A Strip of Light

“I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines….I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe.”  -- Spoken by the narrator of Kurt Vonnegut’s, Breakfast of Champions.

“Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us.  Everything else about us is dead machinery.”  -- Spoken by Rabo Karabekian, a character in Breakfast of Champions.

“…it is Rabo Karabekian who made me the serene Earthling which I am this day.”   -- Spoken by the narrator of Breakfast of Champions.

These lines are rather interesting from the point of view of naturalistic spirituality.  In a sense, the conclusion reached by the narrator in the first quote is the natural conclusion of naturalism, regardless of how hard we squeeze to push out warmer sentiments.  (Karabekian may be incorrect, though, to say that “everything else about us is dead machinery.”  Our bodies are living machines by definition, our brains are exceedingly complex living machines -- but it is machinery none-the-less.)  

There is, however, something about being aware that simply defies any attempt at being reduced to a mechanical function.  Machinery simply isn’t aware.  But if this one aspect of our being is not machinery, how does it fit into the mechanistic paradigm of science?  Further, how does it effect, or even infect, the remaining machinery?

There are some writers out there, notably Daniel Dennett, who claim to understand awareness, and who think it can be reduced to the common machinery of the world.  I have read these efforts and am not at all convinced that Dennett and his ilk have the final answer.  (Actually, I don’t think they fully understand the question.) 

I would suggest that before “awareness” can be incorporated into a scientific understanding of the world, that understanding has a least one more significant paradigm shift to move through, or maybe many, or maybe awareness cannot be captured within the paradigm at all.  Time will tell (but I’ll be long dead before that telling).  From where we stand today, “awareness” is a mystery, and that which allows the universe to bring forth such awareness is also a mystery. 

If we want to talk about the sacred, or the sacred depths of Nature, the only justification comes from awareness.  That nature brings forth awareness is the sole bases for seeing anything sacred in it.  That which brings forth awareness becomes aware of itself through that which it brings forth.  Every awareness is a great intersection of the Creating and the created.  To be that intersection completely is a spiritual accomplishment; to see that intersection completely is to see the sacred.  

One of the goals of this blog is to raise questions and put forth suggestions about how naturalistic spirituality can gain depth.  I hadn't expected Kurt Vonnegut to have such a pointed insight on this topic.

* (The notion spoken by Karabekian may seem a fairly modern idea, but virtually the same idea was put forth by the Sankhya philosophy of ancient India, which is borrowed by Pantanjali as the metaphysical underpinning of his Yoga Sutras.  There it forms a dualistic philosophy, where the awareness is called purusha and the machinery is called prakriti.)

The Given and the Giver

I bumper sticker I saw today reads: “Don’t worship the creation, worship the Creator.”

That the creation exists, I know as the most intimate of facts.  As far as I can see (which, admittedly, is not very far), the creation is my creator.

Who or what created the creation?   What a senseless question!  If one says “God,” than who or what created God? 

The origin of the creation is simply an inexplicable.  To posit a creator apart from the creation is merely to posit one inexplicable to explain another inexplicable.  To multiply inexplicables is an absurdity. 

At the base of the Creation lies a great mystery, or better The Great Mystery.  I see no reason to give worship to the Great Mystery, but every reason to wonder about it, to wander about within it, to contemplate it.

The Great Mystery is the Giver and the Given; our ultimate source and our ultimate destination.  If we love our life, we have it to thank.  If we hate our life, we have it to curse.  It gives the good and the bad; it is its own shadow.

A certain kind of theist and a certain kind of scientist have in common that both think they know more about the Great Mystery than they really do.  One claims to have a book written by it, the other claims an ability to produce theories which that can limn its dimensions.

I imagine The Great Mystery smiling like the Cheshire Cat.  It doesn’t write books and can’t even add on its invisible paws.

Four Interpretations, Plus

Quote: “We come from God, and we are in exile.”

–        John of Ruysbroeck, medieval Flemish mystic.

 First Interpretation: We are of a spiritual substance similar to, but different from, the substance of God.  God is separate from “his” material creation.  For some reason, apparently to test our worthiness and meddle, we have been put into material bodies.  But our true home is God.  We cannot return home while alive, but if we live well, we will return home upon death.

