BEING HOME

So, enough religion already. I’m sick of the subject, for the time being anyway, until something related rears its head again. As a spiritual atheist, I’m almost surprised that I didn’t need to “worship at the porcelain altar” several weeks ago, as I began dipping into the subject. I think the Aussies call it “crying Ruth.” I’ve also heard it called the “technicolor yawn,” “tossing tacos” and “blowing chunks.” Now, this is true religion, something that circles the drain today like nothing else.

It’s another way of say there’s nothing like falling back into one’s fallen nature, settling into his earthly calling (base-brain and all). Being fully human is a profound and weighty subject. It’s a crack that becomes an abyss if one doesn’t step wisely. It just plummets deeper when we fail to see its relationship to the earth around it. But then that’s part of who we are too – forgetting. Most of us float between those realities and don’t handle it very well. There are “higher” domains, but when attempting to integrate them with the temporal and terrane (the everyday garbage of existence – paying taxes, politics, war, putting up with neighbors, barking dogs, indigestion, flat tires), most of us opt for a beer and a ballgame.

I confess to intimately knowing the full range of onerous and perfunctory annoyances that suck us dry every day. I invest in the human condition like everyone else. As long as we’re here, how can we not? – For example, not too many years ago I invested some time at a “singles dating” site whose owner/manager told me my chances of meeting a compatible woman was “3%.” At least she was honest. She gave out fairly lengthy tests with which she compared profiles. It was a uniquely different approach, expensive, but I was marginally impressed. She told me that in the “thirty years” of doing that work she had “never come across” a profile like mine (her exact word was “flabbergasted”). I didn’t know whether to take it as a compliment or as a very discouraging sign. I was, after all, one of a kind now, singled out, the zirconium in the diadem, that “special” fool in search of an errand.

That experience told me one thing: “Being home” is where I should have stayed (and probably foretold the future). My (hard-)wiring is ungrounded, inducing shocks when touched – reverse currents, poor conduction, brown-outs. If it’s not shocking, it’s static electricity. The metaphor fits.

Being “out of sync” is a protracted understatement. Trying to deal “in the world” by way of dating is a desperate act of the forlorn. The best I could ever do was to specialize in humor and diversion. And yet even that has backfired in ways. I often show up like Woody Allen or the geeky cousin with ill-timed comments – wry humor at funerals (“in the name of the Father, the Son, and in the hole he goes!”), bleak responses to bad (abusive, sexist, racist) humor. It was always an in sync problem. And yet it always felt like simple, honest insight.

Was there ever in fact a lady on this planet, among the “3%,” who actually danced to the vibes of this nut in a hard shell? It’s something I’ve pondered, and manufacturing her in my mind could only remain in the clouds of pure projection. No real person could ever have a screw-top that’s been tightened so wrongly as mine. – But, if it was to be a projection, why not go full-bore? Go ahead and fabricate – not unlike AI – out of whole cloth. This is an instant/commercialized/virtual/computerized/hologrammed – just add water – romance anyway.

She dresses like an “older” rock star, does the “purple- barefoot” thing, reads Derrida and Baudrillard, owns a copy of The Portable Atheist, knows the meaning of the “uncertainty principle,” paints in her spare time, listens to Bach on Sundays, is middle-aged going on seventy-five. Hair auburn, very long (for my Samson Complex). She’s tall (5’8”), svelte, vegan, probably wears glasses, lives by the seat of her pants. She eats, sleeps, plays, and works as the urge strikes. She’s fiercely independent and is not a team-player. She reads book reviews, watches films directed by Sydney Pollack. Coffee, martinis, and jazz are movable feasts.

“Dream on, of bloody deeds and death: fainting, despair; despairing, yield thy breath!” Richard III was not alone with certain torments. We awaken, it’s another day, and we’re alone again. The void of despair fills in with what the world serves up to us – a smorgasbord of the old and familiar.

Reality is always “served cold,” often with a vengeance. We can only fill voids with what we can reach at our tables “for one”: Arabica coffee, morning sun, morning walks, pets, birds, squirrels, the always quizzical raccoon who has taken up residence in the yard. One squirrel, named Henry, waits by my window every morning for peanuts. He eats quickly and stores more in his cheeks, as he competes with a fiercely competitive jaybird overhead, filling his gullet with two nuts, carrying a third in his beak: “maximum efficiency, minimum effort.” Nature hits hard and fast.

The world is small and private. We forget that our worlds are swallowed up by larger ones (as the lady at Perfectly Matched tells us all). Even my yard animals are rudely woken to this by the sounds, smells, noises, and violence of the city. Compared to night-time, even the day’s nonviolence is violent. But then my furry friends also enlighten me: They prefer the city. Despite the violence, it’s really safer. This is because, ironically enough, no one “shoots them.” The urban corridor also protects them from predators living outside the city. And so, the “human” factor is an equitable trade for them. The chances of finding food are also, quite remarkably, rather good (sometimes better) than what’s foraged in the wild. Perching and nesting under viaducts and in backyards is prime real estate, though unpredictable “human” hazards come with it.

Humans keep telling other humans to never feed wild animals. But I take that advice with a snicker and consider each situation as it arrives. I’ve been feeding raccoons, birds, squirrels, stray cats and dogs my entire life. I’m not about to stop. There’s never been a problem, and there’s always been a species-to-species understanding.

Once in the wee hours, there were the sounds of little feet scampering across my roof. I grabbed a ladder and went up to investigate. There she was, mamma raccoon with eight kits, teaching coping skills and the “lay of the land.” They all stopped on mamma’s command and looked back at me. I sat down and we engaged. It felt like Alice’s tea party. We were simpatico, imbibing in a gingerbread space. I told them not get hurt, be careful of being seen, and please not to wreck my roof. They assured me and began to play. I was part of their landscape – trusted, harmless, inspected, mother-approved. I passed their test.

