Jesus is Lord". I believe that that makes Jesus unique as a Redeemer, and in primarily in the R2 sense.
The legendary warrior Arjuna was faced with a moral dilemma when he had to fight his own kinsfolk. His charioteer Krishna revealed himself to Arjuna as the incarnation of Vishnu, and gave him a lengthy lecture about spiritual duties. Krishna is basically an R1 redeemer. The Vedanta tradition that draws upon the Bhagavad Gita is R2, for the most part, but as such is lacking a historical redeemer. In such cases, a process of redemption is substituted for an actual redeemer. Someone after years of discipline may obtain enlightenment after which he or she is regarded a guru (teacher), and has disciples in turn. However, there is no finality about this process; moreover, the guru becomes to his or her followers an external "authority" rather than an internal guide. The authority of Jesus rests in our response to him, and is an immediate thing, not a long term process of "finding God".
Gautama Buddha eschewed conventional religion. His path to enlightenment, again, is a lengthy one, and is moreover predicated on the depressing proposition that life is essentially suffering & only by annihilating desire, especially the desire to go on living, can we find rest.
THE JESUS TRADITION
Thanks to Madpriest for this icon, from his Of Course I Could be Wrong... blog.
The Jesus tradition consists of sayings/deeds/signs, reactions by others to these, and assertions of the religious significance lying behind all this. While the tradition goes on to this day, the core of this tradition is, essentially, the New Testament.
There is no point in arguing how historically accurate any of this is. There is no such thing as historical certainty, and to argue that "faith" is what enables the believer to "know" that Jesus said and did such-and-such is question begging. It is not with history that the believer, potential believer, or interested observer is engaged, but with the tradition.
Revelation does not occur through the encounter with an historical entity, but through engagement with a tradition. One starts by having a positive reaction to it, which leads to reflection. Reflection leads to deeper levels of engagement. It’s these deeper levels of engagement, the fact that the initial subject matter is not exhausted or "figured out" but yields more and more treasures, that is revelatory. For many people, the Jesus tradition has been a place where God, the ground of being, has been encountered.
The insistence on the necessary historical truth of the tradition ironically kills this possibility for many other people. The moment you are capable of intellectually questioning the historical truth of the Gospel (which is not at all the same as the Truth of the Gospel), you are forced either to retreat into irrationalism or fundamentalism, or else to feel the contents of your faith slip away from you piece by piece. There goes the Garden of Eden, there goes the Flood. Good, now we don’t have to seem anti-scientific. But then, there go the shepherds and the wise men, there go the Virgin Birth, walking on water (good, that seemed idiotic anyway), changing water into wine, can the Resurrection be far behind? No, not really. Good German theologians have been "demythologizing" that for nearly a century.
What, specifically, does any of this mean? Is the Jesus tradition unique, is it in any way better than other traditions? What follows is an attempt to summarize my own learnings from the tradition. It will involve a certain amount of historical speculation, but bear in mind that what I am trying to convey that such speculation is, in the final analysis, irrelevant whether it is correct or not.
Jesus went to be baptized, that is washed clean of his sins, by John the Baptist. On the occasion he heard a voice tell him, "You are my beloved Son." I believe what he experienced was an overwhelming feeling of God’s love and forgiveness, and this experience determined the content of his own teachings. This altered his understanding of the dawning of the Kingdom of God. The contemporary sense of that term was literally apocalyptic, a violent disruption of the corrupt world order in which God would bring history to an end and redeem the faithful. For Jesus, it became instead the invitation to a feast, the joy in recovering something that was lost, a complete renewal of the soul that could be gained simply by asking for it. His mission was to convey this understanding to others. He did not teach that he was God’s only Son, and the rest of us could only hope to be adopted. Rather he taught that God was our Father (more precisely, in fact, our Papa). Nor did he see this transformation to be a result of being conventionally pious. To experience God’s love and forgiveness, you merely have to be loving and forgiving yourself.
At some point, he allowed his mission to take messianic form. Whether or not he believed himself to be the promised deliverer of the Jews is open to question. But he likely was executed because Pilate was led to believe it, or at least led to believe that he had a convenient scapegoat in his hands.
There are two poles of Christology: One that emphasizes the radical nature of his teachings, the other that virtually dismisses his teachings and insists that the real significance in his life lay in his death, the utter failure that turned into a triumph (known as the Resurrection—whether this is understood literally or symbolically is something I’d rather not go into right now). Both poles are necessary, I think. Some try to argue that his teachings were so controversial to the local authorities that they just had to silence him, and arranged to have him put to death. (The Gospels themselves tell us that it was his assertion that he was the Son of God that incensed the High Priests so.) However, I think that a better synthesis is achieved by recognizing that the horrible, meaningless, undeserved death that he suffered was the ultimate test of his teachings.
THE DEAF MUSICOLOGIST
Music and noise:
"Noise" is random, disorganized, meaningless sound."Music" is ordered, organized, meaningful sound.
