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As evolutionary biology, neuroscience and astrophysics march onward with ever better explanations for the origins of life, consciousness and the universe, we can gratefully cast aside religion once and for all. Or can we? As David Foster Wallace once said, “There’s no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships.”
Feel free to reject the personal, monotheistic God of Abraham, Isaiah and the Book of Revelation. Maybe that already happened around the same time you lost faith in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. But what have you put in its place?
Many glorify the almighty Mammon, or more abstractly, the Invisible Hand of the Free Market, or the ongoing illusion of unlimited economic expansion. Others put all their faith in the Scientific Method. Or perhaps you devote yourself to Gaia in the form of the extraordinary Web of Life. Whether it’s a person, an object, or most likely an idea, everybody worships something.
Of course, the way we worship today bears little resemblance to the way hunters and gatherers and desert nomads worshipped 2 or 3 or 10,000 years ago, not on the surface anyway. And yet it’s the same cognitive function that resulted from the previous hundreds of thousands of years of human development.
The scientific revolution may have thrown a wrench in the works, but it takes more than a few centuries to reprogram all those eons of internal wiring. So where are we headed? The heads of churches would sure like to know. It’s the world’s second oldest profession after all, and there’s still plenty of money to be made from it.
The trinity of evolution
I’ve been forming my own theory on this subject for a while now, and it’s actually based around the symbolism of an ancient and mysterious religious icon. Carl Jung could find mandalas everywhere he looked, but for the uninitiated, you need only look to the sacred art of the Tibetan Buddhists. The image of the mandala appears constantly, and I see in it the perfect analogy for both personal development and cultural evolution.
To Buddhists and Hindus, the mandala is basically a geometric representation of the universe. It can be portrayed in many ways, but essentially you have a small circle, enclosed in a larger square, surrounded by an even greater circle.
So here’s how it works. The image begins with birth. In the small circle at the center, we enter life and we are undifferentiated from the world. This is the pre-rational stage of existence. We draw no distinctions between where the me ends and where the other begins.
In time we learn to recognize subject and object, self and other, and all the pairs of opposite that make up the world of experience. We have entered the square, the rational age. Other religions portray this as the Fall from paradise. We have gained a sense independence, but we have lost the sense of security that came from our attachment to the whole. And everything is a back and forth struggle between mine and yours, between desire and fulfillment.
Through mindful, spiritual practice, growth continues, and if we’re lucky we break out of the prison-like square and into the great, open circle. As in the small circle, we are connected with the everything, boundaries dissolve. But this is not the infantile, pre-rational connection that we might yearn for. That would mean a regression.
Rather, this is the trans-rational oneness that encompasses the previous stages and then goes beyond them. With enough hard work and introspection, we are able to hold the rational and the irrational in balance and accept the paradox required to achieve unity. In the eastern iconography, the greater circle is often surrounded by hundreds of little baby-faced bodhisattvas floating around in pure bliss.
Sages, poets and gurus have spent lifetimes and millennia trying to explain this third stage of development, sometimes referred to as enlightenment, so don’t worry if my two paragraph synopsis hasn’t given you perfect clarity. Keep in mind, it’s not a goal to fulfill, but a journey to experience. Moreover, there’s a larger point to make here.
Our place in history
Just as the three-part mandala can describe the stages of psychological or spiritual progress, we can also use it as a model for cultural progress. Consider the primitive societies who operate at the pre-rational level. Religion and ritual, for them, was an integral part of daily life. They drew no line to separate the sacred from the mundane. All things were infused with sprit. They took their gods quite literally and believed firmly in the magic, and that magic explained the order of the cosmos.
As society evolved, written doctrines replaced oral traditions, and exclusive monotheism came to replace the open, all-embracing polytheism. A single God issued the law with unquestionable authority, and the worship of other gods was no longer to be tolerated. I wouldn’t describe it as rational, but this stage of religious development certainly displayed a sense of rigidity and polarity. You had a with-us-or-against-us mentality, and you’d better know which side you’re on.
Then along came the scientific revolution to knock God right off his ivory pedestal. The age of enlightenment convinced us that all the answers to the universe were available if only we relied on our powers of reason. This new paradigm delivered a blessing in terms of understanding planetary motions and biological interactions, but it also brought a curse. It freed us from superstition, but it could not remove our need to worship.
At the crossroads
For many in the west, science and industry have rendered traditional belief systems obsolete. The four sides of the square are coming down. But will it collapse upon itself, or will it dissolve into cosmic unity? As far as religion is concerned, throngs of rational materialists are abandoning the project altogether. They’ve deluded themselves into believing that they don’t need to believe in anything. And yet they cling to concrete materialism for absolute certitude.
At the same time, we are seeing two distinct trends happening in religious and spiritual circles. On the one side we have New Agers who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. Longing to restore that oneness of the small circle, they look backwards toward the pre-rational paradise, reviving archaic practices of astrology, tarot cards, and Wicca. They use all the right props and speak the sugary sweet words of illumination—namaste anyone?—but genuine depth is all too often absent.