Perhaps only to humor myself, I take moments like that and imagine bringing them to Perfectly Matched. Then I laugh. Only a product of pure projection would find gingerbread that tasty. I come back again to the practical discord of mismatched souls. But all that said, the lady in charge also emphasized her clients’ “standards” which required specific “high” incomes and status. With that, my score not only plummeted with Perfectly Matched, but my scoring of it also went south. In both our minds I think we agreed this whole project was improbable and ludicrous. – In her clients’ minds I was probably the frog in the opera hat; the bull in a china shop. In my mind I was the vegan at the weenie roast, the violinist at a tracker-pull. Her date was a bleeding heart, tree-hugging liberal. My date was the ill-tempered prig, hidebound and boorish, the foot-stomping, gum-chewing rube at the poetry reading. This, by the way, had nothing to do with my “3%” chance of meeting someone, according to “the test.”

In hindsight, I recall actually growing up caught between those two extremes. I grew up in a small “redneck” farm town in the middle of a cornfield, the “buckle of the bumpkin belt.” It was all about basketball, BBQ, feed corn, racism, and soybeans. Meanwhile, I hid in a basement listening to Nat King Cole, Bill Evans, the Mills Brothers, Andy Williams, reading Catcher in the Rye, Kerouac’s On the Road, poems by Ginsberg, and Erich Fromm. I excelled in sports and got below average grades which meant I blended in perfectly well. But there was always a friction of where our two interests were leading. I knew I had to leave at dawn’s early light (right out of college). — As I look back, I sometimes wonder how Alice turned out after she grew up.

A word about country life. One might think that someone like myself would prefer the country over the city. Well, let’s set that record straight. I lived in Colorado’s “high country” for 28 years out of the 50 being here. It was rich and rewarding in its own way, especially when engaging with wildlife. But when it involved humans, again, the spoiler alert was out, and it was categorically “not fun.” For the record (in my experience) most of those living above 10,000 ft (elevation) were not predisposed to “liberal/progressive” views about anything. There were exceptions, of course, but they were rare exceptions. Most residents in the rural community (mountains and flatlands) were boorish, rigid, elitist, unfriendly, guarded, and classically conservative (neo-liberal). As I think back, I never saw so many “No Trespassing” and “Don’t Tread on Me” signs in my life.

They presumed to be the inheritors of the earth, exclusive owners of America, and most deserving of first rights at the trough of freedom and liberty. They prided themselves as gun-toting clones of John Wayne – flag-wavers, Republicans, retired military, (closet) racists, hunters/poachers, anti-government extremists, militia-survivalists. And they were ubiquitous, like flies on shit, found in every public place one happened to enter. Yes, again, there were exceptions. But finding them was like searching for a white flag in a blizzard.

Let me say, for the record: If you want friendly, easy-going neighbors, please stick to the city. This is because we/they live side-by-side and have no choice but to get along. In other words, city-dwellers are more socially disciplined. – Whereas the myth of finding easy-going and welcoming neighbors in the country is just that – mostly a myth. It may have been the other way around years ago, but no longer. It’s also a myth that the country means freedom. Because freedom (to follow their logic) means predominantly to do “what one wants”; doing what one wants implies doing things “marginally” legal; doing things “marginally” legal requires privacy; privacy requires vigilance and rigidity; vigilance and rigidity requires “no trespassing” signs, strong fences, and “attitudes” that are categorically “unfriendly.” And in the last few years, another “persuasion” has entered the equation: GUNS, all types and many of them. – Bottom line: You’re welcome in God’s Country, but “don’t tread on me, stay off my land, don’t make waves, and vote just like the rest of us.” Meanwhile, “turn a blind eye when I poach.”

After so many years holding on to the only refuge I could protect – my home in the woods – I had had enough. I began losing my mind. It was only due to a diligent, patient, sympathetic, and like-minded Realtor that I finally escaped the Land of FOX and Rush Limbaugh. I remember descending in altitude like a pressure valve releasing steam. What a relief it was to land in the city. People always talk about fleeing “to the country” for peace of mind, open-mindedness, and hospitality; but they either don’t know what they’re heading into – or — they’re “the types” who find kinship already there.

The city, by contrast, is (still) wonderful, despite all the crazies and homelessness. When I arrived, I had only two priorities: “access” and “convenience.” I wanted everything nearby. After living in places where the closest loaf of bread was 40 miles away (even my mailbox, which meant the post office, which meant an insane drive), I was sick & tired. The fact was (and is), nothing comes easy in the high country. If you forget something in town, it’s too late, too bad. You either manage, or you repeat the 80-mile road trip. During those trips there were also two episodes when my truck broke down along stretches of desolate country roads, where cell-phone service was spotty at best. I took long hikes on those days.

I have to say that now, after 10 years of living in the city, it’s still a luxury just to walk outside to a mailbox. Also to simply get up in the morning and “push a button” for instant heat. After years of wood stoves and cutting wood in the snow, one who hasn’t “been there” doesn’t know how basic a luxury can actually be. I once lived in a cabin where bathing could only be achieved with 34-degree water in a nearby stream. After several months, the day of showering in hot water was a body-mind explosion I’ll never forget.

Also not taken for granted was the regrouping again (in the city) with IQs, this time in the triple digits, people with “leftist” leanings and open minds. How refreshing that was. Even more remarkable was that the city just happened to be Colorado Springs – another irony, indeed. But it has to be said, in all fairness, that even Colorado Springs is growing, becoming impressively cosmopolitan, showcasing an impressive arts community, bistros, fine dining, bookstores, coffeehouses, and a symphony orchestra. At the risk of sounding like a travel brochure, there are worse places to be. – I still have an eye on Denver as a final residence, that hugely frightening monster 68 miles to the north. But like everything else anymore, it’s all about cutting trim and going for what’s important, especially at 74, Denver is home to a “55 and older” community which just a few years ago sounded awful. Now it feels right. It’s scary how quickly our needs change. We’ll see.

