What’s your problem with god?

I CAN only imagine reality as a kind of a sphere: a bowl of existence we inhabit for a time. We’re bridled by horizons. To me, “god” is a handy word that lets us contemplate and talk about the mystery that lies beyond as well as within the boundaries.

Without that word, I find it hard to talk about what “meaning” might “mean” — and, while that’s not a biological imperative, it is a by-product of consciousness that can have some big implications for how much we make of our lives.

Our experience of “god-ness” is limited to recognizing reflections of the more-than-obvious and immediate in the place we live, and those reflections are everywhere, playing with our every emotion, imagining and thought. And we can in-dwell all this experience as expectations of “god-ness”. We can helpfully think of our being, too, as a manifestation of “god-ness”, simply because existence is inseparable from stuff we can not possibly know directly. So we each, separately, can be deeply changed as living impressions of “god-ness” are formed by our search for experiential coherence.

The “god” we dare to name and think we know is necessarily shaped by our shifting discernment and experience. If we’re careless and undiscerning, we can ignore the experiences of god-ness that are everywhere available to us, and deny those we can’t avoid. Within the search for coherence, they seem too chaotic and uncontrollable. Denied, they engender fear, egocentrism and greed; denial excites loneliness, nihilism, cravings for identity, addictions, sadness and boredom. It gets easy to feel existentially doomed (or damned).

With discernment, we can learn to sense “truths”, but we certainly don’t have minds capable of understanding them. Experienced truths are not intellectual challenges. They’re be-ing challenges. The greatest teachers have always struggled for words. And their followers, forgetting what the question was, have too often missed the point and turned them into tools or weapons of control. Take them a question and you get slapped with a demand to just “believe”.

But NO amount of religion or raw scripture, on its own, gives us “knowledge” of god. The sacred scriptures of every faith are not about information: they are about transformation. It’s transformation that makes them “sacred”.

God-knowledge can only ever be partial, personal and experiential. Each of us inhabits a unique consciousness with its own particular horizons. And, without personal experience to communicate with, religion is just words echoing in an empty room: the words of our culture, faith or denomination — religious practice becomes little more than play-acting or indoctrination. This is happening when we’re told to “believe” this or that about “god”, or where the language and/or premises of religious liturgy are rooted in assertion. Trust, not assurance, is the foundation of faith. The poetics of love are its servant. Logic stumbles.

Ideally, Christian worship serves me as a sort of spiritual dry run for the week ahead. Good guidance and companionship help us to grow in discernment, and serve us well. But solitude is also necessary. As is deep reflection. Silence helps us deal with the inner clamor that ongoing experience quickly generates. We need time without inputs to re-establish the coherence that sustains our trust.

So Islamic coherence recognizes the unity and singularity of the mystery of “god” and is a “true faith”; Judaism’s coherence recognizes how wholly we’re in the hands of the mystery, and is a “true faith”; Christianity finds coherence in the mystery experienced as love, and is a “true” faith; Buddhism sees the need to pass through the curtain of “ego”, and is a “true faith”, native American spiritualties see the whole of creation as interrelated beings — equally necessary kin —and, so, are also “true”. Hinduism sees the mystery’s myriad faces and the dynamic balances between creation and destruction, and so is “true”. Daoism emphasizes the quest for harmony with the mystery, while Sikhism teaches the need to live “truth”, so there are “truths” here too. And, so it goes.

Meanwhile, the mystery continues to perplex us all… passive and remote but immediate and interventionist, granting us sensations of freedom but circumscribing the outcomes of our every thought and action; blessing us with goodness we fail to understand while frustrating our “reasonable” hopes; letting us to get things horribly wrong but being present as a strange consolation in extremity.

On the one hand, evolution is “true” as a tool towards understanding the unity and deep entanglement of life on Earth. “Creation” is also true, because, without forces that are too vast for us to understand (or at least to coherently talk about), nothing exists. The mystery lures us into dreams of permanence and security… but places us in a dynamic universe in which everything changes all the time, at it’s own rate and in its own way, but with a puzzling kind of choreographic synchronicity. Any notion of static existence is a self-refuting idea. But we can’t help experiencing some attributes of existence — meaning, for example — as enduring values.

But who are we to “know”? Surely every “known” is a hypothesis? Isn’t everything we say about “god” falsified as it leaves our lips? Don’t we base our concepts about “god” on endless fallacies? How could the question, “what is truth?” — asked out of Pilate’s legalistic intellect — possibly be answered?

Isn’t it more about “trust”… not because it pleases “god” to be trusted but because it gives us the hope of “pleasing god”? It’s for our own peace of mind that we think we act decently… that “god” will be pleased. But who knows all of the consequences of our actions? How far do they reach? How are others affected? And, if they are affected, how does that experience radiate from them? Can a smile unleash a catastrophe? Can a smile shape a saint? … or can it do both, at the same time?

