Category Archives: Faith deconstruction and reconstruction

Why?

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I realise that yesterday’s post may have seemed unnecessarily startling. “Atheist” is one of those words, like “evangelical” or “apostate”, almost guaranteed to produce a sharp intake of breath on the part of the reader. I apologise – but I did want to be definite, having prevaricated on the issue for so long.

Please don’t imagine that I’ve turned away from the contemplative life, or that I’ve decided to embrace some “There’s nowt but muck and brass, lad!” brand of materialism. I hope you’ll forgive me for quoting Sam Harris yet again:

I share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms spiritual and mystical are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences but about reality at large. Far too often, these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem, because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these experiences are false. But the fact [is] that… [t]he human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover.

And that is the problem – if it is a problem – I have had to face here. It is far too easy to read the word “atheist”, as I sometimes did myself in the past, and imagine someone for whom “all talk of spirituality [is] a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception.” I am not that man.

In fact, until the relatively recent extremes of polarisation set in, many of those we think of as archetypal atheists, like Bertrand Russell, had hearts open to experience beyond everyday consensus reality.

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory: And Other Essays (Routledge Classics)

I confess that having spent much of my life wrestling with spiritual insight on the one hand and unease with the concept of the supernatural on the other, I am profoundly relieved to be able at last to admit, to myself as much as to anyone, that atheist probably does come closer to describing my metaphysical attitude than anything else I can think of. I did consider using the softer “nontheist” (a term beloved of some contemporary Quakers) but I couldn’t get away from the sense that to use the term of myself was once again clouding the issue. I have to admit, though, that there is a passage using it, in Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, that comes as close to expressing my own feelings at the moment as anything I’ve read:

The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God… Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold… Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves… Nontheism is finally realizing there is no babysitter you can count on.

I am an atheist

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I have written here before (most recently here) of my increasing difficulty with organised religion, its practices and its dogmas, its internal turf wars and its external grasping after the levers of political and, worse, military power. What I haven’t discussed clearly enough, perhaps, is my unease at a far more fundamental level. It has taken me far too long fully to admit this unease to myself, let alone to attempt to write about it. Even now I am nervous about setting it down in permanent form.

God is usually understood, in monotheistic religions, “as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith” (Wikipedia). I have very gradually come to realise that even at the most overtly Christian periods of my life this did not describe anything I could relate to the ground of being (Paul Tillich) of my own experience. I have increasingly found it impossible to “maintain the truth that God is beyond essence and existence while simultaneously arguing for the existence of God.” (Tillich)

Spirituality, it seems to me, is far more about the discovery of meaning and purpose in direct experience – ultimately of the ontological ground itself – than it ever has been about supernatural entities however exalted. As I keep saying, this is actually very simple: it is just a matter of practice, and some measure of honesty in thinking through the implications of one’s experience.

Sam Harris, in a passage I’ve quoted often here before, writes:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Waking Up

I’m not sure I’ve encountered a better summary. And yet Harris also writes (ibid.) “…many spiritual teachings ask us to entertain unfounded ideas about the nature of reality—or at the very least to develop a fondness for the iconography and rituals of one or another religion.” I have been trying no longer to entertain unfounded ideas.

Nontheist Quakers, among others, have of course long engaged with this issue. But for me, at this late stage in my life, something simpler is needed. I have to own up to having discovered myself to be an atheist. There is no need to imagine the supernatural. The mystery of the natural is, at rest in its ground, all that we are. In that there is all the peace and clarity I had not expected, but had so long sought.

In the stillness

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In the stillness of meditation, free from concepts, free from prejudices, we are able… to enter the experience directly. We are no longer trying to experience the experience, which is how most of us get so messed up. We get into something, then we start wanting to watch it, analyse it; we want to be in control of it; we want to be able to use it: to experience the experience. What we are learning in meditation, through the utterly simple practice of stillness and of letting go of all thoughts, is that we are able to enter into the experience of being as a whole person, and therefore, the experiences that happen don’t matter.

Laurence Freeman

It seems to me that contemplative practice, formal or otherwise, cannot be in any sense a goal-oriented activity. We are not seeking to achieve something, whether an experience or a state of mind; we are not going anywhere. All we are trying to do is to reveal to ourselves what is.