I’m not in a rush. I take one day at a time. I’ve learned that wherever you happen to be, whatever you’re doing, “there you are.” I just hope that, wherever that is, it remains in the company of intelligent friends, furry, feathered, and otherwise. Home is where you make it and who you make it with.

© 2024 Richard Hiatt

THE LAST RELIGION

It may seem like a contradiction, but it isn’t. We might employ this term – religion – not as something to include what transcends it, but as something that just points to it. It’s a messenger term. It points the way, then evaporates.

And so, what is this last, final religion? In the end, it’s not what we think but what thinks us. Not what we dream but what is dreaming us. In other words, something much larger than what we can conceive, something we know to exist but cannot sense, and something we either consciously (or not) already are. The closest we can sense it is in our dreams, and dreams tell us that time-space is a projection, psychodramas of our creation. It makes us just crazy enough to laugh at it, and along with it.

This, to be sure, is just short of the noumenon (cf. D.E. Harding below). It is a “non-sensible intuition,” said Kant. This is not C.S. Lewis’ “awe” or Huxley’s mysterium tremendum – aka.,the numinous. With the noumenon we disappear completely and there’s no experience. – But we’re not there yet, which is why we still entertain “religion.” We’re still hovering in spaces of thinking and dreaming.

Man’s Fall from grace is both ontogenetic and phylogenetic (one “recapitulating” the other). In other words, the Fall not only happened a long time ago; it is recapitulated in each instant of consciousness. And so the “unfallen” world beyond time remains in the background, here & now, and pulsates like heartbeats.

“We are everything that there is,” said Alan Watts. And to illustrate the idea of this larger paradigm, he had us imagining a beautiful embroidery. It looks beautifully organized. But put a microscope to it and you see a helpless tangle of fibers which make no sense. There’s no organization. Only at the magnification we’ve “chosen” does it look organized. But then increase the magnification and there’s fantastic order again, “gorgeous designs and patterns of molecules.” Turn up the magnification yet again and there’s chaos again. And again, at a higher magnification, marvelous order.

His point: “Order and randomness constitute a warp and woof. We wouldn’t know what order was unless we had messes. It’s the contrast of order and messes that [higher] order depends on – on and off, there and not there, being and nonbeing, life and death, that constitutes existence.” Expecting only one side to win loses sight that all living things are connected underneath. So the question is: Who are we in that churning flux of order and chaos? Again, “everything that there is.”

Now, add to that a curve ball — death – that interval separating “order-chaos” into an even higher paradigm (death’s interplay with “life”) – as in “now you see me, now you don’t.” The analogy would be if the embroidery above self-destructed, then appeared again. In music, what makes the melody significant are the steps between the tones (the intervals). “The interval between what happens is as important as what happens,” said Watts. – This is the paradigm shift which essentially separates, not just one religion from the next, but religion from no religion, or pure mudo (Japanese for “no thing way” – faute de mieux). Rendering it a name diminishes it, robs it of what it is.

When I share words or thoughts, there’s the “interval” between that and the next thought. I make a sound, then I pause and wait. When in a crowd, there’s also the pulse of energies going in a hundred different directions. They coincide with many individual heartbeats. But when the crowd is told to focus on one subject, something happens. The energy is channeled into one voice. It then seeks another player from outside with which to pulsate back and forth. The antiphony between individuals now shifts between groups – and further on between nations. But the music and its intervals remain unchanged. The dance remains unaltered, and as T.S. Eliot said, “there is only the dance.”

I mentioned the heart. If life pulsates “in and out,” systole and diastole, inhaling and exhaling, then everything commits to the same ebb and flow of consciousness. Everything (life to death to life) fades in and out, moment to moment. To speak, we inhale, gather thoughts and words, and then exhale them. Then we pause, rest, and wait for the tide to return. One person’s flow is another person’s ebb. If the two sides are out of sync, everything stops. There’s no movement, no life. The only thing that alternates is tempo. Eureka, we’ve just stumbled into an archetype.

Action and reaction, note and rest, become the sounds of higher meaning. The antiphony effect amplifies its own axiomatic rule. From here one can see the fleeting nature of everything. He also (hopefully) sees his place inside that flow. Two things happen: One is part of the flux, and he also sees the flux. But he can’t do both at the same time. He pulsates back & forth between Being and Becoming.

This was D.E. Harding’s experience when he discovered “having no head.” ¹ Again, now I see me, now I don’t! It’s so unspectacular that most people simply don’t see it. “I stopped thinking… I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness…. Past and future dropped away…. It was that vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything.” It was “a sudden awakening from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming.” — The West may consider this a “remote” phenomenon; but again, “how can these be remote when there’s nothing to be remote from? The headless void refuses all definition and location; it is not round, or small, or big, or even here as distinct from there.”

The final religion then is a launching pad, and that’s where it ends. It launches the paradigm shift between Being and Becoming, and one floats in between. On a purely geopolitical and historical level, it’s also been that iron curtain between East and West and will be for a long time. But even that becomes just another dance, another level of interplay. Politics employs its own musical counterpoint.

The next lesson from here is that there is no judging of opposing thoughts and beliefs. But even when there is judgment (which leads to horrible actions), it just creates other judgments which keep them in check. That too is a dance. So, the question looms: Why do we even play this music, why do we even “dance this dance?” Because it’s movement, and movement is life. “It makes no difference what we do. but it’s important that we do it,” says the Buddhist sutra. Everything is temporary, and from a higher view nothing changes even when it appears to matter. And again I ask: Who am I in all that? Again, “everything.”

Step away (and down) from that not insignificant epiphany and we find ourselves back in the zone of concepts and ideas, messages meant only to point the way. In other words, religious clues. But it’s still not religion per se. It’s the space between ordinary consciousness and post-consciousness, or Self-Realization. Religion is dogma and rules. This is actually a space of “high” religiosity, essence, and (what I define as) spirituality.

