Tag Archives: Ludwig Wittgenstein

Godless?

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At this point in my life, I think there isn’t a god or Higher Being out there 100% of the time. My renouncement of God is too fresh, and a major reason I felt relief at my unbelief was the end of the cognitive dissonance I experienced for so long. I don’t think of the universe as a god-substitute, somehow working with will and intention to bring people and opportunities our way. I truly believe that no one is in charge anywhere out there in the background of our lives.

Yet I considered the label “Christian atheist”… not because I do and don’t believe in God, but because I feel like I am an atheistic cultural Christian, akin to a secular Jewish person. Because I continue to be culturally involved in Christianity while I attend church with my family and socialize with predominantly religious friends. I still enjoy discussing (picking apart) the Bible, and I enjoy debating spiritual theories. I like this approach because as I laid out earlier, Christianity created me. The foundation of my life was centered around Christ. It greatly contributed (for better or for worse) to so much of my essence—my values, my morality, my language, my behavior, my tastes, my sexuality, my life choices.

Sarah Henn Hayward, Giving Up God, p.155

Although for most of the middle years of my life I would have called myself a contemplative Christian of one kind or another, I never really shared Sarah Henn Hayward’s sense of being a cultural Christian. I grew up as the child of a single parent, outside of any formal religion. My mother, a painter and sculptor, was an early example of someone who might today refer to themselves as spiritual, but not religious; and while most of my twenties were spent trying to find some kind of spiritual compass, the last place I thought of looking was within the Christian faith. Most of the time my adult friends were not Christian – some were militantly atheist – and I was rarely entirely at home in a church milieu.

Nevertheless, since my own “giving up God” experience over the last five years, I have experienced something of the tension Hayward describes. Like her, I found Christian language had become “infused into the air I breathed” (ibid. p.156), and it has been difficult at times to live without it. Appropriating another religious language from a culture far removed from my own would not have helped – long ago I discovered that, intricate and finely honed as it was, Buddhist language and iconography didn’t really  do it for me. Inevitably I do find I borrow technical terminology here and there, but that live electricity of a sacred poetry deeply embedded in my own culture is lacking.

The language of scientific materialism, while I tend to agree with many, if not most, of its conclusions, doesn’t do very well when it comes to the  phenomenology of spirituality. It is probably best left to those who use it in their daily work; in any case, stretched too far, it begins to sound like pseudoscience, after the manner of Deepak Chopra or JZ Knight.

To muddle on, as I have done over the last few years, occasionally using the word “God” in Paul Tillich’s sense of the ground of being, or Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, occasionally repurposing bits of Scripture, occasionally filching Buddhist or Taoist phrases to use out of context, seems to be the best I can do; although even academic philosophers often seem to find themselves reinventing language to suit their own formal requirements – Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s early work comes to mind, not to mention Spinoza’s Euclidian complexities in his Ethics. In any case, I have no formal philosophical training whatsoever; and moreover, I usually find myself distrusting academic philosophy when applied to spiritual intuitions.

Perhaps I am doing the best I can. Certainly over the last year or so I have become more comfortable with what I can’t do in terms of language. I know that my writing can verge on the incoherent, but at least I feel as though I’m beginning to be able to say what I mean, to put words to what David Jones so memorably called “the actually loved and known”.

About time

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Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

Real meditation isn’t something you do; it’s something you cease to do… it is the freedom to notice what is already here… What is there to notice, right now, that matters? What’s available to your powers of attention, in this moment, that is important – or even sacred? … Meditation is simply noticing what is real, as a matter of experience, now and always – but always, and only, now.

Sam Harris, from a recorded talk on Waking Up

“Self” is not a single thing in a thousand guises; it is a word for the thousand guises themselves. To understand the “self” is to understand the usage of the word within the full range of its seeming contradictory manifestations. Now it’s this, now it’s that. Only when we try to grasp an essence or assert the priority of one aspect of self-experience over another do we find ourselves entangled in philosophical brambles with very real emotional thorns. Wittgenstein repeatedly said that the job of philosophy is not to answer questions like these, but to dissolve them, to show that they are nothing but pseudo-problems thrown up by particular aspects of our language. In taking this approach to what had traditionally been seen as intractable metaphysical conundrums, Wittgenstein, I believe, comes the closest of any Western philosopher to Zen.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

The thing about the self is that it is, as Wittgenstein pointed out, another substantive noun – like time – that can lead us to mistake the word for the substance. Time does not contain, or somehow lead to, the succession of experience: it is that successive experiencing. The self does not experience a succession of events: it is the experience. To sit still is to see this unfold, in real time.

The unfolding is the sacred moment itself. As Harris points out in his talk, it would be easy to be misled by what appears to be religious language here; but the sacredness of the moment resides not in some imported framework of belief that conditions, or interprets, or redeems the time. It is sacred because it is real. It is all that can be real – all else is a memory of time past, or an anticipation of time future; and these are only dreams. The world of speculation is empty, as empty as the idea of a self. The one end is only present; it is all that is real.

Happy New Year!

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!