[The following is an essay for my Theology for Pastoral Counselors class. As I am a work in progress, so too is this document and the ideas expressed.]
I believe transcendence is not only part of the human condition but an integral factor behind the existence of all things. I believe many problems are linked to an unreasonable attachment to this world and many answers reside in the transcendent realm. I believe each person’s ability to access this realm in search of meaning is influenced by the particular paradigm of understanding from which they operate. In this sense, I believe in a personal God to which we can turn for answers and direction.
I derive meaning from acceptance of the idea all things – ideas, emotions, objects, actions, people, animals, plants, whatever – are in a constant state of change, and therefore impermanent and fundamentally empty. Our sense of reality – transcendental or mundane – is a product of our minds and the illusion we are separate from all other things. A constant stream of cause-and-effect relationships underlies the principle of perpetual creation, a seamless process of simultaneous construction and destruction. Individual experience can never be accurately communicated with symbols or rituals. All such endeavors are merely referential and gesticular. Each person comprehends and internalizes their unique relationship with the worlds of sense and transcendence using both logos and mythos.
The poetic irony is that, because we all enjoy unique lives, we share the experience of perceived uniqueness. As a result, much of what it is to be human common and relating to one another on the most intimate levels should be as easy as accepting our shared adventure on this planet. The truth is, finding connections is a challenge for almost everyone.
Regarding mission, I believe faith entails a priori assumptions about what is true yet beyond my ability to perceive. Meaning without truth is hollow, and truth stems from the degree to which meaning can be implemented. As the Book of James says, “[J]ust as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead.”[i] I interpret this to mean we should act on the things in which we believe and leaving these beliefs as pure abstractions robs them of their true power.
Here is the fundamental challenge: All things, regardless of how defined, are constantly changing. The implication is meaning can be derived at any instantaneous point during a thing’s birth, life and death, but meaning ultimately is ephemeral, and the final purpose of all things is to change into something else. Just as God brings order out of chaos, it also returns order to chaos. Comfort stems from accepting and embracing life’s dynamics. From my freshman perspective, it seems as though the pastoral counselor’s mission is to help clients see the underlying causes of their problems while accepting the very real possibility nothing – not their successes or their failures, not their hopes or their fears, nothing – is static.
I have trouble thinking about faith, meaning and especially spirituality as separate from myself. This uncomfortable feeling is most obvious when I try to discuss the nature of God in the third person. For me, God is a state or quality of transience. It is the fundamental creative path of all things. I am inseparable from this phenomenon.
Specific things have positive or negative meaning to the degree they advance or retard the underlying fluidity. Things can be good or bad in an ethical sense but not in a moral sense. A thing that facilitates creativity reduces pain while a thing that destabilizes change causes suffering. “Letting go” enables God’s grace to work unimpeded. God is the process by which a block of stone is turned to a statue, whether beautiful or ugly. The sculptor facilitates this process of transformation while the vandal inhibits it. We call the artist good and the thug bad.
Using the term loosely, my sense of “spirituality” is driven by a desire to find a unifying theory. That is not to say our respective faith perspectives must be identical or even synchronistic, but that I must be able to explain my transpersonal and metaphysical thoughts in a coherent way that relies on more than a hunch. I have difficulty stepping back and accepting mystery on its own terms.
This frustrating need for intellectual integrity was spawned from a tumultuous religious upbringing from which I inherited the notion no person or institution had a monopoly on truth, spirituality was subjective, and each individual had to find a framework of understanding that suited them.
I hardly remember attending Methodist church as a child. I do, however, remember adults exhibiting hardscrabble resourcefulness and independence. They were people of the land and practicality ruled the day. As an only child in Ann Arbor I was introduced to hippies and free love, alcohol and marijuana, African Americans and Latinos, and to the extended family in Unitarian Universalism. When my mother married an Episcopal minister, I became briefly interested in Christianity and was confirmed at a small church in Vermilion, Ohio. At university I adopted agnosticism, then graduated to secular humanist utilitarianism. It was during these years I came to embrace Modern Movement theories about the power of science to answer all questions. I agree with Karen Armstrong when she argues the advent of Modernism encouraged the modern sense of atheism.[ii]
Also as a young adult I made substance abuse a way of life. The following by Dennis Ford is salient:
Alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual obsessions, and adventurousness – in which meaning remains, but only while engaged in extreme and risky activities, including violence – have all been attributed to misguided and finally self-destructive attempts to suppress the question of meaning by drowning in instinctual behavior. [iii]
Recovery was only possible with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.[iv] In the context of this seminal 12-step recovery program I sought a “power greater than myself” using the kind of spiritual pragmatism described by William James.[v] Later I found guidance through Native American spirituality and the Mankind Project, where I worked on archetype modeling.[vi] In recent years I took a Postmodern Movement approach to life while studying Buddhism and Religious Science[vii].