The realm just below this is “low” religiosity, or religion itself, which then spirals downward into abstruse layers of dogma, literal interpretations, and even violence. This is the terrain of religion. It cannot avoid violence because it refuses to acknowledge the rules of proportion, inclusion, symbiosis, and mutuality. It trashes the antiphon even as it incorporates it in its own religious hymns, cantillations, and Gregorian chants. In principle, it celebrates/worships “the light” and condemns “the darkness.” Thus, religion by design was doomed from the very start; it was at best a temporary vehicle.

Religion in pagan/matriarchal societies by contrast have always made sense, because they actually transcend the boundaries/limitations of religion. It’s also why they’re condemned by other religions. There has always been a tremendous fear of pagan practices because of how they embrace what the three Abrahamic monotheisms cannot. Christianity for one continues to stumble through its own learning process, rules and censures, trying to somehow, finally, incorporate nature’s laws and no longer lord over them. The Christian God, still jealous, is arguing with his own Grand Council over such concessions. Since the 1965 Vatican Council (Vatican-II) and the aggiornamento ²– not to mention “liberation theology,” “Christology,” “transpersonal psychology,” – things have been, shall we say, “in negotiations.”

One such roadblock between the reconciliation between East and West, or Christian and Pagan, has always been the issue of personal meaning. In the East, the work evolves around the self (ego) while working to deconstruct one’s attachments to the illusion of separateness. “The purpose of life is to be done with it,” says the Buddhist proverb. Hence, also the understanding that death is just part of the circle of life. — The West staves off death because it is “the unknown.” But what it actually fears is not so much extinction itself but extinction without significance. Hence the need to mean something important – which the Church provides. Christians must always leave something behind, a legacy of some kind. Without self-perpetuation there remains the fear of meaningless extinction. The secular world goes to work ensuring we transcend death here on earth, while the Church goes to work ensuring life after death. The ultimate goal is to raise man above nature and make sure our lives count in the greater scheme of things, more than mere physical things, animals, and nature itself.

Another way of putting it is the constant need to retrieve the ego, because it’s strongest instinct is “self-preservation.” The ego will fool, deceive, and lie (will do anything) to stay alive and keep its mastery over nature. It is quite literally the “master of deception.” Hence, the need to feel important and survive death. At the same time, it does not allow itself to be probed too deeply. In other words, it can “observe” and judge the world but bridles when thoughts come to close to “observing the observer.” Its worst fear is being “found out.” Put another way, the ego is like an onion – a collection of (chosen) perceptions, beliefs, notions, and data about who we think we are. Once we start peeling away the layers, at the core there’s nothing there. The ego is a complete fabrication. There’s the old limerick: “Thou I know that I know, what I would like to see is the I that knows that he knows that he knows.” Infinite regress into nothingness.

The obsession around perpetuity, by the way, is the ego’s most bitter pill, its most tragic gift. This is because perpetuity is the one thing which has created more fear, instability, and anxiety on earth than anything. Not just overpopulation but a neurosis over who survives, who doesn’t, and the sacrifices made to preserve “us.” All of which too easily leads to war and violence. The obsession over survival perpetuates exactly the opposite of what it wants (the “law of reversed effort”).

Coming back to the Church, there has been at least some light on the religious horizon. Since the 1960s, the Papacy has had to embrace many new ideas. Some ideas touch on pagan principles, but only marginally. A new tolerance for women’s rights, abortion, female priests, gay rights, not to mention unprecedented concerns for the environment, shows a move in that direction, a small but critical willingness to orbit new ideas of “inclusion.” The mere acknowledgment of women alone is an enormous step forward. From there it is also fringing on the analysis of original/antecedent meanings, causality, creation myths, derivations and source meanings. – Meanwhile, Christianity as a world religion has been losing membership since the 1960s, so there’s a nervous urgency in the air. Let’s just say that the lamps have been burning into the night at the Vatican. It’s a small beginning.

Today the world pivots between religion and “higher” religiosity (spirituality). The former fights tooth and claw like a cornered animal fighting to survive. It will even go to war to defend its ideas of “peace.” While the latter seems to be overtaking the realm with very little effort. It seems to be part of a natural evolution which cannot be held back. The human race is growing up, simply put.

Religion in the West has gone through three stages in its own evolution: A childhood phase (the Dark Ages when Christians were superstitious, illiterate, and took the Gospel at face value); an adolescent phase (the Middle Ages and the Renaissance when they began to rebel against authority); and an adult phase (the 20^th century when they had learned enough history to began questioning original ideas, while introducing their own). This is why in the last fifty years the Pope has visited the 3^rd World more frequently than ever before. The 3^rd World is still in its “childhood” phase, is still largely illiterate, and doesn’t question authority. The 3^rd World is where the Vatican now receives most of its funding, without which it would be bankrupt today.

The problem looms eternal: What could still be called an “Aquarian Conspiracy” or simply “New Thought,” it’s all about balance and place (identity). Cornered animals are desperate animals. They will die and take everyone down with them. This is the instinct of religion. But there’s also what religion can launch, if allowed to do so. In one way we’re on borrowed time. But in another way “time” is just another dance. Meanwhile, as dance partners, all we can do is observe and keep the conversation going. Some of us stay religious, while others among us lost our heads a long time ago. There’s just the rhythm and tempo of things.

© 2024 Richard Hiatt

1D.E. Harding, On Having No Head: Zen and the Re-Discovery of the Obvious (London: Arkana Pub., 1986), pp. 1-6..

2Meaning the “bringing up to date,: modernizing.

RELIGION REVISITED

Back in 1941, Otto Rank wrote:

“All our human problems… arise from man’s ceaseless attempts… to achieve on earth a ‘perfection’ which is only to be found in the beyond… thereby hopelessly confusing the values of both spheres.”