Language comes into this, of course. English is, at least when used for discursive prose, an irredeemably directional sort of a language. When we look for ways to speak of spiritual realities we seem either to slip into outright poetry – in which case we may convey a state of being but lose much of our ability to convey information; or we find ourselves adopting what Wittgenstein referred to as the “language game” of religion, of myth and liturgy. This, of course, is dangerous. (Even Sam Harris, in a book like Waking Up, begins by repudiating formal religion, but ends up adopting much of the language, and conceptual framework, of Buddhism.)

The alternative has to be in some way apophatic; not in the theological sense (since in denying predicates to God it ends up predicating his personal existence) but in the sense we began with, perhaps: we are seeking no thing at all. Or not even seeking: we find ourselves here. “Here” has been called ground, way, path, source, and perhaps it is all of these; but it is fact, plain and valid as a mathematical expression. It is what is, quite simply. The difficulty, if it is a difficulty, is in saying so without coming over as gnomic; but that may be a risk worth taking!

Of babies and bathwater…

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I have written often enough here, particularly in this post, of my difficulty with organised religions, and with the structures of belief that tend to accumulate around an initial experience of faith. I have quoted him before, both here and elsewhere, but Alan Watts’ comment on the distinction between faith and belief bears rereading:

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Quakerism has described itself as “an experimental faith”. Charles F Carter, for instance, wrote:

True faith is not assurance, but the readiness to go forward experimentally, without assurance. It is a sensitivity to things not yet known. Quakerism should not claim to be a religion of certainty, but a religion of uncertainty; it is this which gives us our special affinity to the world of science. For what we apprehend of truth is limited and partial, and experience may set it all in a new light; if we too easily satisfy our urge for security by claiming that we have found certainty, we shall no longer be sensitive to new experiences of truth. For who seeks that which he believes that he has found? Who explores a territory which he claims already to know?

Quaker faith & practice 26.39

Contemplative practice is, it seems to me, just this – an experiment in “sensitivity to things not yet known”. It seems to me that it is vitally necessary both to be able to “make sense of the world through logic, reason, and evidence” (Humanists UK) and to maintain this open-eyed apprehension of spiritual perceptions. Robert C Solomon:

Spirituality is a human phenomenon. It is part and parcel of human existence, perhaps even of human nature. This is not to deny that some animals might have something like spiritual experiences. But spirituality requires not only feeling but thought, and thought requires concepts. Thus spirituality and intelligence go hand in hand.

Spirituality for the Skeptic: the Thoughtful Love of Life

This profoundly curious alertness to what is not external materiality seems to me both the intellectual basis of the philosophy of mind as a discipline, and the experiential basis of any true contemplative practice. What is not easy is to explain these things, even to ourselves, without the semiotic framework of religion. After all, the systems of meaning underlying the great religions took centuries, often millennia, to develop to their present forms. It is small wonder we find it hard to find the words!

Honesty in spiritual matters is both necessary and difficult, since the inner life is not generally accessible to objective assessment, still less to demonstration to another in the manner of a laboratory demonstration. It appears so much easier when there is a convenient set of symbols for spiritual realities ready made, as it were, on the shelf of the nearest religion.

Unknowing, the quality of openness and courageous acceptance of what is, being-in-itself, is perhaps the only way to start. If being itself entails consciousness – and it must, as the source and place of our own consciousness – then there is, it seems, no way for us to “fall out of” the ground of being. And that has more implications than I can begin to conceive.

More on faith and belief

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Last month I wrote a post quoting Alan Watts:

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

The more I think about this, the more crucial it seems to me for the non-religious contemplative life. Religion, as defined in Wikipedia, “is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.”

Spirituality, on the other hand, is perhaps best defined by Sam Harris:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Waking Up

Faith is often used (and Sam Harris is sometimes guilty of this) merely as an alternative word for belief, whereas Watts’ definition seems to me far closer to the mark: “an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown.” This is precisely the kind of faith I find I need to continue with a contemplative practice, which is almost by definition “a plunge into the unknown”: the psychonaut casting off from the shores of consensus (conditioned) reality. (In this context, it is worth remarking that in a theocentric society, religious belief is consensus reality!)

18 months or so ago, I wrote,

As I have found myself increasingly at variance with institutional religion, Christian, Buddhist or whatever, and increasingly sceptical of its value either in the life of the spirit or in the life of society, so my naturally eremitical inclinations seem to have strengthened – dramatically so since the enforced isolation in which so many of us found ourselves during the earlier months of the recent pandemic. The opportunity for online fellowship and collegiality of one kind or another changes our expectations of community and communication almost daily.

