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The Gaffer's Philosophy;
Part 25: On Ethics and Spirituality:
About Process:
October 21, 2002:
To date, I have drawn a pretty bleak picture of our spiritual
and ethical situation. It behooves me now to begin collecting
the pieces to hopefully put them in some kind of order. I want
to see what we know and do not know. All religions claim to know
things they cannot prove. With no attempt to present any elaborate
arguments or proofs, I will state flatly my belief that nothing
important about religion or spirituality can be convincingly proved.
Even so, perhaps it is reasonable to list those things we do know
and those things we believe we know, but cannot prove. Then we
can examine the experience, evidence, or logic we have to support
them.
One thing I believe I know concerns the God of our fathers. We have put God under the microscope of critical examination and he died. We killed him. The stress of examination was too much for him. We now know the God of our fathers is a fraud. He is a two dimensional monster who has been terrorizing children since the beginning of organized religion? Even so, up until recently, the concept has served as a place to anchor our morality and ethics. For thinking people, that anchor no longer exists.
With that patriarchal God debunked, I end up with more questions than answers. One question I can quickly ask is, did our souls die when God died? This is a twin to the question, are we immortal? Another question we can ask is what is the meaning or point of life, particularly human life? Is the very idea of God just a mean trick that we played on ourselves or is there something to it? Does God exist in some form? What is real? Are any parts of our current religious philosophies or institutions valid? Where can we anchor our ethics? Answering these questions, I believe, will take more than one essay.
Assuming the God of our fathers is dead, does any God at all exist? All of the religious philosophies I have looked at have as their main premise the unsupported assumption of some kind of God as a first cause. I do not believe thinking people can accept that. I cannot go there. I can make no such assumption. I have had that premise shoved down my throat since I first began to understand words. I have striven mightily with this and I just cannot go there. No matter how much you threaten me, beat me, or shout it at me, I cannot do it. The best I could do is pretend if pretending would save me from harassment.
Many people who talk or write about, philosophies, religion, and spirituality simply choose to believe or to not believe in God. I think it is impossible to make a compelling case for anything on unsupported assumptions. I can cite two cases in point. L. L. Whyte says flatly that there is no God. He offers no supporting arguments, statements, or evidence. Alan Watts, on the other hand, spends a few pages debunking the fundamentalist view of God as a father figure patriarch. Then he leaps to an assumption of God with no evidence, proof, or arguments at all. Both of these assumptions are irrational and neither of these writers really makes his case.
The general thrust of both their cases is that the human being is not a separate phenomena, but a process within and part of a larger process. I agree with that premise. There are two nonsensical notions which we humans tend to treasure. One is that we are separate entities and the other is that we understand the life force. Let's consider the first notion. I think Carl Jung offers us the best evidence and arguments for this theory that we are not separate, but part of a larger process. In his discussions of the collective unconscious, he gives very compelling arguments for the view that we are connected through some internal mechanism. Jung has his own experience along with case histories from his work to support his premise of a collective unconscious. It seems we do have some kind of collective unconscious or shared communication ability along with a racial memory.
In addition, there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence to support the idea that we are connected. Much of this evidence is contained in accounts of personal psychic experiences. Many folks, including me, will contend that they have some kind of a spirit guide. What is it? I call mine Minerva. She seems to be female most of the time. I cannot show her to you, or let you talk to her. Is she truly a connection to the infinite? I don't know what her true nature is.
One thing I do know for sure is that Minerva gives me information that I could not possibly have acquired by ordinary means. This information often comes not from myself and is often not even about me. It comes from other people and is about what they are doing. This means she is somehow connected to those other people. She can somehow access what is going on with them. She can access things which are external to me in the world. I cannot prove any of this, but it is very real to me. If I were the only one who had these psychic experiences, I would be very suspicious of my emotional stability. However, these experiences are quite common in the human community.
So, from the science of psychology and from personal anecdotal experience, we have the idea that we are connected through some larger process. I think, when we examine the facts, that's all we can say. Be this true, it means we are not separate even though our general experience leads us to believe that we are separate entities. The problem occurs when we try to give a name to this phenomena. These names, like God or collective unconscious, imply that we understand the process. However, we certainly don't understand.
I think we must ever keep in mind that we do not understand. The only things I can base my philosophy on will be those I really know or perceive. So for this connection, to avoid any pretense that we understand it, we can call it a mystery. I don't think it's wise to even call it a divine mystery. That implies something which is currently unprovable. We can show evidence that there is a connection. We have no such evidence that the connection is of divine nature or origin. I think our name should imply that we do not understand it. Hence, the connection mystery is appropriate.
Let's look a bit more at this connection mystery. In his book, "The Book" Alan Watts did give me one useful thing. He writes, "We do not ‘come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree." This is a nice way of noticing that life is a process. The individual human being is a process within and part of a larger process. The evolution of the species is a larger process. We come out of the world into individuality. We stay out a while, but ultimately we return into that which we came out of. We become part of the greater process.
I do not pretend to know a great deal about that process. I do suspect that those who pretend to know, know a great deal less than I do. They simply have not thought about it. They just shout louder and louder and more and more stridently what they have been taught by others who did not know. To pretend that we understand the process or to give it a name, like God or Allah, is patent nonsense.
Now we can look at our second treasured nonsense, that we understand the life force. Let's look at babies. The production of babies is part of a larger process. Humans do not produce babies except inadvertently. Humans do not create life. Life is. Babies come out of the process of life. Humans just reproduce, usually mindlessly.
There is a life force, of which we know nothing, which drives reproduction. It works through us, but we do not cause it, we are simply agents of it. We can observe it with awe and wonder. We can, for sure, appreciated the beauty of it, but there is no way that we can claim we understand this life force. We can only say it seems to be another facet of the total process of life. Calling it the work of God is not an explanation, it's an evasion. Let's simply say we don't know.
I will continue looking at the questions raised in this essay
next time.
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