Apropos of that, Ernest Becker said that man “wants a stature and a destiny that is impossible….; he wants an earth that is not an earth but a heaven, and the price for this kind of fantastic ambition is to make the earth an even more eager graveyard than it naturally is.” – In short, humans have had to bring heaven here, to the material world, because the Biblical heaven, as prophesied, decided not to show up.

From a Christian perspective alone, there is truth to this. Since Jesus Christ has not shone up in two thousand years for a 2^nd Coming, the decision by Church leaders (all denominations) has been to shift focus from heaven to Christ manifesting “on earth,” mostly through signs and omens, thus giving more purpose to missionary work and the decision to “invest” in this world. The Church decided to put “God’s plan” to work. The original plan wasn’t to invest anything because it was all temporary anyway. That all began to shift about a thousand years ago.

It’s another way of saying that, through time. humankind has tried infusing virtually everything with a religious meaning or making it proof of some religious foretelling. They set about making things into something they were not. What that has produced is simply too many “signs,” too much proselytism and forced conversions, militancy/war, cultural/racial genocide, indoctrination, and “guilt” – in short, too much religion.

The very first thing religion does is reaffirm our intelligence “over and above” nature and the animal kingdom. It says we’re smarter, therefore better, more deserving, and more important in the eyes of God. Animals (and nature) are therefore here to serve man’s quest in finding his way to God – which means the former (nature) is justifiably “disposable.” The frontal lobe is man’s passport to exploit whatever he wishes on this planet, which, again, is still a “temporary” haven – a holding-cell for souls waiting to be supremely judged, sent to another holding cell (purgatory), and then to heaven or hell.

But what man is really avoiding is what animals can do, but “he” cannot: Man wants to endure and prosper, which means he wants to overcome his mortality. This is why he needs to deny his animal nature, because animals embrace mortality. They have no higher ambition. This is also why man has turned against animals with a vengeance. As Becker said, animals embody what men fear most, “a nameless and faceless death.”

This is religion’s first effect in the effort of trying to be what we’re not. But it has a second effect as well. It also cannot keep its smelly sanctimony off of technology. Insofar as technology is pulling us further and further away from our real selves and into allusions of techno-androidism (away from our animal natures, even our “human” DNA), religion puts its stamp on even that. For instance, we’re making outer space into some kind of “other world” religion. Pointing upward and into unknown regions somehow becomes a metaphor for heaven (or “the heavens”). We now follow a futuristic religion through science. Most scientists today confess to being devout Christians or Jews.

Every religion must also have its detractors, its infidels and pagans. We need them to scapegoat, to resist, to push against and forward, in line with thermodynamics. The darker the resistance, the brighter the yellow brick road. What’s interesting about that is, since everything appears to be forming its own religion, we now have “religions pushing against religions.” It’s the oldest pretext to war in human history, just taken to a subtler level.

I think of the religion of sports, the religion of political science, the religion of cooking, the religion of lawn care. We use “art” and “science” as useful and popular euphemisms, but we give them religious cache. When they begin to truly “work for us,” we anoint them with cultish powers. It shows just how driven we are on trying to bring heaven to earth, since it won’t come to us. We are constantly pursuing a savior/messiah – human or inanimate, it doesn’t matter. Anything is fair game. If crystals and rabbit’s feet can be magical conduits to higher power, so can sweat socks, hamsters, carburetors, and angel food cake.

Let me add here that perfection does indeed exist on earth. But not in the way visualized in religion. The most “spiritual” (as opposed to religious) observers see perfection in the smallest (and largest) things already, without human interference. The Christian agenda is to include humans as having an active part in the christening of “sacred” things. What it doesn’t accept is the fact that humans most often (in their zeal to bring “perfection”) defeat themselves and poison the water. Nature was fine, just as it was, before religion came along. But Christians had to rationalize and intervene. The Church also had to of course profit: “Riches are the blessings God reaps,” and “poverty is the sign of moral failure.” Hence, economic success became the sign of divine election, and nature (all things “pre-civilized”) needed “hands on” intervention. They just couldn’t leave it alone.

I often view religion like I view a large family tree. One seed grows into a giant with many limbs and branches, and finally into small “twig-like” cults. I also see that the reason for such diversity is because no one branch can sufficiently answer the question of why they’re all reaching outward in different directions at the same time together. The most fundamental problems remain conundrums because they share the same beliefs and absolutes as founding principles. The wrong trajectories, based on the wrong guidance, always ends in futility. But they keep reaching “out there” anyway. The tree doesn’t realize that its only real purpose is to be itself — growing, dropping seeds, and dying. As Alan Watts often said, we’re so concentrated on looking forward into the future and over horizons, we fail to see that what we’re seeking is right under our noses. “The pilgrim rides an elephant in search of an elephant.”

So then, one religion/denomination/cult always branches off by virtue of some new leader’s bright ideas. Eventually the tree gets over-burdened and branches begin to bend. The tree dies and a new seed buries itself in the mulch. – It’s often said that all wars are religious wars. If that’s true, then indeed the tree-rings and timelines which demarcate the tree’s history (cultures and civilizations) is war itself. If it isn’t a natural cataclysm then it’s always one tribe fighting another tribe over religious (divine) “rights” over land, people, property, resources and principles.

Before there was religion (including the “very first” religiosity) there was the sense of total inclusion and involvement with nature and the cosmos. This has been Ken Wilber’s thesis for fifty years (American theorist and writer), and it’s his model (the Atman Project) which, in my view, best describes the birth of religion. — A disclaimer here: Wilber’s analysis is very detailed and impressively thorough. I present here an extremely abridged version of his work to render just a basic understanding of how man’s evolution finally led to religion. With that, apologies to Mr. Wilber.

