Mysticism, Myth and Make-Believe

Religious teachings and ideas consist of three things: mysticism, myth, and make-believe. Or, as I've said somewhat less precisely in another context, inspired wisdom and comic-book stuff.

Where does religion originally come from? Of course one may provide a cynical answer to this question; one may assert that religion comes from a desire for power on the part of a priesthood, or from a desire to explain the unexplained, or from a desire for immortality or fear of death, or from a desire for certainty in an uncertain world. But while all of these are factors in determining the beliefs that make up a religion, there is one other element without which religion wouldn't even exist: mysticism.

By "mysticism" I mean the direct personal experience of -- well, of those things that mystics experience. Call it the Underlying Reality, or UR for short. Any words I might use to describe exactly what the UR is would be metaphorical at best and misleading at worst. If you reading this have undergone mystical experience, you know what I mean. If you haven't, unfortunately, I can't tell you. But there are states of consciousness which the human mind can achieve either spontaneously or by various methods, and in which one comes to an intuitive understanding regarding one's identity and place in the cosmos. Mystical awareness has been called many things: communion with God, union with God, communion or union with the universe, eradication of the ego or of the self, awakening from sleep or from a dream, penetration of the illusion to find reality. All of these are metaphors, which is why I'm using a vague term here like UR, which really doesn't mean anything and so, if it fails to inform, should at least also not confuse. Again, if you've been there, you know.

One thing that has sometimes happened is that mystics have felt a compulsion to communicate their teachings to other people. I guess most of us go through that desire at some point or other (and look, here I am surrendering to it yet again). Something interesting happens when they do. Two interesting things, actually. The first is that hardly anyone understands them (only other mystics, who don't need the instruction, can really comprehend it). But the second is that what they say often resonates with a kind of unconscious awareness we all have. It's as if the understanding of mystics is stored inside our brains where we can't normally get at it, and pops up to say "Hey! Here I am!" whenever it gets any encouragement. And so when a person reads a parable of Jesus from the Gospels or the teachings of the Buddha from the Sutras or the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tze or some of the more seminal passages of the Baghavad Gita, the thoughts expressed in those words touch off little explosions deep inside the soul. And so the mystics attract followers who don't really understand what their teacher or guru or whatever is talking about, but know that they like it and want to follow it.

And then another thing happens when the mystic teacher dies, as is of course inevitable. The written teachings are then all that's left, and there is usually no one around anymore who really understands them, but there remain enthusiastic followers who want to believe. And that's where all those other contributions to religious thought come in: the desire for power, to explain the unexplained, to deny death, or to achieve certainty.

Now, within most religions or at least within an esoteric branch of them one can always find a framework for pursuing mystical enlightenment, together with techniques for achieving it. Since it's only possible to know the UR by personally experiencing it, this sort of instruction within a religion -- instruction as to how to personally experience it -- is the only religious knowledge that can be conveyed directly and straightforwardly. That's mysticism: the first category of religious teaching.

One can also find plenty of myth, and by that I mean ideas and stories that provide metaphorical descriptions of the UR or some aspect of it. Myths, like the teachings of great mystics, resonate in the brain's hidden recesses. But we must always remember that myths are metaphors; its their resonance with the buried mystical awareness that's important, not their literal truth. The central Christian myth of the Resurrection is a perfect example. Many Christians actually believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead; I regard that as extremely improbable for obvious reasons, but that's not really the point here. The point is that the Resurrection as myth is more important than the Resurrection as fact even if it IS fact. What this story says about the process of awakening and the experience a mystic goes through to come to that point is what's important here. And the same is true of other myths in other religions. It's not important whether the Buddha was actually raised with such imposed naivety that he never saw sickness or poverty or death until he became a teenager and jumped over Daddy's royal wall. (Yeah, like he never suffered a childhood disease . . .) It's not important whether his mother had a dream in which she was impregnated by a white elephant. It's not important whether Moses really brought monstrous plagues down on Egypt or caused the sea to part or obtained God's will inscribed on stone tablets by the divine hand itself. What's important in every case is the symbolic power of these stories, the way they resonate (once again) with that hidden knowledge we all carry.

The final category of religious thought is make-believe. Now, make-believe can have the same contents as myth sometimes. In fact, that's very often the case. Those that believe a myth to be literally real and (more importantly) make a big deal of this, so that it sets their religion apart from all others, are engaging in make-believe.

Make-believe in religious thought and teachings generates a narrative that aggrandizes a religon's power and importance.

God, the creator of the universe, selected one particular tribe of humans as his particular servants, and expects more of them than from others, and visits them with blessings when they live up to these expectations and with tribulations when they fall short.