Second Interpretation:  God is the eternal and we live in the temporal.  In this changing world it may be possible to catch a glimpse of our true home in certain eternal truths, such as might be found in metaphysics, religion, mathematics, or science.

Third Interpretation:  God is the whole, and our soul was once whole and is capable of being whole again, but it is now fragmented.  Being fragmented, the soul is abstracted and alienated from its true being.  By certain disciplines, the soul can regain its wholeness, and in wholeness feel at home in the world.

Fourth interpretation:  We are in exile.  There never was a home, there never will be.  But exile has its advantages, so we might as well enjoy the only home we have. 

And beyond the fourth interpretation, we may find the lucky soul, the golden soul, who has never felt a bit of cosmic alienation -- who has no clue why Ruysbroeck would speak of our being in exile.

The Fine Print

The Fine Print

Though a country might offer its citizens

the right to life, liberty and

the pursuit of happiness,

The World does not.

In this World, be assured:

You will suffer – mildly perhaps, or horribly. 

You will know injustice and resentment --

a little perhaps, or a lot.

You will die – later perhaps, or sooner.

And if you love,

each one you love

too

will know pain,

injustice, resentment,

death.

That was the fine print on the Lease on Life

we were unable to read as we

were being pushed through the door

into our new home.

This is our daily rent.

Most days it seems bargain enough!

Communion

A major difference between Eastern and Western spirituality is in the way the various traditions regard the immanence or transcendence of the Divine.   The East tends toward immanence and the West toward transcendence.  The Hindu, Buddhist or Taoist can find the Divine within; the Jew, Christian or Moslem is not so comfortable with that idea.

Communion is only possible if the divine is immanent.  So how can a religion that insists on the transcendence of the Divine, as Christianity does, enter into communion?  Holy Communion, at least as it is celebrated in the Catholic Church, provides an interesting solution to this.  It brings the Divine into space/time through the “miracle” of transubstantiation; and then we actually bring the Divine into our being through the partaking of the transformed bread and wine.  We get a momentary immanence, and thus communion is possible.

But what of this momentariness?  How long does the Divine stay within after communion?   Until the bread and wine dissolve?* There are many fascinating things to think about in this.  Christianity overcomes the distance from God that it inherited from its parent religion, Judaism.   But by being a temporary immanance, it maintains the fundamental idea of a transcendent God.  Perhaps more sinister, the priest are given control of access to the Divine (you get your five minutes of the Divine and if you want more, come back tomorrow, and don’t forget to pay on your way out!). 

To the best of my knowledge, no one answers the question above about how long the Divine stays.  It would seem that if we can bring the Divine into our life for a minute, we could bring it there for an hour, a day, a lifetime.  Why should the materiality of the bread and wine matter?  Yet the carefully crafted theology of communion makes it matter.  There is definitely the assumption that the divine immanence presented by communion is ephemeral. 

The Catholic communion is tied to another sacrifice, confession.  One must make oneself worthy of the Divine.  I believe that “communion” in some sense or another is a goal or the goal of all spirituality and that it is always tied to some preparation, some making of ourselves worthy or prepared.

Many today find communion with the natural world; a long trek through the wilderness prepares us.  Many find it in erotic love; the preparation is the attention each partner pays to the other.  Some take peyote, which has its own ritual preparation.   For some of us communion is also known as Satori, Samadhi, Nirvana, Immersion in the Tao; the preparation is long years of study and meditation. 

To its credit, the Catholic sacrament of communion is wonderfully easy, available, and right for many people.  I suspect most people only want a few minutes of the Divine per day, or even per week – a few minutes of being pure and humble, before going back to the ordinary preoccupations. 

Some of us are a little greedier.

·         * (I started asking questions like this early in life, and I got slapped around by the nuns a lot because of it.)

Why the Invisible?

 A few people have asked me why I would use the term “the invisible” in a blog dedicated to naturalistic spirituality.   That everything is overt, thus open to empirical method, is something of a dogma of naturalism.  And that is the main reason I chose a title emphasizing the invisible, because I believe it is false dogma and needs to be challenged.

There are two major aspects of our world that are not open to empiricism.  One is the information that tells us of our ultimate origination.  The other is the being that each of us lives as a subjective person.  These two mysteries, both separated and connected by the whole of Nature, are also the subject matter of spirituality.