Around six million years ago, the time of Australopithecus africanus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus, our ancestors were in their “archaic-uroboric” phase. It was the time of “Dawn Man.” They were “immersed in the subconscious, realms of nature and body, of vegetable and animal, and initially ‘experienced’ himself as indistinguishable from the world that had already evolved to that point.” Man was “pre-conscious.” In Biblical terms, “the soul” had not yet awakened.

This was followed by the “magical-typhonic” phase where man was beginning to awaken to his own separate existence, starting around 200,000 years ago. He sensed the vague separation of himself from things outside his physical being. But he was still magically fused and confused with what he experienced “out there.” Here he developed rudimentary communication skills (simple language, primary/secondary socialization skills)), symbols, primitive art, and “totemistic identification.” This continued until roughly the arrival of Neanderthal man.

When Neanderthals began fading out, Modern man brought in something that changed everything – farming. It caused a transformation of consciousness and initiated a “mythic-membership” consciousness. Planting and harvesting made him acutely aware of the need to plan, hence an awareness of extended time (past and future). This allowed a full-fledged emergence of language and a newly emerging “mental self” (ego). He also became seriously aware of death: “[T]his is the first age [c. 10,000 B.C.] in which we find ceremonial graves as a common practice. And graves, as Campbell put it, ‘point to an attempt to cope with the imprint of death.’”

Language, time, and membership also enabled extensive verbal and artistic symbols and concepts (developed perceptual powers). Symbols led to “representational thinking.” Symbols are not only creative but reflective (capable of reflecting nature and conceived realities). This was the dawning of the fully developed ego, “perched midway between total slumber in the subconscious and total enlightenment in the superconscious.” – In short, man was a clearly separate entity by now, from nature and other humans. This created new realizations and horizons, and with farming (including an oral tradition of learning, cultural activities, symbols, rituals, totems, icons, the transference of superstitions) “civilization had begun” (by 4,500 B.C). ¹

The operative term here was death and the instinct for self-preservation; hence, also the desire for immortality. We return again to the point made above about death and animals. Wilber said there are “two kinds of immortality”: the kind of total immersion with nature, and the kind where “death is overcome by accumulating time-defying monuments.” He quoted Norman O. Brown who wrote, “Civilization itself is an attempt to overcome death.”

In his book Escape From Evil, Ernest Becker said,” We have so long been stripped of a ritual role to play in creation that we have to force ourselves to try to understand this, to get this into perspective.” Indeed, we need to see what religion has done to cause man’s “fall” from grace. With what Wilber called the “slaying of the Typhon,” (the body-self) he wrote:

With the emergence of the ego level, the self had finally succeeded in differentiating itself from the Great Mother and Mother Nature. At the same time, we saw that the process was carried to extremes in the West, with the result that there was not just a differentiation between ego and nature, but a dissociation between ego and nature. In just the same way, there was not just a differentiation of mind and body… but a dissociation of mind from the body, And I am saying that these two dissociations are one: the alienation of the self from nature (and the Great Mother) is the alienation of the self from the body. ²

With the transfer from body to mind Wilber makes an analogy to the major shift from matriarchy to patriarchy. It was a major transfer of consciousness. Many other analogies are made by Wilber here (from the pre-Oedipal child separating from/wanting to possess the mother, even to a “solar/phallic” matriarchy). But what’s interesting here (for me) is the shift in symbolism. Matriarchs worshiped symbols of cyclicity, return, death and renewal (the uroboros, dragon, cosmic symmetry, union and inclusion); whereas the patriarchal symbols became those of separation, exclusivity, female oppression, dominion, aggression, right over wrong, good over evil – the “heroic ego” made distinct from “the chthonic and Earth Mother.” With this also evolved sky-god worship as opposed to the earthen Goddess – something unseen, intangible, unreachable, imperious (and eventually quite “jealous”). The many faces, forms and expressions of the Goddess (polytheist) were stamped out by a single male deity equipped with many commandments (monotheist).

With patriarchy we came into the world and will leave it upon death. With matriarchy we came “out” of the world and will return to it. Everything is reversed. But the real pivotal difference here is with the introduction of the Church, the institutionalizing of a Messiah’s message. The Church had its own agenda apart from its principles. The Fathers knew they had to keep its flock “trembling” while somehow loving God at the same time. Humans had to be kept in a permanent state of fear if they were to succeed in turning this new cult-religion into the powerful, wealthy institution it was intended to be.

To reach God, to be saved by God, now required going through the Church by way of a hierarchy of clergymen (“apostolic succession”). Minus the middleman of Church intervention, he’s doomed. Alas, this is actually how people still view religion today: one gives everything he has (including his soul) to the institution, in exchange that it may “save” him (a ransom, in other words). – Oh, but the good news is, all they need is “faith” (courtesy of St. Mark) and patience enough to wait long periods, in prayer. The message is one of continual submission, gratitude, and fear. Life itself is also therefore assumed to be what it was meant to be in the beginning: a waiting room in which to prepare for the hereafter. And waiting rooms, again, are hardly worth the trouble of respecting, cleaning, maintaining, or caretaking.

“[T]o achieve on earth a ‘perfection,’” as Rank said, is a euphemistic way of saying we want immortality by shaking off death. Immortality means “perfection” (and visa versa). There’s also the ulterior motive of transferring the powers of religion to the earthly domain through social institutions and politics. Again, everything takes on a religious aura. We want everything to be working to bring “heaven on earth” (while we wait).

The interesting thing about spirituality is that it is not religious. The two are mutual exclusive. Terms “high” and “low” religiosity are tossed about to convey this very distinction. This, by the way, is why I call myself a “spiritual atheist” to those who ask. The difference can also be laid bare by comparing Western and Eastern thought. Alan Watts again once had to make clear the fact that Eastern religion is not religion. It is a “psychology,” he said. A psychology is direct and experiential; it is not speculative, theoretical. or academic. Western religion by contrast is commonly explained in terms of theories and ideas, even while some Westerners “experience” transcendent states in their own ways, in some forms.

