God and Spirituality

Where is this God about whom so many prattle? Those who claim to know and those who claim to know not are both in error.

For millennia questions about the existence of god would not have been questions anyone would have understood. From the time that the human specie began to think about gods, they were all out there in the trees, the rocks, the water, the wind. At some point the gods were conceived to be in some non-material place, but always nearby, watching and controlling, requiring appeasement, sustenance, pleasure.

Then along comes Ankhnaten (various spellings) and the primary God is "out there". Where? Beyond the dome of heaven. (The dome of heaven was held up on four pillars in the directions of the four winds. It had windows that openned to let in rain, lights hung from it and two big lights traversed from east to west.) Even Moses didn't really change this. There were still many gods. He just announced that Yahweh was the greatest of the gods and that Israel would "have no gods before" Yahweh.

Throughout most of Israelite/Hebrew history, the people believed in multiple gods, but eventually the Hebrews gave up that idea and decided that there was only one God and all the others were idols.

The location and realm of that one God has changed and diminished over the years as Galileo and an ever increasing horde of scientists encroached on the body of misinformation about the physical world. The earth became round, not flat. It became one of many bodies in space. The time of its origin began to be pushed back. The animals, plants and other life forms were found to have existed for millenia and into pre-history.

In the end, any talk of a God "out there" is very speculative. If such a god put natural law into action and thereby created the moral being (Whether human or chimpanzee) he/she/it did so by the mechanism of the big bang. We have good experimental evidence of what happened after a few milliseconds after the big bang. The Large Hadron Collider was supposed to bring us within microseconds, but there have been major "glitches" with the supercooled magnets. Still, those look to be resolved within a couple months and we will get more information.

The point of this is, even if we get within micro-seconds, we cannot go beyond the Big Bang. Nothing can pass beyond the Big Bang. Therefore we cannot know anything about God as an entity. (Besides the obvious logical problems with that.) Beyond that, any God we discern, being non-personal, would be very unsatisfactory from a spiritual perspective.

I don't believe that we can demonstrate either the existence or the non-existence of such a God.

Another part of the problem of the quest for an objective, transcendent god, is the semantic one. What does the word "god" mean? Words don't really have their own meaning. With all due respect to makers of dictionaries, different people mean different things by the same words. Each of us carries a mental image of the referent for a word (Or perhaps several for some words.) and those referents are different. Let us take a mundane example. You and I look at a map of the town. A stream runs through the town and the map shows a bridge crossing that stream. You look at the map and make a decision to drive to the bridge and then cross it to the other side. When we arrive we find that the bridge is really a one-way bridge. To cross the stream from our side requires that we go several blocks further to a second bridge which is one-way in our direction. The map is not the territory, to quote Alfred Korzybski, the father of General Semantics.

Words and language are only a map to the territory, they are not the actuality. So the word "god" can have--does have--different meanings for each person. At another level, the word "god" is a metaphor by which people have, throughout history, attempted to share their experience of the spiritual which, by every definition, is beyond words and definition. Whatever that word means, it is clear that it cannot mean something or someone "out there." There may be a good use for the word but it is not the traditional theistic meaning. (Of course, it may be that the word has become so contaminated with the "out there" meaning that it may no longer be a useful word. This may be the reason so many people refuse or are reluctant to use it.)

So we come then to the question, "If God is not, what is the subject of 'spirituality'?"

The answer to that is, I think, the one Albert Camus poses in "The Myth of Sisyphus"; given the absurdity of life, there is no purpose to living. Why not just commit suicide and avoid the pain, struggle and difficulty of living. In the end we will become ill, or deteriorate and die. Life is a terminal diagnosis. Are the few moments of joy worth the cost of continuing? Camus' answer is that it depends. If life is absurd, any purpose for it must be one you existentially create for your life. If you choose to do so, that purpose can make living worthwhile and be a reason not to commit suicide. Sisyphus found his purpose in thumbing his nose at the gods and not surrendering his spirit. Yes he had to push the rock up the hill, but he did it magnificently and that became his purpose. (I know, the gods didn't give him the option of suicide.)

Spirituality, it seems, is that process of creating a purpose for your life. Paul Tillich, one of the great Christian theologians of the 20th century had a key idea that is quite congruent with this. He spoke of finding a "Ground of Being," for your life--which he identified as God. He derived the ground of being, God, primarily from Christian revelation, but he also took much of it from existential philosophy, e.g., Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre. Tillich was writing in the 1940's and 1950's and could not yet escape from conventional, traditional neo-orthodoxy. Others have pursued this in further direction.

Today we have Christian theology that is even more cognizant of new thought. Particularly "Process Theology" (Built initially around the thinking of Alfred North Whitehead but carried now by John Cobb and others.)

What this makes of spirituality and religion is something different from the past. Spirituality is to be seen in the behavior that it engenders. Do not tell me of your beliefs or your "spirituality" without showing me the results in your behavior. And I will apply that same standard to myself. This is really not all new. The Buddha preached this, but even before him, Jesus did so. And even before Jesus, Amos, Hosea, Micah and Isaiah said it also. Even before them, it was embedded in the Torah.