God sent his son to sacrifice himself for the sins of the world, so that those who follow his religion can be saved from hell and achieve eternal life in bliss.

God has addressed mankind via a series of prophets, and we who follow the last of the prophets have his real, true teachings, all previous prophetic teachings having been either superseded or corrupted or both.

See the pattern? In reality, awareness of the UR is something that all human beings have as a potential. It's there, separate from any religion, ready to guide and lead. The experience of finding it is something often hinted at in the teachings of all religions, and all religions should consider themselves to be signposts pointing the way towards the reality at which they can only hint. When all religious teachings are properly understood to be what they are -- myths and metaphors -- how can any religion ever claim to possess THE truth, or to be true while all others are false? Literally speaking, there is no such thing as a "true metaphor." (Or, of course, a false one.) When a religion takes this kind of humble approach and accepts that its teachings are not THE truth, but only one version, one myth, one pointer towards the knowable-but-not-tellable, then it will leave make-believe behind and deal only in mysticism and myth.

But when it obsesses over the make-believe aspects of its teachings, then it ceases to be a guide to the UR and becomes a barrier between it and the believer. And that is also when it becomes potentially something dangerous.

No matter how sophisticated our knowledge of the universe becomes, there will always be a place for both mysticism and myth. But there really should be no place for make-believe outside of fiction.

The First Noble Falsehood

All of the religions of the Classical Civilized Paradigm have in common a core belief about the relationship between the soul and physical existence. This belief is expressed in different ways in different faiths, but the most elegant expression in my opinion is the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, first of which is that all life contains the element of suffering, or, more simply and as believed in practice, that all life is suffering. For Buddhists, the joys and pleasures of life (while acknowledged to exist) are, in essence, the bait for a trap. They’re here to bind us to the world so we can suffer more. The point is to get out.

No other religion puts it quite that way (or, in my opinion, quite that well), but all of the Great Religions share that conclusion: the point is to get out. We don’t belong here. We belong somewhere else or in some other conditions: in Heaven, in Paradise, reunited with God from Whom we have become separated, or restored to the bliss of non-manifestation. The details vary widely, of course. Religions of the Hindu/Buddhist complex believe in reincarnation or soul transmigration, and so teach that we may go through many incarnations before finally being freed to go where we belong. Religions of the Abrahamic lineage (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) don’t have this belief, and so teach that there is a single lifetime after which comes God’s judgment and (hopefully) a passage to the place where we belong. But in none of these faiths is incarnate, manifest existence on the physical plane seen as anything but a mistake.

This idea – that we are here by mistake, and our focus should be to remove ourselves somewhere else – is what I call, in a play on the Buddha’s teaching which I’m sure he will have enough enlightenment to forgive, the First Noble Falsehood.

In fairness to the Buddha, we can’t be sure that this is what he actually taught. No writings by him have survived, and that’s rather a mystery. The Buddha, who was a prince, was certainly literate. Did he really not write down any of his teachings, or were his writings lost – or suppressed – after his death? We may wonder the same thing about Jesus and Mohammed, who were also literate and who have also left us no writings. Be that as it may, an inevitable disconnect occurs in communication between the teachings of an enlightened spiritual leader such as the Buddha or Jesus, and the form those teachings take when embodied in an organized religion, especially after the old boy isn’t around any longer to interfere with the process.

Part of that disconnect arises simply because of the difficulty of communicating the deep truths of the spirit in words. Language isn’t designed for that purpose. Its vocabulary communicates things from one person to another that both people are already familiar with. In giving you directions to the post office, I know that you know what a street is, what a post office is, what it means to turn left or turn right, and how to identify various landmarks that I may give you to show the way. If someone wants to communicate something that is a bit outside his listeners’ experience, then one starts with the things the listener knows and builds on that. But to communicate spiritual reality is very, very difficult, because it is outside of the experienced world of most people. It can usually only be done in metaphors and parables, and even then most people will attach meanings to the parables that aren’t correct. “He who has an ear, let him hear.”

But beyond this, further problems came in for all Classical Paradigm religions as they became established and involved in politics. Ideas and teachings that did not serve the political purposes of the faith were suppressed, and ideas that were necessary for that purpose were introduced. And it is at this juncture, I believe, that the First Noble Falsehood arose.