All of our words and actions are participatory, interactive, and malleable. They can be silenced, re-construed or amplified in ways that are beyond our control… we need “hope” as well as “trust”.

The mystery grants us both, but only when we let ourselves be ridden with the viruses of vulnerability, open-ness, curiosity and passion. Of course: we must not judge and cannot be judged. Of course: forgiveness is an absolute necessity. Of course: the “kingdom” is both of this world and beyond it, but also within us. And of course: love is the only way we can give our own life meaning and value. “What is love?,” Pilate might have asked, and been answered by the same silence.

Love is the best we have, given our nature, culture and capacities… to give, or receive. How are we empowered to love? By immersing ourselves in it… hoping, trusting. We have to know love to become love. It has everything to do with the mystery… and nothing to do with the mystery.

I have come to understand beauty as “god’s language of love”: beauty, inspiring gratitude, raises our will to express love. It has the power to affect us morally as well as aesthetically.

I have come to understand beauty as “god’s language of love”…

Wisdom. anyone?

WISDOM is scarce and difficult to acquire.

What is wisdom? Let's say “wisdom” is the fusion of experience and gathered knowledge into core principles that, integrated into our awareness, being and behaviour, help us to live well. Living “well” means living satisfyingly, joyfully, confidently, with integrity and without harming other people or nature. It is about peace, within oneself and with the World. It is a dream, an ideal. 

In youth, we’re called upon to gather ideas in a great rush to make our way in life. Most of those ideas about the World are constructed by others. Some are great and manage to survive the testing times of life; most are, at best, expedient, and they get us through… sort of… with a bit of luck. And some are total rubbish.

They come to us through our parents and peers, our educators and employers, from society, politics, friends, economics, religion… and a lot of them are convincing because, in those particular, close contexts, everyone around us is similarly mistaken.

Along the way, we also pick up glimpses of truth, insights into reality and some genuine wisdom. We almost certainly start seeing flaws in the ways we are living, in what's offered as “common sense” and in “conventional wisdom”.

As we become growingly aware of our necessary selfhood, most of us are likely to be picking up signals that our favourite falsehoods are, in fact, false. To avoid the stress of self-examination and the effort of reworking our accepted ideas and beliefs, we might to decide to cling to them anyway and hope for the best.

Or we might feel more “wisdom” would come in handy. And that leaves us with a couple of ways to become wiser:

1. Seek more insight. This, though, means opening more widely to experience and that carries risks. It means adventuring into new (to us) ideas, fields of interest and personal reflection — and that’s hard work for which we probably have limited time and little energy.

2. Discern and ditch more falsehoods. Though this, too, means taking some risks. Can we get by without some of our deeply embedded falsehoods? What will happen when we pull one familiar prop out from under our cherished sense of who we are… then another, and another? Besides, what is all THAT wrong with us?

Or we can let life continue to simply run on by us… and linger within familiar boundaries. There are dangers here, too. The biggest is the vulnerability of trying to stand still in a changing, inherently dynamic world; our self-image is bound to become less and less tenable unless we let it shift. Placing that shift in the hands of others will leave us, in the end, not knowing who we are, feeling lonely and without “meaning”.

What might be a few “favorite falsehoods”? The list here is necessarily personal but a few I’ve done my best to eject from my own life would include, for example:

• The fallacy that there’s ever “us” and “them”.

• The fallacy that winning a war, a game or a life-contest is something to be celebrated.

• The fallacy that we can pick and choose the people we should treat decently.

• The fallacy that anyone can move on in life without forgiving completely and utterly.

• The fallacy that what I’ve done by simply earning a living hasn’t really ever harmed others.

• The fallacy that some things never change and that some things are reliably predictable.

• The fallacy that someone who’s more needy than me is somehow less deserving.

• The fallacy that hard work, intelligence and education guarantee “success”.

• The fallacy that our responsibilities end at living decently and not making waves.

ANYBODY can seek wisdom… and, for humanity's sake, everybody should. 

Wisdom has very little to do with information, data or blitzing through books… nor with genes or Myers-Briggs profiles. Nor is it necessarily archaic or arcane.

It's not about “knowing” (in the popular modern sense) — or job training — but “meaning”. And it lies around in everyday stuff: the walls we bounce off and the torrents that lift us high. It's a gift, to be sure — but no more special than our other capacities. Denied the ability to fly like a bird, we have to do our flying with our wisdom journey.

Wisdom simply has to do with cultivating an open-ness to experience and that has a lot to do with trust: trusting, for example, that whatever got "me" here today can probably also take me to where I need to be tomorrow. That trust may be misplaced but — even if it is — there's nothing gained by withholding it. As we go, discernment grows and life deepens as it unfolds.

