It’s good to be back! I had to take a hiatus as I try to figure out what to do with myself. But let’s pick up with a discussion of spiritual matters eh? Recently, I’ve had a number of events lead me to a spiritual mood of late, so let’s discuss. I’ll attempt to weave together some kind of coherent commentary by talking about a few different observations I’ve made over the last few years.
First, I’ve been investigating Buddhism and its many intersections with modern psychology and science. Of all the religions, Buddhism seems to me the least traditionally religious in the sense that it doesn’t really posit the discrete existence of God, nor does it prescribe any sort of political affiliation or outlook. For instance, Buddhism doesn’t comment on abortion, gay marriage or gun ownership, which is as it should be. More a philosophy or a practical guide to navigating life’s joys and sufferings, its belief in the immense healing power of meditation has changed my life. Essentially, as the poet Dagon stated, to be enlightened is to be intimate with all things. Being close to all the people in your life, your neighborhood, your feelings, having a sense of the interconnectedness of all things is to discover and metabolize both the inherent beauty of all creation, and its native cruelty. To fully accept our suffering and our joys, to cease resisting our emotions and to fully incorporate them into who we are, to release ourselves from the pathological and destructive defense mechanisms we’ve constructed for ourselves, is the principal goal of Zen. As an added bonus, Zen compliments our scientific understanding of the world. There is no difference between a chair and myself, a leaf and an idea like capitalism. All are simply different manifestations of the root energy unleashed by the Big Bang. When we die our energy is dispersed back into the universe. As the law of energy conservation states (which is a corollary of the first law of thermodynamics) “energy can not be created or destroyed—it can only be changed from one form to another (such as electrical energy into heat energy)” or kinetic energy into, for example, thermal energy. It’s kind of nice when our spiritual system for understanding ourselves and the world neatly fits into our scientific understanding of the universe. Thus Buddhism and, say, the general theory of relativity, or evolutionary psychology, exist in an amiable congruity between faith and reason.
Second, modern neurology has offered us some powerful tools for explaining the universal religious impulse in man. There are two camps right now, those scientists who believe that a belief in God bestowed an evolutionary advantage to the religiously observant, and the more popular and contrary belief that the religious instinct is a byproduct of the brain’s elaborate neural architecture. (I have the full article, which is now protected behind the Times’s Select wall. Let me know if you want it.)
Third, I saw a great play at the Women’s Project in Manhattan called TransFigures which investigates the ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’, a condition in which secular and religious people alike experience a kind of spiritual ecstasy when they visit Israel. Men and women, regardless of their beliefs, have been known to discard their clothes, wrap hotel sheets around their bodies, and gallivant around Jerusalem proclaiming to be Moses or Jesus only to have the effect wear off after a couple of days. Typically, the tourists then resume their vacations as if nothing had happened, emerging from their spiritual psychosis as if from a daydream.
Taken altogether, there is something clearly making man a distinctly religious creature. Divine revelation? Biological side-effects? Evolutionary advantage? Let's try a slightly different tack. It seems to me there are two forms of reality, one subjective and relative, and the other absolute. Our relative reality is informed by our own experiences, personality, genetics, circumstances, etc… Our relative reality is the world through our own eyes as dictated by our own subjective experience. If I had a rough childhood, my perception of the world might be colored more by a sense of injustice or cruelty than if, say, I was loved thoroughly and truly from the day I was born. Absolute reality however, is the world as it is, free from human interpretation. I believe it’s this absolute reality, and the occasional glimpse of it we get from religious experience, that makes us spiritual beings. Most of the religions of the world place a strong emphasis on love and love’s importance in our daily lives. Of course, if we really are cut from the same cloth, if there is no substantive difference between myself and my friends, or my enemies, then of course a kind of compassion must naturally be a consequence of such an understanding. Our desire to know the contours of this absolute reality, to touch it and understand it, fuels our spiritual lives and gives meaning to our existence in the universe.
There are currently 10,000 extant religions in the world right now, and most claim the other 9,999 are incorrect in their understanding of God and lay claim to the one ‘true’ revelation of God’s word. With such claims to an ‘exclusive’ interpretation of God’s will, it’s no wonder there are so many conflicts around the world and why so much of secular society turns away from anyone who claims to know what God wants of his people. There is an arrogance to most kinds of spiritual faith, and often an imperative to relinquish one’s individual mind to the collective will of tradition that is repugnant to what is truly man’s most divine gift: his ability to reason for himself! Of course, if God wanted us to simply do as he said, he wouldn’t have given us the faculty to reason for ourselves. Islam, Christianity’s and Judaism’s directive to ‘surrender’ to the will of God as detailed in apocryphal texts whose collation has been historically arbitary, patriarchal, and subservient to the cultural and social needs of the era in which they were written, seems the height of intellectual folly. Nonetheless, the whole world subjects itself to ‘literal’ understandings of the Bible and Koran that are often at odds with modernity and individual freedom (see the Supreme Court’s most recent ruling on partial birth abortions or the attempts by Creationists to instate ‘Intelligent Design’ as a serious scientific alternative to the theory of evolution). We see rather irrational beliefs that are disproved by experience cultivated and passed on for generations. Thus homosexuality becomes an inherent sin despite there being no evidence to support such a belief. Reason, observation, and personal experience shows us that gay people are as loving, barbarous, beautiful, idiotic and human as the rest of us, yet the vast majority of the world continues to see gay people as a walking repudiation of God’s will. As if, in all His resplendent glory, God doesn’t have more important things to think about than where someone sticks their dick.
But that striving to know our absolute reality, to see beyond the shroud of our limited five senses and see the truth of the first law of thermodynamics, to really intimately feel the interconnectedness of the universe and all its sentient and non-sentient inhabitants is to truly know God. Part of us, somewhere, knows this. The tragedy is when man distorts this wondrous and beautiful impulse to intimately know all things, this ability to see ourselves with infinite compassion (as Jesus instructed), out of a desire to control and manipulate others. The Protestant Reformation, the Shia and Sunni split over who would rule after the death of Mohammed, the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, the intractability of Israeli settlers, Muslim terrorism, the Jonestown Massacre, Salem Massachusetts, the Holocaust, the dissolution of Yugoslavia into civil war, the extermination of the native peoples of the Americas and the blood soaked sand of the Sudan all bear witness to our fractious and violent competition for God's love. One presumes, of course, that these moral calamities were the result of sincere religious discord and not just the product of a banal rapacity for personal profit. In the end, does it matter one way or the other? Man’s unique tragedy is both his inability to see absolute reality without laying claim to it and his insatiable desire for power. Perhaps one causes the other.