Politics is in large measure about privilege. It’s a battleground between those who enjoy an elite, entitled, privileged position, and those who would like to see them lose it. Sometimes those who would like to see them lose it simply want to replace them as the privileged elite. Sometimes the goal is to eliminate privilege altogether or at least reduce its prerogatives. In modern times that latter manifestation has become more acute, but in the ancient times when the Buddha lived, the elite (to which class he himself was born) had things pretty much any way they wanted. Politics – a game the Buddha’s social class played exclusively, commoners need not apply – was thus all about upholding and supporting their status and power, except of course when it involved infighting among them for a larger share of power than one’s fellows.

Religion was, under the Classical Paradigm, always a partner with the state. Often, it was an actual arm of the state. As such, it always served the purposes of the state, which included public order, but also included the upholding of privilege. Now privilege, to the enlightened eye, is unjustifiable. It is simply wrong, and needs to be abolished. And so, if religion is to serve the purposes of the state, a filter must exist to allow the passion which an enlightened teacher’s teachings inspire to be twisted into the service of privilege, something he would in all cases have abhorred. And the First Noble Falsehood serves that purpose admirably, by taking that passion and turning its focus away from this world altogether and towards another reality where there is no social privilege to be threatened.

The challenge to privilege and power represented by spirituality when focused on this world where we actually live can be seen in modern times. Look what Gandhi accomplished for Indian independence or Martin Luther King for racial equality in America. There is magic in genuine spirituality, a power of the heart that moves the hearts of others. To the holders of privilege, spirituality is dangerous, and must be channeled into non-threatening, or ideally even privilege-supporting paths.

Jesus was not put to death on a whim.

The story of Christianity’s co-option by the Roman state in the 4th century CE is a good illustration of how the process works, and where the First Noble Falsehood comes from. I said above that under the Classical Paradigm religion was always intertwined with the state, but actually early Christianity represents an exception. Under Roman law, Christianity was an illegal religion, but the laws were seldom enforced. Christians could be arrested any time, given a chance to recant their faith, and executed in brutal ways if they refused, but most of the time they weren’t. The net effect was that Christians were free to practice their religion (except when some Emperor or other got a bug up his sphincter and started a persecution), but was not involved with the state at all. It couldn’t be, because it was illegal. Nor could intra-faith politicians (you know the type, all religions have them) call on the state to enforce their authority. For that reason, during the time between the mission of Paul and the Council of Nicaea, Christianity was one of the freest and most diverse religions of all antiquity.

It was also frequently troublesome. Christians refused to pay token worship to the official state religion, and so in the view of the state endangered Roman society’s relationship with the Gods, on whose favor it depended. Christians were also frequently pacifists and anti-slavery advocates, thus endangering the Roman state’s ability to defend itself against foreign enemies and the foundation of the Roman society’s economy. Here was spirituality acting as a threat to privilege, which it so often does.

Three Emperors attempted to stamp out the religion through persecution. None succeeded. In the early 4th century, the emperor Constantine tried a different approach: co-option. By repealing the laws against Christianity, by calling a council of “Bishops” (note that this in itself favored the more authoritarian forms of Christianity over the less so, since only the authoritarian Christian sects recognized “Bishops” to start with) from all over the Empire to iron out exactly what the faith stood for and taught, and finally by making Christianity itself the state religion of the Roman Empire, Constantine and his successors transformed it from a rebellious and dangerous spirituality into a useful tool of politics. One of the primary levers of this transition was to bring to the fore, and interpret in certain pro-privilege ways, the otherworldliness that had always been an element in the religion. Rather than oppose war and slavery in this world, believers were taught to focus on the next, where there was no war and where everyone was free. By the time of the Roman Empire’s fall, Christianity had become wholly a tool of civic authority and the defense of privilege. The First Noble Falsehood was an important part of that transition.

The transition to that state for other religions is less visible, and in some cases I suppose it’s possible that the First Noble Falsehood was enshrined from the beginning so that no actual transition occurred. What is certain, however, is that so long as religion and the state remained partners in politics, any religion allowed to survive would of necessity transfer any passions for reform from this world to another.

With the separation of church and state which has become the modern norm, spirituality is now free to manifest itself in worldly ways and has begun to do so once more. It is, I think, time to abandon the First Noble Falsehood. We are not here, embodied in physical existence, as a mistake, and our goal is not to leave this life for another, but to make of it the best and holiest thing we can, in love of those around us and in homage to the principles we cherish.

The Advanced Civilized Paradigm II: Religion

This second entry in the Advanced Civilized Paradigm series concerns religion. I touched on this subject last January: http://thedragontalking.blogspot.com/2010/01/morphology-of-religion.html. Here, I want to go into a bit more detail about the nature of religion in the far future, in the end state of significant technological progress.