So far, the mystery's okay by me.

To not “let go” into life is a seriously self-debilitating choice… imagine a swallow on a wire thinking “what if that stuff with the wings doesn’t work this time?” and clinging to the wire, waiting for food to come to it until  at last it dies of hunger.  

I'm saddened by the way we “elders” collectively allow the “system” to regiment young people into what’s called “responsibility” when the world — everywhere — is such an exciting, interesting diverse and dynamic place to be.  Young people would be far happier and better off with vision quests than with law and business degrees, or with jobs that eat up their capabilities and give them fretful lives of struggle to keep corporate castles in the air. A bit of irresponsibility can be a marvellous tonic.

We “elders” owe young people more than we give them… and, to be “elders”, we should be helping them to open their eyes and ears and interests and minds, and dissuading them from embarking, passionless, on some glassy-eyed, psychic sleepwalk into student debt, but to follow wherever curiosity and inspiration lead. Knowledge should be as accessible as fresh air and water. God knows, education should at least be free and available to anyone who wants it. And the idea of what counts as “education” needs to include the whole of life. 

Truth and beauty are more important than any career skill. Wisdom is a journey for which all should be allowed, or must claim, space and time. Its pursuit is to the common good.

Learning to see truth and beauty is more important than any career skill…

Just the facts…?

BEAUTY — god's language of love… 

"FACT" is a word that comes to us from a a Latin word that had the sense of something that is “done”, more than something that “is”. Popularly, it's become associated with “truth”.

When I think about my experience of “facts”, a “fact” has almost always come to me as the answer to some sort of question, or as an assertion that’s come from a question someone else asked. In each case, the question came first. The question arose in the mind of the person who asked it —  not from nature, which simply exists. The question need not even have been explicit. It can be embedded in the way we have come to “see”, and to understand.

A “fact” is invariably the outcome of a question… it is discrete, separated from its source… extracted, like a museum exhibit, from some greater reality. It is static, despite the busy dynamism and apparent purposefulness of reality. It is a fragment of information chosen intentionally from the flows of change and indivisible interaction in which we’re immersed.

A “fact” — pretty much by definition — is “true”. But there’s a lot wrong with that notion.

The way any “fact” is observed or discerned and the reasons for its being chosen have a lot to do with our culture and the way we exercise our attention. A “fact” has almost everything to do with our values, interests and attitudes. Certainly a “fact” is a “western” concept. It fragments reality in ways that expose events to particular sorts of intervention and manipulation. All cultures have their own “knowledge” and wisdom systems as ways of extracting meaning from experience and the flows of being. But different tools, of course, produce different outcomes.

Science tries very hard to exclude all sorts of irrelevant variable from its research procedures but can forget that silly, limited or incompetent questions will generate as much data as wise and accomplished questions, and that statistical predictions may or may not have a lot to do with the personal experience of particular events. Science does what it attempts fairly well but it remains a limited activity facing infinite challenges. One of its limitations is the capacity of the human mind.

As a journalist, I became very aware that a news story — written in fluent "fact-ese" — was a selectively chosen and carefully circumscribed representation of something that seemed to have taken place, looked at in a particular way. 

Whatever had happened took place for reasons that were far to complicated to explain in the few words journalistic conventions allowed, and everyone — from the players themselves (and their agents) to the clock watching news editor steaming full speed ahead to a deadline — would see your story according to their own lights and priorities and, by the time anyone read, heard or saw your “story”, reality would have already moved on and the “players” would be doing other things. Nevertheless, people will tend to believe what they want to believe and, by and large, have enormous appetites for self-affirmation.

Understanding this makes journalists cynical and public relations companies profitable. It makes advertising and marketing the most lucrative business activities of all (their raw materials are vanity and credulity… which both come cheaply).

Facts never coincide, except in the bluntest of ways, from one culture to another, and not necessarily between one person and the next. Misunderstandings are rife. A person’s “facts” can place and identify that person in his/her culture, society, class, occupation, interests… the more stratified or specialised a society becomes, the less well to people understand each other, their society, or themselves.

When we try to share “facts” by way of language, we are ensnared. A language is like a pipe, a conduit. It channels “facts” (better understood as “perceptions”) into the constraints of the particular language. And different languages achieve this in different ways.

Some languages emphasise substantiality, others emphasise dynamics and activitity. Some emphasis relationality and contextuality. Some emphasise people, some emphasise roles or wider forces. And, always, it’s a matter of degree. But every language rounds off a statement into the regularities of “meaning” that are inherent to it. Language organizes experience into sets of familiarities. So what is said (written or represented) is not the whole of what is “meant” — and what is “meant” has an only approximate bearing on raw experience. And that is the extent of our communication: whatever can be said within the conventions of overlapping premises and references.

