Essay #33:  Original Religious Experience

That sky, in truth, does it not hold
The world more firmly in its hand
By what its openness does not enfold,
By what its spaciousness does not demand?

It is perhaps a strange question given the history of religion, but what if faith were the one thing that vitiated the religious experience?   What if the original purpose of religion were not to lead the mind through narrow articles of belief but to foster wide-open awareness?  What if religion’s promise was to ground personal transformation and social change in wisdom directly accessible to all rather than upon tenets of faith unassailable to wisdom?  And what if that promise also revealed good works as the natural offspring of a universal compassion found in the heart of wisdom?  Would this not go a long way to quell the artificial urgency and inflated sense of righteousness tainting many of the social benefit projects launched from within religious institutions?

Faith traditionally promises protection from evil by remaining enfolded in the wings of a “defender-spirit.”  It promises ultimate deliverance through observance of and adherence to the demands of a divine lawgiver and judge.  The metaphor of enfoldment and the requirement of adherence both imply a division of the world into zones of inclusion and zones of exclusion.  That which “dwells within the spirit” or is “filled with the spirit” is included in a safe zone believed to be free of the influence of temptation, taint, evil, blame, and other negative qualities, whereas that which is “devoid of the spirit” is excluded from the safe zone and relegated to a dangerous hinterland where temptations prowl and evil awaits the opportunity to overshadow those who enter.  Adherence to the rituals of faith and to its moral tenets defines a zone including all behaviors which accord with faith and an external zone where behaviors are at best classified as benignly secular or at worst as debauchery, brutishness, or sin.  In the case of both the protection and deliverance it promises, faith divides the world asunder into these different zones primarily by means of the schemas it projects onto the world rather than from any mindful interaction with its qualities and contents.  For example, with reference to Christian historical and scriptural narratives, faith pronounces “deliverance” for those who will be saved by adhering to the requirement of submission to a “savior” and pronounces “damnation” for those who refuse to be saved.  Once again, such pronouncements do not issue from direct acquaintance with human nature in specifics or in general nor from a direct encounter with the character of Jesus of Nazareth.  Rather, they are scripted according to the schematic re-representation of reality at work within faith and within traditional religion.

What happens when such scripts and such schemas are set aside?  Do the divisions beneath them collapse leaving the world awash in moral and ontological chaos?  In other words, without the boundaries and values attributable to faith would there not be an utter conflation of moral and immoral behaviors such that the world would be ruptured by sin and debauchery?  And without the categories of “good” and “evil” as defined by faith, would there be any discernment at all of the ontological status of the world’s contents as either “positive” or “negative?”   Let us assume for a moment a total collapse of moral boundaries and a conflation of ontological categories in the absence of faith.  Under such an assumption, let us ask:  what would it take under such conditions for faith to restore boundaries and rehabilitate categories?  From what we know about the foundations of faith, it would take a reimposition of historical and scriptural narratives upon the world.  That is, it would take once again whatever time and effort it required for the influence of those narratives to be etched upon the face of history itself.  From this we can see that whatever influence faith brings to bear upon the qualities and aggregates in the present moment in the world, it does not emerge from within those present qualities and aggregates themselves but is rather imposed or projected from behind as a gloss from the past.

Present qualities and aggregates may or may not reveal themselves as genuine moral values or as containing moral values within themselves.  They may or may not reveal themselves as ontologically positive or negative.  Be this as it may, whatever faith imposes can be seen to be relatively disconnected from whatever might or might not be discernable in present-time aggregates themselves.  Therefore, whether or not it speaks for them correctly, faith is at most like the sophist or lawyer who enters the courtroom to speak on behalf of his defendant.  Whatever truth or falsity the lawyer speaks remains at least one remove from the source.  Those who know the defendant directly and intimately have a much better chance at getting to the truth than those who only listen to the attorney.  Thus it was with good reason that the caretakers of ancient cities cautioned they should not be allowed to grow too big.  A city where any one person was unrecognizable to another was already too big.  Intimacy was the most trustworthy source of truth and of the most positive intercourse among citizens.  Likewise, a direct apperception of all aggregates through intimate knowledge is a far more certain path to the discernment of ontological and moral qualities or their absence than is faith.  In the absence of such qualities, faith could only provide their artificial patina.   However, if they prove to be discernable and present, then the importation of some schema projected onto them by faith would be not only artificial but foreign, intrusive, and obfuscating of what is real and true itself.  This is why we said in Essay #32 that faith can become an obstacle to mindful awareness.  If it distracts the mind from what is present and discernable then it becomes a hindrance and an obstacle to pure awareness.

Let us return, then, to the question of what might happen when such an obstacle is set aside.  Might it be that simple awareness of what is provides the surest path to moral outcomes and the firmest foundation for the apprehension of ontological positives?  Like the defendant who speaks for herself to intimate acquaintances, is Reality not better able to reveal herself to those who take time to know her intimately rather than follow the lawyerly outlines and prescriptions of others about her?  Are faith and its tenets in church not an awful lot like the lawyer who stalks the courtroom wanting nothing more than to steal the jury’s attention away from whatever might be the truth of the case?