The materialist is like a deaf person studying a musical score – she will find patterns galore, astonishing mathematical symmetries, but will never experience the music. This "deaf music" is a third category of "sound"—it contains internal, self-referential meanings, but no ultimate ones.
Any materialist may have two sides. One is the rigorous philosopher who insists that the world is utterly without purpose or meaning. The other is often an easygoing, affable person who quite enjoys life. The two sides are presented as one, linked by the "deaf music" described above.
This is one reason materialists have been able to successfully propagandize their outlook. Much of the time they don’t present a model of the universe that is pure noise, ending in despair, but one that has enough order in it, presumably, to relieve our anxieties (most of the time), even to satisfy us.
Another reason is the creation of a category of hero myth appropriate to the age – the "existentialist hero" (or anti-hero).
Among the types of heroes possibly the two most prominent in our culture have been macho conquering ones and redemptive sacrificing ones. Hercules and Christ. The existentialist hero "Sisyphus" is virtually an amalgam of both. Thus his appeal in this power-obsessed, deadly civilization (which until recently was proud to call itself Christian).
Other types of heroes might include the discovers or creators (Madame Curie, Beethoven), the endurers ("individual triumphs against great odds", which sounds at first Herculean but I am thinking more along the lines of Helen Keller or Stephen Hawking), and reformers (Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Gloria Steinem). I think one might also mention "erotic" heroes, which would include movie stars and pop stars, as well as sex symbols. I’m sure this is not exhaustive, but it is enough to suggest that these sorts of a heroes are lower key than the first two. (King’s assassination, of course, turned him into an hero of the sacrificial type.)
A third reason for materialism’s success is the fact that it has been represented as part of the liberal resistance against the authoritarian Church which dominated Western civilization for the better part of two millenia. The fact that such wholly secular philosophies as Marxism, Naziism and unfettered capitalism proved to be (at times) just as tyrannous during the 20th Century does nothing to lessen this perception, as they can be regarded as quasi-religions or simply huge mistakes.
And of course, there is Darwin and a host of other scientific debunkers. Because orthodox Christian theology was dependent on authoritarian premises there was never any basic arguing of its doctrines.
TRINITY
God transcendent
God made manifest through personal encounter
God immanent
These are recognizable as the persons of the Trinity, but also constitute the sequence of revelation in both historical and personal reality.
Q1 Is the Christ-event really the centre of human history?
Q2 Is it right to worship Jesus as the Christ?
Through Jesus, the disciples experienced (2) & it was this that led some of the to identify him with the deliverer of the Jews, the Messiah. His mission ended in failure; however, some time later (the Gospels and Acts suggest a short time), his followers were declaring it a victory.
Jesus as the "Christ", however, may be seen as a theological invention superimposed upon the historical figure.
An experience becomes a memory; a memory becomes a trustworthy account; a trustworthy account becomes a moving story and a moving story a tradition. So it doesn’t matter whether Jesus did or did not do all that is recorded of him; either way what we have is a tradition, not directly perceived reality.
The "centre of human history" would be the middle term of the trinitarian sequence. One might argue that God has never been made manifest through personal encounter, thus settling that. Or one might argue that God is frequently made manifest, in which case no single such event could stand out against the rest.
I think the problem here is in fetishizing the historical Jesus. The Christ-event is indeed the centre of human history, but it is a mythological event, which occurs whenever the myth is reactivated or reenacted. The life and death of Jesus was taken to be the Christ-event by the early Christians (and this constituted his resurrection as well). Later Christians reenact this event through Gospel readings, the Eucharist, and prayer and reflection. This certainly does imply a belief that God has been made manifest at least once; but more importantly it means God still is made manifest, and is becoming immanent in people’s lives as well. It is surely more important to hold that God is made manifest now than to believe that S/He was in AD 26!
To the objection that this does away with the uniqueness of Christ I would say that in point of fact it establishes the figure as an archetype, unique of its kind, and ultimate in its scope; as opposed to being an arbitrary and perhaps dubious historical assertion.
But what then becomes of Jesus? Does the historical carpenter from Nazareth get caught up into the clouds with the archetypal Christ? If so, what a strange hybrid: Half human, half symbol. If not, then poor Jesus. He died in agony on a cross, and his guilty followers who’d abandoned him in his hour of need hallucinated for themselves a religion in his name to console themselves. Or that’s the way it seems.
We can regard the Christ-event/archetype as a kind of lens that you can place over various moments in time to see what if anything comes into focus. The moment something does come into focus, you can stop: You’ve found an optical perscription that suits you.
Place this lens over the life of Jesus, and something does come into focus for many people. That’s not altogether surprising, as it was the life of Jesus that gave rise to the Christ-archetype in the first place. The two go with each other. It is this fact that allows us to make Jesus-as-the-Christ the centre (the focus) of our worship.