Even raw experience is very much shaped by the interests and questions we apply to reality. When we approach reality with an agenda, we are almost certain to end up mistaken. But, rid ourselves of agendas? That is very, very difficult.

Art can free us from language, but risks being either so subjective and idiosyncratic that it’s unintelligible, or so bound by conventions of its own that it means little. Our behavior can communicate a lot, but most of us show the world something other than our “true” self… not that we are very good at seeing or understanding our “true” self anyway.

Which is why “wisdom” is such a rarely attained state, why "meaning" is elusive and why we spend so much time feeling confused, and bickering with each other.

“Facts” are especially dangerous when we believe them. My mother used to tell me that you didn’t get “it” until you saw the truth in its opposite. Still, facts do have their functional value… as, indeed, do hammers, explosives and heavy earth-moving equipment.

IT is a popular-level “fact” that, let is say, water is “wet”, unless it’s vapor or ice. Vapor is the gaseous phase of water, “wet” only when it condenses; ice is a crystalline or polycrystalline solid  (wet only when it melts), like iron or limestone. Some scientists consider ice a "mineral".

"Wet" is a "fact" but that doesn't make it "true"…  and  any memories of truer times we may have may are almost certainly coloured by experiences of consensus.

There was a time when monocultures existed more or less seamlessly. They were able to instill and maintain values and ideologies in ways that established powerful cultural solidarities. There have always been dissenters and rebels but there have been times — and still are — when they have been relatively easily dealt with. Nevertheless, it was rebels and dissenters who, for example, ended the rule of the great European monarchies… less by force than by the propagation of new views of what being human was all about. They cleared the path for good stuff and bad stuff… but mostly for new stuff.

The good stuff — to some of us — includes the rule of justice rather than the rule of law. This is what Parliaments and the like were supposed to have been about. But most parliaments have attracted representatives of “the people” who still think in “rule of law” terms — it’s simpler, after all — and are swayed, understandably, by personal ambition. Democracy is an idealist’s dream: it assumes that the surrender of personal interest to the widest benefit for all is a sufficiently common impulse to ensure the common good.

The admissibility of evidence in courts of law has long been — and continues to be — a contentious issue: one that is under constant review in those states that care about justice.  As its resources have allowed, the Innocence Project in the United States has applied DNA testing to cases where convictions may have seemed clear enough at the time but denial of guilt has been obstinately maintained… and won a quite a few exonerations. Sometimes the necessary evidence for comparison has been lost or destroyed, and the Innocence Project has also has won exonerations in several of these cases too, though its focus has been on DNA testing. It has a waiting list of thousands of cases. You can check them out at http://www.innocenceproject.org.

The “opening of minds” that many claim as a feature of the new era is an interesting notion. The reality is, of course, that we are all and each ultimately trapped in our own consciousness. There is no way for us to avoid that place. Even nirvana does not reach that far; it is merely the extinction of greed, delusion and hatred… it frees the consciousness to open more fully and wholly to experience, but is does not allow it to explore the consciousness of others.

Social and media diversities almost certainly make us more aware of our existential loneliness but they don't help us deal with it. Rather, they "atomise" our world: they open us to extremes of relativism and, simultaneously, to intensified self-centredness. We see it expressed in fits of “joining” activity (chasing around after like-minded or congenial groups of people who make us feed good for a time but often disappoint us in the end), in feelings of insecurity, futility and pointlessness; it engenders ambient fears, suspicion of the “unknown” and deepened needs for reassurance. It can drive people to extremes, to fickleness, to madness and to straw-grasping desperation.It seems to exacerbate depression, suicide and addiction.

The “truth” forever lies in pieces in a million hearts.

Meaning is necessarily contextual. And “meaning” is the vessel of “truth”. Contexts don’t contain “truth” but some contexts have bigger windows and thinner walls.

Finding “truth” has to be about finding contexts in which “meaning” can be experienced. This is why I open as keenly as I can to “beauty”, and see beauty and god’s language of love. That’s NOT a “religious teaching” in any religion I’m aware of (and I do look around a bit) and it seems to be very eccentric, but it is a personal source of “truth” to me. It is important because it leads me to a kind of nirvana. It is accessible to me because I can find it at my fingertips. But all I can attribute it to is my whole-of-life experience: the workings of my own consciousness.

It’s that personal consciousness that we neglect or abuse at our peril. Which is why I pretty much live the way I do and pretty much why a deep, sustaining joy is always immediately available to me. If we are going to survive as a species, I do believe that we each need to nurture and value our personal consciousness more hopefully and more discerningly but also more more freely, more boldly, more deeply…

Historically, “facts” — by virtue of their ephemerality, and the sorts of questions that have produced them — have been a distraction from that. 

The “facts” are found among the chaff of any winnowing.