As I grow older, and gradually (if sometimes inconsistently) settle into a life outside any religious framework, in companionable solitude, married eremitism, call it what you will, I find I am relatively happy not calling myself anything in particular. Ethically, I am a humanist; spiritually, it’s harder to say. While I will always be grateful to the institutional teachers I have encountered over the years – in my case mostly within the Christian contemplative tradition – I am happiest just getting on with it. The path, or whatever it’s called, is its own place. Names separate; in the ground itself there is no separation.

Opening into…

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As we go on into whatever it is our practice is opening into, it seems to me to become apparent that the underlying or enclosing ground of being, isness, is neither a metaphysical abstraction nor a psychological apprehension, but a reality so profound that to think of it as a thing, or condition, is to miss the mark. This is why I keep on coming back to the word God, not as a trademark owned by one or another institution, but as the only way to speak of something more real than the earth beneath my feet, more alive by far than I am myself.

Now of course I’m aware that “God” comes with a vast deal of emotional and conceptual baggage for most of us, and for some of us that baggage may be a dead weight. For me, though, not having been brought up as a child to the profession of any formal religion, it is a treasury of bright images, a boundless resource for understanding where I may find myself.

Laurence Freeman writes, “By beginning [a settled practice] we learn pretty quickly that we meditate as disciples, not as entrepreneurs.” That is indeed how it feels to me; it is too easy, perhaps, to make our practice itself, or its imagined “goal” into the centre of this life, rather than following the light to which it tends.

Freeman again:

What happens is that a whole set of forces, inter-connected in the unity of our spirit, is released in our centre and radiates outwards to our lives. But it is not even this that is the fundamental goal. It isn’t this we are asking about when we say, ‘When will it happen?’ All these real and necessary dimensions, all these inter-dependent forces are signs and symbols of one unified force, the one unified reality. This is the power of the reality of the Spirit of God who dwells in our heart, in the final depth of our spirit, the Spirit of all creation which is also the ultimate goal and meaning of our life… Because we then know that ‘it’ is the Spirit which is both the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega. It is the beginning and the end of our meditation, of the whole journey of our meditation taken from the day we begin until the last day of our life.

Faith and mercy

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We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Watts’ distinction between faith and belief has become crucial to me recently. Belief is a willed assent to some proposition. Faith describes an encounter. It happens to one; it is not something one can decide to do. That seems to me to underlie statements like this one of Paul’s: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works…” (Ephesians 2:8-9 NIV)

No thing, the ground of being encountered in the loss of the believed certainties, in the emptiness of the apophasis, is just such a gift. J.P. Williams: “When we talk about divinity, though, we’re not trying to exclude a set of things and point to what’s left over: we’re trying to talk about what is beyond all things. We’re not pointing to anything, really, but to the source of all things.”

It is hard to use words. Emptiness is the expanse of what is, dimensionless, preceding space and time, holding “all that is made” like a nut in the hand of Christ, as Julian of Norwich saw. And yet as I once wrote, “We are creatures of the word, we humans. We know ourselves by our names first of all, and our least thought comes ready dressed in words. And yet it is in silence that we draw close to God, becoming open in the stillness to the presence that is always with us, nearer than our own breathing.”

Prayer, it seems to me – prayer as stillness, openness, not as asking for things – is not quite the same as meditation. There is a reason why centering prayer is so called, though it is so similar in practice to vipassana meditation, and there is a reason why the Jesus Prayer is a prayer and not a mantra; and I think that it is in this surrender to what may come – rather than in an irritable reaching for what is expected – that it is found.

I cannot help myself. If I follow the path of self-emptying honestly, through meditation; or if I follow, to the best of my limited understanding, Alan Lightman’s journey Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine, I find myself back here, at the mercy of no thing at all, but the wholly beyond – only to be given just that, mercy.

So when we think of mercy, we should be thinking first and foremost of a bond, an infallible link of love that holds the created and uncreated realms together. The mercy of God does not come and go, granted to some and refused to others. Why? Because it is unconditional–always there, underlying everything. It is literally the force that holds everything in existence, the gravitational field in which we live and move and have our being. Just like that little fish swimming desperately in search of water, we too–in the words of Psalm 103–‘swim in mercy as in an endless sea.’ Mercy is God’s innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope

I do not know

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“The apophatic denial – I do not know – humbles us and leaves us vulnerable, certainly. At the same time, it can be a tool of resistance and subversion.” (JP Williams)

To understand that we do not understand doesn’t just call into question what we think we know, but all that we have been told. The old names will not do; the familiar roles will not play out any more. And yet even to say this sort of thing contains its own risk: Kipling’s The Cat That Walked by Himself can seem a romantic figure, and can draw attention to what he seems to be, rather than what he is not.