And at the other end of the spectrum, we see a rabid resurgence of fundamentalism. These are the ones I like to describe as religious but not spiritual. When Sunday morning comes around, these fundamentalists are the ones filling the pews. In this day and age people want answers, and whether they get them from science or from the church, what they want above all else is something they can believe in. The last thing they need are more questions.
In this respect, the Christian and Muslim fundamentalists can all be lumped in the same camp with the new atheists and scientific materialists. They aren’t interested in mysteries, they have no time for paradox, and they deny any contradictions. They want the truth and they want it incontrovertible.
As far as the mandala goes, these true believers box themselves perfectly into the square. They’re not even looking for a way out. For that reason I actually have more respect for the new age types; at least they can see beyond the solidity of their four walls. Still, too many fall prey to the easy temptation of pre-rational bliss. But real advancement means including the holistic circle and the dialectic square, and then transcending them both.
Integration and Reconciliation
On the surface, the magical, pre-rational worldview of children and aboriginals cannot be reconciled with a mind that’s been exposed to geometric proofs and scientific methodology. It’s a riddle every bit as difficult as circling the square. But there is a way forward; it’s just not a straight line.
If we can learn anything from the last 2,500 years of western philosophy (and even more so from eastern philosophy), it’s that metaphysical reality is made up of irreconcilable contradictions and unanswerable questions. In the eastern traditions, they overcome this dilemma through powerful iconography like the mandala, and through concentrated spiritual practices like yoga and meditation, exercises to release the mind from the closed cell of binary, either-or thinking.
But as westerners, can we find a way forward that does not require us to betray our own heritage? Of course, I have nothing against yoga and meditation; both can foster spiritual growth and bring us closer to union with the fabric of existence. But I envision a way to integrate these esoteric practices with a better understanding of our own western traditions, an understanding that works on both the spiritual and the intellectual level.
Take the Bible, for example, probably the most important spiritual handbook in the western hemisphere. Modernity has relegated it to the sphere of fiction and fairy tale. And that’s a reasonable reaction, especially when fundamentalists point to Scripture as the source of some incontrovertible, literal Truth. But there’s no reason to equate fiction with worthlessness.
Like any great work of literature, the Bible contains layers and layers of meaning, all of it open to careful analysis and multifarious interpretation. When it’s been nailed into a box of dogmatic certainty, then yes, most of the value gets lost. But if you recognize the stories as allegories for the deepest philosophical questions, and treat them as a dialog to contemplate rather than a proclamation to swallow, then you can see that there are far more than two sides to every story.
So forget everything you’ve been told about the answers you can get from religion, and look instead for the questions. Consider the stories and characters as metaphors for the thorniest philosophical dilemmas, as ways to think about the nature of consciousness, and to examine the relationships between matter and spirit or between good and evil.
Here’s an example to show you what I mean. One of the oldest mysteries in philosophy is what’s called the mind-body problem. Basically, it refers to the fact that we live in a physical body tightly restricted by time and space, but at the same time we experience life in our mind which defies physical descriptions. You can read some Plato and Descartes for a more thorough explanation, but trust me when I say that we’ve had the best minds working on this one for a few thousand years and they still can’t solve it by any rational means.
Irrationally however, we have the story of Christ who provides the perfect embodiment of both the physical body and the spiritual mind. He is simultaneously man and God, however you wish to define God. The official church doctrine has one—and only one—explanation for this. But if you put your mind to it and examine the story through the lens of a philosopher or literary critic, you can come up with an enormous range of possibilities.
And that’s only the beginning. Without exclusive affiliation to one doctrine or another, hundreds and thousands of instructive stories lay before us, from Homer to the Hopi, from Shiva to Mohammed. Substitute God with whatever you choose to worship, but do so mindfully. Consider the values and virtues that give your life meaning, that resonate on both the rational and irrational frequencies, and let your mind wander.
The deeper you look into the nature of existence, the more puzzling it becomes, and eventually you have to realize that the biggest questions cannot be resolved by Aristotelean logic alone, which is why the ancient sages and scribes have passed down this wealth of myth and epic poetry to express these mysteries through nebulous imagery. Engaging both our discernment and our imagination, these stories lead us out of the linear, black-and-white mindset and into the realm of the trans-rational.
Don’t think I’m trying to proselytize from the New Testament, but the story of Christ is one we all know, so allow me to draw on it once more. As I said earlier, he is the perfect embodiment of flesh and spirit, material substance and mystical knowledge. So think of the cross as this intersection of opposites, and think about the importance of bringing our rational minds into harmony with our irrational powers of intuition, incompatible though they might seem.
Unless we want to live in a world that forces us to choose between dry, sterile concrete materialism; fundamentalist, dogmatic certainty; or wishy-washy, touchy-feely, shallow new agism; then here lies the path of genuine spiritual integration. For the thoughtful and the curious, we have the tools at our disposal, and there’s much work to be done. So, with wonder and uncertainty, let’s get started.
Further Reading
If you found this interesting, you’ll be sure to enjoy:
- Limericks about Indian philosophy
- Limericks about Buddhism
- Limericks about Taoism
- Limericks about Religious Problems