Religion changes over time. In particular, it changed dramatically at the same two junctures I cited in my last entry, the transition from the Precivilized Paradigm to the Classical Civilized Paradigm, and the transition in which we currently find ourselves, away from the Classical Paradigm and (perhaps) towards the Advanced Paradigm. Just as in government, in work, and in other areas, a pattern can be seen that remained constant within recognizable parameters across thousands of years of history and everywhere in the world.

It’s sometimes hard to recognize this, because all of the so-called “great” religions were developed under the Classical Paradigm. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, all of these emerged during the millennia of agrarian economies and monarchical governments, and so they show the common characteristics of all such faiths, but because we are used to considering only these ancient religions, and the parameters of the possible are (incorrectly) imagined to be coextensive with their variations, the relatively insignificant differences among them stand out in stark relief and the essential similarity is all but invisible. It’s analogous to an all-male convention in which one observes that some of the attendees are tall, some short, some thin, some fat, some bearded and some not, some bald and some with hair, and fails to observe that none of them have breasts.

Religion, like government, follows the material needs of society, in this case the need for a statement and ritual reinforcement of collective morality and of the myths that describe man’s place in the cosmos. Like the governments of the Classical Paradigm, the religions of that era all had certain characteristics in common. They all stipulated that man was the master of nature, entitled to rule and dominate. They all elevated a principle separate from nature over and above man. (Usually, that principle was personified as one or more deities. Occasionally, as in Buddhism, it was not. But in all cases, the principle elevated to sacred status was separate from nature. It was either the creator of nature, or supra-powerful beings dominant over nature, or a principle of reality with nature seen as illusion. Nature itself was shorn of sacrality.) They all acknowledged the superiority of some men over others and of all men over women. All propounded a sexual morality that maximized birthrates by making women the sexual property of men, denying them control over their sexuality and their reproductive behavior, and placing upon them a moral obligation to have as many children as possible, while condemning both (female) extramarital sex and (for both sexes) homosexuality.

In matters of organization as well as doctrine, broad constants can be seen. All Classical Paradigm religions included a formal priesthood. All entered into partnership with the state, which gave privileged status to the official faith and, more often than not, suppressed all others. In all cases, the clergy represented an elite class alongside the warrior nobility, endowed with similar wealth and privileges, and often enjoying somewhat higher status than the nobility itself. In all cases, the formal priestly hierarchy had the authority to declare official doctrines and to declare deviance from those doctrines to be heretical; more often than not, the hierarchy also had the power to impose material penalties for heresy either directly or through the agency of the state.

These characteristics do not describe the religious beliefs, practices, and organizations of the Precivilized Paradigm, to the extent we know about those faiths. Admittedly that knowledge is less than perfect, but we can be certain about some things. For example, we can be sure that precivilized religion did not enjoy a special relationship with the state, because precivilized societies did not have states. What we can tell about our hunter-gatherer ancestors in terms of religion, assuming that the precivilized societies that have survived into historical times and had their beliefs recorded may be taken as typical, is that their myths and morality alike placed man as part of, subordinate to, and interwoven with nature, rather than above it. Women enjoyed a higher status in precivilized society than under the Classical Paradigm, and the religious beliefs of our distant ancestors reflect this. The stories and myths taught that people should treat nature, and the animals and plants that comprise nature, with the utmost respect. The religion of the Precivilized Paradigm was appropriate for the material circumstances in which people lived, and so was that of the Classical Paradigm.

Beginning in about the 15th or 16th century CE in Europe, our ancestors began to diverge from the Classical Civilized Paradigm. They did so in terms of religion just as they did in terms of economics and government. The Protestant Reformation was the first major upheaval in that transition. Most of the religious ideas of Protestants were as rooted in the Classical Paradigm as those of Catholics (after all, most them were the same ideas), but in two key respects the movement was revolutionary. One was the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers: that each person was his or her own authority on matters of doctrine, and required no sacerdotal intermediary. The other was the sheer existence of the movement and the challenge it posed to religious authority. By breaking the monolith of western Christianity, the Reformation weakened the religion’s power and paved the way for the related Enlightenment ideas of religious freedom and separation of church and state.

The second major change to impact religion was the scientific revolution. In creating the myths that explain man’s place in the universe, religious thinking during the Classical Paradigm had often employed statements about observable fact which, under scientific scrutiny, turned out not to be true. That in itself did not invalidate the myths, whose purpose was never scientific (that is, they were not intended to make factual claims about objective reality, but rather to use observable reality as a metaphor to make values statements), but it did undermine claims to infallibility, and thus further diminished religious authority.