So what about "god?" Surprising myself, I find I am quite able to use the word "god", in prayer and in words, but not because my prayer calls upon some "out there" god to fill in and accomplish what I cannot. Rather, my prayer has something to do with instilling in my unconscious, the will to do what is moral and good and to oppose what is "evil" and not good; in other words, to "love my neighbor as myself". I look to the reports of Jesus, among others, his teaching and behavior, for inspiration in this without suggesting that only he could so inspire.

Struggling to find words to share my spiritual experience and aware of the perils of language, I have begun speaking of myself as a non-theistic (No "out there" god), heterodox (Orthodoxy is almost always wrong), Presbyterian (The milieu in which I have learned and grown), Zen (My personal spiritual meditative practice) follower of Jesus, the Jewish spiritual master.

The Sacred

Here's the rub: If I can actually describe it, it is not the Sacred. I can call things sacred, meaning that they are important to me or that they fill me with awe, but the word sacred implies something more. In fact, William James, writing in his famous The Varieties of Religious Experience used the phrase "The More" to designate whatever it was that some people called "God", others "Allah"; still other people, such as the Hindus, refer to various characteristics, but do not name The More. The Christian theologian, Paul Tillich, referred to the Sacred as "the ground of being."

Why is this so difficult? Because the Sacred can only be experienced, not described, every attempt to describe it is untrue. We can only speak of the Sacred in metaphor. And the metaphor only refers to our own experience of the Sacred. Others may, in fact will, have a different experience. Therefore, even if they use the same words as I do, they will mean something different. My metaphor can never be prescriptive.

Religious doctrines, dogma and creeds are always wrong, except for the people who wrote them. This is the origin of my belief that orthodoxy is always wrong. The Sacred is always more than we can encompass with our orthodoxies.

I prefer to use the word "heterodox", but in a new and positive light. Often heterodox is associated with heretical. But, as I see it, heterodox thinking deliberately rejects any orthodoxy in its entirety, seeing in orthodoxy the error of mistaking metaphor for reality. Orthodoxy sees the finger pointing to the moon and makes the mistake of creating doctrines and "truths" about the finger, worshiping the finger rather than seeing the moon. "Heresy", is simply the rejection of one or more orthodox positions, replacing it with its own alternative orthodoxy.

Of course, the same logic holds for almost all human endeavors. Those who "believe in" science, think themselves more rational than those who acknowledge their spirituality. Yet science is, by definition, not about absolutes, but about probabilities and approximations. The nature of science is asymptotic. That is, scientific "truth" is always approaching the truth but never quite reaching it.

Does that mean all is hopeless in communicating our experiences of the Sacred, our spiritual experiences? Yes and No! (Yeah. I hate that too.) Yes, if your goal is that others completely understand you and your experience, the most you can do is create the metaphors and give them to others (Even if some people actually convince themselves that their metaphors are the reality). One can, of course, make corrections to the other person's understanding of your metaphor and through dialog come closer to understanding. But it is still a metaphor and not the reality of your experience.

On the other hand, "No"; there can be value in religion. It can provide a common language, if it isn't taken too seriously, too literally, and too dogmatically. Having a common language means that we can come closer to understanding each other's experience of The More. A religion could, potentially, be a community of spirituality recognizing that each person must apprehend the Sacred for herself, but the members supporting each other's spiritual practice and growth. When this happens, we are facilitated in communicating our experience of The Sacred.

On Starting a Blog

I've been thinking about writing several articles to share some of the things I've learned about life and some of those I think I've learned. I was going to put these on my own website, but that would mean having "finished" ideas to share. I'm not sure that I will ever have a finished article. Everything I know is in a constant state of flux.

Here are a few of the ideas I intend to write about.

• One of my "late in life" learnings is about the value of public, social nudity. Thirty odd years ago I took some training in using nudity in doing psychotherapy. I led several nude therapy groups and had some amazing success in helping people improve their lives. Later the therapy movement became more staid, conservative and stodgy. They also bought into the conservative idea that nudity equals sex. In order to remain a "member in good standing," I abandoned this work. That was a mistake. But there is more to nudity than therapy. Social and especially family nudity has several great benefits for the adults and for the children.

• There are a lot of fairly strange movements in the world of psychotherapy. Many of them are either not efficacious or even worse train people to be crazier. Others, in the marriage counseling arena, actually destroy marital relationships (The words "marital relationship" for me mean all forms of consensual, committed relationships of whatever gender preference.) rather than improve them.

• In the realm of spirituality, I will share my own ideas, feelings and my own apprehension of "The Sacred." The Sacred can be called by all kinds of names. . .or even None.

• As counter point, I may share what I have learned about pickling fish, the joys of motorcycle riding or photography, Mexico, Brazil or Japan.

This is a starting list. I'm a broad fellow (Physically and mentally) and don't intend to restrict either myself or anyone who cares to read.

Blessing,
David