So Williams’ “resistance and subversion” are not merely to tradition and dogma, but to ourselves: to what we think ourselves to be, certainly; but also to what we would like to be. The ground of being is no thing; to be still enough to hear its silence (1 Kings 19:12 NRSV) we must become what we are, empty of self. Not knowing, without substance, no things ourselves. I suppose all this fuss about practice, and wayfaring, is no more than that.

Grace

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Anything we can say in words is myth, or legend. Even when we go out of our way to sound objective, precisely factual, our words are mere illustrations, revealing more about us and our systems of perception and cognition than ever they do of what we are trying to describe. If that is so of “ordinary” facts and events, how much more is it of spiritual ones?

But there is more. God is a word, and so are form, and emptiness. Science uses words to describe fields and probabilities – though mathematics apparently does a better job. We give accounts of things; we label even the ineffable so as to remember, to recognise what we have been.

Words are the tools of knowing. Unknowing is almost by definition their absence. But presence? Grace.

Frames

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The spiritual life can be a difficult thing to live with. Once one realises for oneself the emptiness of the “universe of concrete things in eternal categories” (Brian McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed and the Disillusioned), of Newtonian mechanics and dualistically interpreted perceptions, the question of how to live arises in ways that are not only personally unsettling but potentially disruptive to the society in which most of us have grown up.

The Abrahamic religions in their popular, one might say political, forms provided a solid dualistic foundation for life and society – “God’s in his heaven–all’s right with the world” as Robert Browning had it – just as classical mechanics formed a solid, readily calculable foundation not only for physics but for all the sciences. As the revolution in mathematical physics initiated by Einstein and others, and the revolution in biology and paleontology initiated by Darwin, shook the scientific community, so the invasion of Eastern thought and practice (and the revival of the non-dualism inherent in the Christian contemplative tradition), together with the developing psychological disciplines, shook many of the foundations of Western self-understanding.

For those of us who grew up in the turmoil of the 60s the problem could easily become acute. Were we to cling to the imagined certainties of the past, or cast ourselves adrift on the foam of the psychedelic ocean? Were we to seek for no less imaginary certainties among the outward forms of Eastern religions, or were we to become Einzelgänger und Einzelgängerin, tracing our own paths on the leaf-litter of philosophy and metaphysics?

It is easy, at times fatally easy, to fall into New Age formlessness on the one hand, or into some kind of fundamentalism on the other. Perhaps some of the cults and cult-like groups that have formed over the years have been failed attempts to blend these two incompatible directions.

I don’t wish to seem to condemn any of my fellow seekers after truth and insight. Once the medieval conception of a state-sponsored compulsory religion – such as still holds sway in some Muslim societies – has fallen away, choice becomes inevitable. (Even atheism and agnosticism are in this sense choices, albeit nominally negative ones.) The spiritual life needs teachers, though, and teachers often imply institutions, if only to validate their teachings. Many teachers of the spiritual life whom I most admire have remained within, or thrown in their lot with, traditional religions, from Richard Rohr and Cynthia Bourgeault in the Christian tradition, to Pema Chödrön and Brad Warner in the Buddhist. But there have been others who have not, whether like Jiddu Krishnamurti they rejected an institutional role, or like Sam Harris never adopted one outside of the academic community.

For myself, I feel that while I will always be grateful to the institutional teachers I have encountered over the years – in my case mostly within the Christian contemplative tradition – I have been happiest and most settled in myself outside religious institutions altogether. I wrote recently:

As I have found myself increasingly at variance with institutional religion, Christian, Buddhist or whatever, and increasingly sceptical of its value either in the life of the spirit or in the life of society, so my naturally eremitical inclinations seem to have strengthened – dramatically so since the enforced isolation in which so many of us found ourselves during the earlier months of the recent pandemic. The opportunity for online fellowship and collegiality of one kind or another changes our expectations of community and communication almost daily.

Despite the value of frameworks of doctrine as a protection from delusion and indiscipline, I am profoundly indebted to those who have sought to delineate the spiritual path outside those traditional frameworks, whether like Tara Brach or Stephen Batchelor they still call themselves Buddhists, or whether like Harris today or Alan Watts in the 60s, they reject such definitions. As I grow older, paradoxically perhaps, I feel less dependent on them myself.