A third major change has emerged over time from the industrial revolution, that awesome tidal wave of progress that has toppled kings and aristocracies, freed slaves, liberated women, and radically transformed societies from top to bottom. It has had its effect on religion as well. It has allowed population to grow to the point where we now need to restrain it rather than encourage it, and this has rendered inappropriate much of traditional sexual morality. Together with the elevation of brain over brawn, the same change has rendered pointless the subjugation of women. It has expanded human power over nature until today we must restrain ourselves in its use, so that myths which make man a divinely-authorized tyrant over the natural world have become inappropriate.

A fourth change impacting religion is the revolution in communications technology. From the printing press to the Internet, this has led to the exchange of religious ideas on a global basis, making it problematic for any faith to remain intellectually isolated and preserve its doctrinal purity or claims to exclusive possession of truth.

Most subtle of all, but perhaps most radical, is the observed reality of progress itself. All Classical Paradigm religions were built on a foundation of unchanging Truth known for all time and handed down by God or perceived in a state of enlightenment. (It’s true that there are Truths which are True for all time, but it’s also true that none of these Truths can be told in language, so religious doctrines, which of necessity are expressed in words, do not expound them.) Commandments written on stone tablets by the finger of God. God Himself inhabiting a human body and proclaiming infallible truth. The Prophet taking dictation from an angel. But these metaphors and mythic images, while appropriate and holding resonance within a society whose pace of change is so glacially slow that it is possible to believe it never does change, cannot work well in a society where change is rapid and constant. We cannot help but feel that they are relics of a bygone time – and indeed they are.

There is I believe one final change which has not emerged, but will. It will come from future developments in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. When we are able to remake the genetic structure of our own species, we will not use this technology merely to eliminate genetic diseases or augment average intelligence. There is more than one template of the ideal man or woman, and so the man or woman of the distant future will be a highly diverse creature, with genetic variation that is difficult to contemplate today. (The science fiction writer Greg Bear did a fair job of it, though. I recommend his Eon for a good mind boggle. To a lesser extent, also his Darwin’s Radio and Darwin’s Children.) At the same time, developments in artificial intelligence may create minds, recognized as being minds, with a radically different basis of thought than our own. The myths expressing man’s place in the cosmos must take different forms when the nature of man itself has changed almost beyond recognition.

These six changes – religious liberty, scientific method, the need for environmental responsibility, global communication, the perceived reality of progress, and redefinition of what it means to be human – will define the religious thought of the Advanced Civilized Paradigm. Under the influence of these factors, we may get a somewhat hazy image of what will emerge, indeed what is already emerging.

First, contrary to what is supposed by some militant atheists, I am sure that religion will still exist. There is a need in the brain for mythos, for a narrative expounding the nature of man and our place in the universe, for ritual weaving us into that narrative, and for reinforcement of collective morality. Whether and to what extent the religion of the future incorporates crude “supernatural” ideas is another question, but a more subtle one than is usually recognized; the myths of the Gods, and perhaps even more so that of God, resonates with the mystery of consciousness and that of existence itself, which are inherently beyond the reach of science. Reason does well at contemplating the working of the parts, but is not designed to encompass the whole.

But if we need neither fear nor hope for the end of religion, the end of the religions of the present day in their Classical Paradigm forms is a certainty. The religion or religions of the Advanced Paradigm will have the following characteristics:

Fluidity. Religion in an advanced civilization will be an evolving thing, and it will be accepted and understood that its forms must adapt themselves to the concept of change itself. People will move easily from one religious idea to another, and the idea of fixed membership in a strictly-defined belief system will be abandoned.

Diversity. Religion will take many forms, mixing elements of many faiths and adding new metaphorical forms. The fact that all religious ideas are metaphors, and so multiple “truths” are possible – or rather, that multiple ways to express truth are equally valid – will be universally recognized.

Egalitarian, environmental morality. The Advanced Civilized Paradigm will include much greater recognition of the ideal of equality than the Classical Paradigm did, and it will, of necessity, be environmentalist to a degree most people do not comprehend at this point. Religion will reflect these values. All religion will promote equality of rights and economic equality, and all will promote good stewardship of the natural world. As a consequence, traditional sexual morality will be replaced by a morality of respect and trust in sexual matters. As part of this, traditional taboos against homosexuality will disappear.

As with all elements of the Advanced Paradigm, we should not expect its religious motifs to emerge without controversy. But emerge they will, because they must. In fact, the religious aspects of the Advanced Paradigm are closer to being with us already than any of its other aspects. That’s to be expected, because one must envision the future before one can build it.