The saving grace in the courtroom of old was often the intimate knowledge the jurors had of the defendant outside the courtroom.  Their experience as a whole shed light on the case and brought the context of a larger perspective to bear which tended to reveal deeper truths about particular behaviors, motives, and outcomes.  This larger perspective is always implicit in a court of law.  It is represented in the ideal of dispassionate judgement known as the “reasonable man standard.”  If we know the defendant then as a juror we strive to form our idea of what is reasonable conduct aided by that knowledge.  If we don’t know her then we substitute examples of similar persons we’ve known in forming our expectations.  In either case, we strive to discern more than what the lawyers tell us.  We strive for a broader apprehension of reality and the truth.

With respect to religion, there is the overarching or fundamental reality to which religion originally sought to pay attention.  Then there is the case as argued by faith.  The original skyward impetus of religion was no different from that contained in natural science.  It was an impetus to look out the window, see what was there, and experience it directly.  It was an impetus to delve into the nature of things.  Early answers to the question, “what is?” tended to be very close to what was observed on Earth and very spacious.  It was said that “water” is what is.  Then it was said that “air” is what is, then “fire.” At the same time as it was said that all things are made of water, it was said that “all things are full of gods.” ¹  The essential and divine nature of things was not separable from what was observable.  It appealed greatly to the ancient mind that water could be observed directly everywhere in various states whether liquid, gaseous, or solid.  Thus the behavior of the “gods” could be known.  The formal separation of the divine nature from the observable was something that came later.  It brought with it the advent of faith which would have been met by earlier thinkers with the same skepticism they reserved for lawyers and sophists.  Why trade the fundamental reality for a less authentic re-representation?

Whether in the courtroom, in church, or outside in the world truth depends on unmediated access to reality.  That is, it depends on a firmament, foundation, or container that offers what is to awareness just as it is.  Its character of openness offers firm and unimpeded access to awareness to all parts of itself.  By not enfolding anything the sky neither forces nor obstructs awareness.  By not demanding anything it does not create repercussions that cause things to be seen and grasped through other things and not simply through themselves.  Like the parent who holds loosely and gently in his hands the food he has gathered for his children, the sky’s open-handedness toward us its children is our greatest strength.  For when we are trusted to draw from deep goodness by our own nature and not by force or persuasion, then our good choices rest on the strong foundation of our own immediate awareness, our own wisdom.  Nothing is stronger.  Faith may prompt and guide but it is ultimately a substitute for the original experience of religion, which was to know the most real intimately and immediately.  Faith trades the fundamental trust in the goodness of reality contained in that original religious aspiration for a hope and a promise ever removed from the present-centered mindfulness upon which such trust depends.  In unimpeded mindfulness is revealed the material nature of things as they are.  Also revealed is their selfsame spiritual nature that fulfills as far as possible the appellation “divine” without any dependence on historical, scriptural, or eschatological narratives.

 

Notes:

1.Thales, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus were among the Ancient Greek philosophers known as the “Pre-Socratics.” The Pre-Socratics were roughly contemporary with the Buddha during the 6^th century B.C. Thales posited water as the fundamental principle or nature of all things.  Anaximenes posited air.  Heraclitus posited fire.  That these are not simple material equivalencies but deep and subtle insights into the nature of things may be gleaned at once from a perusal of the fragments these thinkers have left us.  Thales, for example, seems to have carefully observed the behavior of material substances such as water and lodestone.  Both the dynamic transformations of water and the ability of lodestone to have an observable effect on iron afforded Thales some insight into the fundamental characteristic of matter that the Buddha described as “dependent origination.”  This is the property of all material qualities to be bound together with other qualities out of which they arise and into which they become transformed.  Thus, matter is not static but bears a divine or creative principle within itself, which Thales may have noted in his remark that “all things are full of gods.”

This observation may be contrasted with the Greek mythological framework from which Thales seems to have distanced himself.  That framework assigns properties and behaviors to the gods by means of schemes and stories borne less out of material observation than from imagination and an attempt to cope with the drama of human life.  In that way it is similar to the religious faith that arose after the death of Christ.  One could argue, however, that Greek mythology contained no intrinsic barriers to close investigations of the gods—or even to apotheosis–whereas Christian faith is full of barriers to direct knowledge of God, which include the indispensable mediation of clergy and the general inaccessibility to the people of methodologies for investigation.  In this sense, traditional faith represents a regression to a state of mind that is less permeable to enlightenment than Greek mythology.  Indeed, Greek myths already shed immense light on human character and the trials and triumphs of life.  This is due in no small part to their openness to our own participation in the dramas they portray with great subtlety.  The central Christian story or myth, by contrast, depicts human life as unredeemable through identification with any characters except Jesus Christ.  And even then it remains a mystery to us not of our own doing how we rise above our lowly station and become transformed.  Participation is limited to accession, whereas the Greek approach to transformation is expressed by the saying attributed to Aesop that “the gods help them that help themselves.”