The ultimate origin is the answer to the question Why is there something rather than nothing?  It is now pretty clear that the answer to that question cannot be found within this universe.  The laws of nature tell us a great deal about what we do find in here, but they do not tell us why the laws of nature are as they are.  There are numerous cosmological theories about this, but each in the end is a metaphysical theory based on scientific information, rather than a scientific theory. 

We can presume that each of us experiences the world much like others.  Our joy is like the joy of others; our pain like the pain of others.  We see the color green as others do (if they are not color blind) and hear music as they do.  But we can’t know this for sure, and our attempts to articulate what we experience can only go so far.  We experience our life directly, not through our senses.  We experience other’s lives through our private sensory phenomenon.  We cannot escape that loop.

As a Pantheist, I believe that Nature and God are one and the same.  But just as water and steam are two different aspects of H2O, Nature and God are two aspects of the Great Mystery.  To play around with words: Nature is the sensible aspect of God; God is the un-sensible (invisible) aspect of Nature. 

Naturalism is a set of assumptions about the way the world works.  It is a set of assumptions that works – it has given us remarkable power over the natural world (for better or worse). 

Spirituality is an engagement with Being.  The Depth of spirituality is the depth of that engagement.  The two poles of Being are the ultimate source – God, Goddess, Tao, Brahma, Nature, Absolute – and the depth of experience wherein we experience that which has been born of the ultimate source (including that depth of experience).

The honey of the invisible, harvested from the pollen of the visible, richly nourishes the life of contemplation. The joy of contemplation is the reward of a spiritual life; the spiritual life is a golden hive of the invisible. 

Reinterpreting the World

 

In the previous two posts, I put forth the idea that, relative to our own self, we can change the world simply by changing how we think about it.  This is an important idea in many spiritual traditions, and it might be worth exploring further.  I suggest that there are four levels on which this principle applies: surface culture, deep culture, surface biology, and deep biology.  At each level, our ability to make this kind of change becomes more difficult.

The poem is an example of surface culture. It is not terribly difficult to mentally make this kind of change, but as I suggested we can encounter significant resistance from our fellow humans if we do.  Also in that post I suggested that there is an analogy between the notion of weed and the notion of sin in Christianity.  Here, I’ll suggest that in our culture the notion of sin is a more deeply established than the notion of weeds and that our ability to reinterpret that notion will similarly be more difficult.

Moving from the re-interpretation of ideas grounded in culture to ideas that are grounded in biology is a significant increase in difficulty, but I will argue that the principle still holds.  We may think that pain and pleasure are simple biological givens, but this is not so.  As an example, I used to teach outdoor education, and sometimes we would do an exercise with kids were we would blindfold them and have them smell various aspects of the world.  Often, along the way, we would take them to a “stinky” garbage can.  In the blindfolded conditions, the kids did not recoil from the smell the way that most of them would have had they known it was a garbage can.  Instead they would explore the smell.  We may think that our response to such odors is purely biological, but there is actually a combination of learned and natural response at play.  After witnessing this, I played around with this idea and found that I could re-interpret many things that I found mildly painful as simply interesting sensations.

Just how deep people can take this principle is an interesting question.  In the various ascetic traditions, there are many examples of people doing things that we would find intensely painful.  In some cases this is due to people developing a very high pain tolerance, but in the yogic traditions the explanation is usually given that the yogi has learned to become totally detached from the idea of pain, and so is able to re-interpret what would naturally be thought of as a painful sensation as merely a strong, but neutral sensation.

The upshot of this principle is that we have more control over our world than we normally think.  This control can provide us a significant degree of freedom from the negative conditions of life.   The Western alliance of science, technology and market economics has fixated on external solutions to problems.  It has highlighted to the so-called “objective” world and de-valued the subjective.   In the process it has ignored the degree to which the world for each person is that person’s subjective interpretation of the world.  That degree is limited -- there is a range of laws and principles operating beyond subjective interpretations.  But the degree that those laws and principles determine the quality of our life is also limited.   Too often we think that our quality of life is a state to be achieved by changing our external conditions, and fail to recognize the degree that the quality of our life depends on how we choose to interpret those conditions.

(The above doesn't really says anything different from the old adage: "when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.")