While the West portrays a God who is “out there,” sometimes incarnate, sometimes not, past and future oriented, Buddhism on the other hand negates any term for God (or Enlightenment) and at best refers to It in terms of what It is not – by erasure (sous rature, as the French say). What the Buddha experienced is simply “Buddhism.” What is direct & experiential cannot be objectified.

Many Christians refute this, saying they have “direct union” with God as well, and they use all kinds of ways of explaining it. But what never changes in their sharing is the presupposition, the premise, the “absolute” assumption, of an “I-Thou” – which is not absorption but a surrendering to something “out there,” albeit something peaceful, safe, and protected. They never get over the obstacle of separation. If they do, they will “die,” and death (even Thanatos) is the opposite of eternal life for them. They want “eternal life,” but in fact one can’t have one without the other. What they miss is lost in the notion of “eternal,” which implies time & space. The only thing truly eternal is the transcendence beyond time. The “here & now” is all there is. “Lay not your treasures where moth and rust doth corrupt,” said Jesus.

As for earthly perfection, Joseph Conrad wrote, “I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural which is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories, an outrage on our dignity.” – Conrad was an atheist ³ while intensely spiritual. He also took offense to religion’s habit of teaching people to be extremely self-centered. That is, to think that god cares for them individually and the universe was created with them specifically in mind. – Just think how far we’ve fallen since the times of man’s “magical-typhonic” consciousness. With the pre-frontal lobe comes “knowing that we know” – and suffering.

So much for religion today. I submit that what we need is far less of it. In fact, like it or not, this is where we seem to be heading anyway. Religion has gone as far as it can go. It’s taken us to a precipice and, as William Irwin Thompson wrote, “Edges are important because they define a limitation in order to deliver us from it…. [W]e come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before.” According to Thompson, we’ve gone through three Ages of myth-making: the Age of Chaos, the Age of Men, and the Age of Heroes. We now enter the Age of Gods, which is a “unitive” state of Being, very much like music where it becomes a “performance of the very reality it seeks to describe.” It is completely experiential and no longer, as Watts said, “speculative or theoretical.” The ego (control) is phasing out of it.

“Here history becomes the performance of myth…. The ego is locked into a narrow time frame (Plato’s cave).., [I]n the experience of illumination the ego realizes that the narratives that seem to be saying one thing are saying much more” (Thompson).

The hero returns from his long journey of self-discovery and Persephone returns from Hades. We are all (hopefully) wiser, older, and ready to put religion in its proper place. In the end, religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who have already been there.

© 2024 Richard Hiatt

1It should be noted that the 4,500 B.C. estimate was made in 1981. Since then, this circa had been set back again and again with subsequent archeological digs.

2Ken Wilber, Up From Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution (Boulder: Shambhala Pub., 1981). p. 191.

3Joyce Carol Oates wrote, “Though he was born Roman Catholic, Conrad acknowledged no religion and wrote of the supernatural only as superstition.”

THRESHOLDS REVISITED

A threshold, says Webster, is a point “at which a physiological or psychological effect begins to be produced.” It is also a point “above which something is true or will take place and below which it is not or will not.” In the second case, the opposite is also implied: what isn’t true becomes true.

There’s a threshold in our society below which something is allowed to happen and above which it is not. In this case, it’s about a threshold for suffering. And not just suffering, but a certain treatment of suffering which allows it to continue. And the reason it continues is because we actually see it in manageable forms. We can objectify it and, in a sense, even possess it. To that degree we can also make it into a kind of aesthetic. That is, there’s a certain beauty to it. And what makes that possible is that objectification allows us to lecture about it. We presume to know all there is about it.

Using “beauty” to describe suffering (as in war) is disturbing. But it’s exactly what we do, which is how and why we repeat it. Artists have always painted romantic and heroic scenes of battle, but in modern times it’s been photography which has turned pain and death into a marketable aesthetic. Photos, especially war photography (called “photojournalism” since 1941), was/is inclined to turn war into a visual art form. It doesn’t just record and report. It searches for moral lessons, parables, and commentaries through angles, lighting, smoke, and carnage. The battle scene, makeshift graveyard, burned-out building, the aftermath, have won prizes for projecting surrealistic auras and even a “peace” that comes through reflection.¹ In my lifetime this (and the Pulitzer) has been the primary interest among photojournalists. ²

Hence, the serious debates held about the photographer’s very purpose in the presence of suffering. A number of photographers actually vowed once to shoot nothing but the suffering itself as a crude statement of fact, and nothing else — rightfully criticizing their peers for “inauthenticity” and being too “cinematic.” Their peers, they said, were actually making war into something it wasn’t. Ironically, the result of this was quite stunning. The ones discredited were the ones who stuck to their ethics. The world simply couldn’t resist the syrupy sermonizing, sanctimony, romancing, and lecturing made possible by the “heroic” photos which teased suffering’s threshold.

Below that threshold suffering is sufficiently upsetting enough to draw outrage, but not enough to end it. Below we explore it in absentia, by default, and conveniently from a distance. It’s this painfully subtle hypocrisy that takes us to the races to watch cars crash, to the movies to watch explosions and murders, to watch everything in the news tragic and horrible. In between those times we exercise bouts of schadenfreude – enjoyment from watching tragedy befalling others (aka., “endarkenment”). There’s Edmund Burke’s quote: “I am convinced we have a degree of delight… in the real misfortunes and pains of others. There is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity.”

We love to be shocked. As for its aesthetic beauty, tragedy brings a certain irony to it, and with irony an inexplicable poetry and rhythm to the most violent suffering. Especially when recorded in pictures. Photography should be the first giveaway, because pictures control perception. Photos are a language. They’ve become the primary manner by which we make things real. With pictures we’ve learned how to calculate, monitor, and ration suffering in just the right dosage, which makes it a kind of drug. This is the rhythm I refer to – as if taken every four hours.