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.[viii] This observation applies to the cosmos, to Earth, to plants and animals, and to me. When such ingredients as fruit, sugar, starch, flower, butter, and eggs are combined in a particular manner then baked, we create something different than the sum of the constituent parts – we have a pie. This pastry has an aesthetic, commercial, and nourishing life of its own. This “greater than” quality connects me to all people and things. I am more than a collection of cognitive and emotional responses to my environment. As a youth I argued communication was the glue that allowed society to be greater than the sum of its homo sapien constituents. This belief explains in part why I became a journalist. Today I perceive a “self” or “soul” similar to that described by Richard Schwartz in his Internal Family Systems Model,[ix] or perhaps like Buddha Nature (Buddha-dhatu). This new notion helps explain why I now pursue pastoral counseling.
Regardless of how the pie is sliced – what size or shape the pieces – Aristotle was correct when he said, “[A]ll things flow and nothing stands.”[x] By example, the Chicago River is both permanent and reliable but also changing from second to second as molecules drift and fish swim. The Chicago River is simultaneously greater than the sum of its parts – an entity with a life of its own – and completely empty and evanescent.[xi]
Mind distills substance from the emptiness. In this sense, I believe we “dream” ourselves into existence out of the eternal ocean of perpetual creativity: God. Working in harmony with God, our minds allow us to render coherence out of the maelstrom. Our collective dream – the sense ego is separate from the external world[xii] – is harmonized by the lessons and expectations into which we are born, as with the modern concept of nomos and the concomitant notions of externalization, objectification and internalization.[xiii] The subjectivity of our experience, especially of our transcendent world, means Baal and Thor and Elohim are equally real to those who believe, and should be respected as such. The individual must ask, “How is my concept of transcendent reality working for me?”
Compassion is the only emotion I feel when accepting the notion we all of the same stuff – a benign creative force – and operating under the same delusion of binary thinking – me and it, I and thou.
I once had a dream about the way multiple dimensions may fold in upon themselves to create the fundamental forces – electromagnetism, strong and weak interaction, and gravitation – that lead to the world as we perceive it.[xiv] In this dream I had an epiphany: What I think is the external phenomena by which reality is created is actually what my mind does to assemble the world around me. At the instant of this realization, all images, thoughts and emotions in my mind became completely malleable and interchangeable. I realized the complete plasticity of my human experience. I was overcome by a feeling of warm compassion for all sentient creatures that, like myself, are fumbling along, desperately trying to make sense of an otherwise terrifying and seemingly meaningless world.
Upon awakening I was enveloped by the illusion of my concrete world, which pressed upon me all the demands of my half biological, half symbolic life.[xv] I found myself again embroiled in ego clinking and the endless push and pull of my samsaric existence.[xvi]
Science tries to objectively describe the laws by which the physical world operates. I believe these laws reflect cause-and-effect principles originated in the ether from which I emerged. Just as a wave propagates another wave, so too does love beget love, negativity beget negativity, and so on. Faith in this concept of cause and effect underlies my two regular spiritual practices – Religious Science and Buddhism – and forms the backdrop of my daily meditations.
Living a good life is a bit like standing on a boat. One must be flexible enough to let the deck shift beneath one’s feet while at the same time maintaining enough balance to not fall overboard. The captain does not control the wind’s direction, and cannot travel directly into it, but can leverage the prevailing forces, tacking back and forth to reach his goal.
Endnotes
[iii] Ford, Denis (2007). The Search for Meaning: A Short History (p. 14). Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.
[v] James, William (1897). The Will to Believe [Electronic version]. New World. Retrieved September 27, 2009.
[vi] Mankind Project was formerly known as New Warrior. It finds its roots in the men’s movement started by such people as Robert Bly, author of Iron John (1990), and Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, authors of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (1990).
[vii] Holmes, Ernest (1938). The Science of Mind: A Philosophy, A Faith, A Way of Life. New York: R.M. McBride and Co. Religious Science and Science of Mind are synonymous.
[viii] Holism as articulated by Aristotle in Metaphysics, Book VIII, Part 6. The original quote as translated by W.D. Ross is, “In the case of all things which have several parts and in which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something beside the parts, there is a cause; for even in bodies contact is the cause of unity in some cases, and in others viscosity or some other such quality.
[xi] Emptiness is a tenant of Buddhism. The following quote from the Dalai Lama from Stages of Meditation (2003) is typical: “Although there are as many categories of emptiness as there are types of phenomena, when you realize the emptiness of one specific phenomenon, you also realize the emptiness of all phenomena. The ultimate nature, or emptiness, of all phenomena is of equal taste and of the same undifferentiable nature.”
[xiii] Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociology of Religion. New York. Anchor Books. 1967.
[xvi] Buddhists describe samsara as the world of relative reality in which we live, a place of ego-clinging that triggers attachment and aversion to things near and far.
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