Photos are just part of a much larger arsenal of tools we use to show what is tolerable and what isn’t (cf. Watts’ reference to egoic memory below). Together they draw a large line in the sand we intuit to be that threshold of allowed suffering. As long as we can play with that line, we court it and keep it on our terms. Courting brings with it yet another obsession, a kind of death wish, if you will. ³ It’s the nearness of death that makes us feel most alive. It’s also the nearness of chaos and insanity that brings order to existence, whether by means of superstition and religion, philosophy, or political order. It seems that everything orderly is always about staving off the nightmare of its absence, not simply because we like civility or structure.

The threshold itself is the brink of what is incomprehensible. Below it we invest in various tools to filter suffering as needed. War is one way. Gun violence is another. “Guns” are the most efficient tools ever invented to affirm and sustain this threshold. Guns have only one clear purpose – to inflict pain and suffering. There is nothing peaceful about a gun except through the ignorance of mutual deterrence, which is not peace. Instead, it simply delays what is dreaded. Alas, the world today actually defines peace as a kind of uneasy, nervous deterrence – the staving off of tragedy. It’s what’s left by erasure, not by a presence but by an emptiness. ⁴

What also plays with thresholds are the ulterior motives secretly kept behind the rules of order. Compassion, sympathy, and righteousness are fraught with deception and reverse meanings. They are unstable emotions requiring exercise and action, or else they wither, which then puts their authenticity on the block. Sentimentality is often a masking of a taste for brutality. Sympathy often suggests an false understanding of suffering. Susan Sontag said, ”So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence…” In the same way, we grapple with “pride” (quoting Alan Watts) “with every act of humility; and even worse, we feel pride for realizing we is humble.” Then, “am I going to be proud for knowing that I am proud for knowing that I am humble?!” – infinite regresses which lead us down rabbit holes.

Detachment and possession are key. But at what point do we lose those fail-safe protectors? When is it that we cross that line and can no longer prod and poke our thresholds? It’s the point where suffering becomes too intimate and personal, when it involves a family member, when the catastrophe seen through the safety of television lands at our doorstep. At that instant we can no longer possess it, shrink it to a safe aperture. It intrudes into our personal space and we lose ourselves. We lose perspective and footing.

Here is where we gain another kind of aesthetic, or dark beauty. Thresholds exist not just to tease but to cross. Again, it’s a subtle but interminable fascination with endings. Becker again: “[S]ince everyone is carrying on as though the vital truths about man did not yet exist, it is necessary to add still another weight in the scale of human self-exposure.” This “weight” is the unveiling of the death wish, the wish to push that threshold farther into the darkness. The fact is, we are never fully convinced about our right to exist in the first place. We’ve always doubted the authenticity of life as we’ve made it, and we pass through portals of existential unworthiness. This is the part of ourselves we fear and are most fascinated with. We become fraudsters, or “genuine fakes”(said Watts) the more we refuse to admit it.

Watts used to say that the problem of memory is in how we sense our existence. In other words, what we choose to remember? He goes much further than ordinary memory, probing the self (ego). “Although memory records are much more fluid and elusive than photographic film… the accumulation of memories is an essential part of the ego-sensation. It gives the impression of oneself… as something that remains while life goes by…. The skin informs us just as much as it outforms; it is as much a bridge as a barrier.” Sensory memory (“ego-sensation”) is another reconnoiter with thresholds.

Again, (mental) photos/pictures inventory and archive our thoughts, feelings, images, and common ideas and keep the memory of who we are. They are also, as Susan Sontag said, “a temple that houses a comprehensive, chronologically organized, illustrated narrative of … sufferings.” But Sontag also added a caveat: “The problem is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photographs.” We dip into the simulacrum: “imitations without originals” – which again stirs existential doubt.

All that said, our “inform-outform”/inline-outline/self-other/meum-tuem/I-Thou/here-there/“we – versus – they” memory is all prefigured by the distance we set from the ultimate suffering – that place where the barrier of validation and belief set up, where the final suffering starts and ends; hence, where to be, where not to be, how far to go and still be safe.

In vague subconscious snippets, this is what flies through my mind’s recesses as I witness the most ordinary things. I see the waging of war with bravado and chutzpah against all things which challenge our little reality, termed apocrypha. But those enemies are always smaller, weaker, and more vulnerable than our egos. Then we praise ourselves for being noble. Underneath, we are “genuine fakes,” but it doesn’t matter. We know where our thresholds reside, beyond which “the jig is up” and the game is thrown. It’s also mindful of the flat-earthers and “geocentrists” (Ptolemyists) who still think everything revolves around them. Or our notions about God, heaven and hell. There are borders and limits we are willing to meet and challenge, but no one dares cross over those lines. If they do, they’re never the same when (or if) they return.

© 2024 Richard Hiatt

1In his book The Myth of the Machine, Lewis Mumford said: “Hence the sense of joyful release that so often has accompanied the outbreak of war… popular hatred for the ruling classes was cleverly diverted into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies…. Thus the greater the tensions and the harsher the daily repressions of civilization, the more useful war became as a safety valve.” – Safety valves and channeled hatred bring a twisted “peace.”

2We might ask “why photos?” Photos are emphasized here more than anything because we are in fact a “visual” culture. We see the world more than we hear it or smell it. Hence, the supreme power of the image.

3Ernest Becker, in his The Denial of Death, reminds us of another fascination with war. First of all, we are all by nature narcissists because we are “hopelessly absorbed with ourselves.” With that comes a necessary belief in our self-worth and, in the extreme, the feeling of invincibility. War then allows us to test that notion. “Luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow….everyone is expendable except ourselves.” Later on, Becker makes an interesting observation: :”Man is moral because he senses his true situation and what lies in store for him,” the end of himself.

4After the Soviet Union blasted its first atomic bomb in August, 1949, the French sociologist, political scientist, and historian Raymond Aron said,” “War is impossible, peace is improbable.”