Wednesday, May 25, 2005
What is real?
"If anyone wants to be my diciple they must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me."
Recently I have been undergoing a process of denying the certainty of many of my religious assumptions. However, this has not happened as a result of doubt or disillusion. It has happened as part of my ongoing spiritual practice. The journey to God has led me to the point where I regard concepts of God as approximations. They point to God, but they don't describe God any more that a roadsign pointing to Penzance describes that particular Cornish town.
I have accepted for some time the ancient view that God is ultimately more than any words, concepts or images can describe. But it is taking me a while to take on board what that might imply.
Here is one thought:
If God is mysterious, more than can be described rationally, then what of the universe? If the universe truly comes from such a God in some way, perhaps the universe is also mysterious, and likewise beyond the ability of reason to descibe completely.
A lot of people wont like that idea. Since the Enlightenment the assumption has taken hold that the human capacity to reason using investigation, logic and deduction would establish objective truth about the universe. The thought occured to me just today that this is taking only one way in which the mind thinks, and extrapolating it to the behaviour of the whole cosmos. But the mind also thinks in other ways. There is the erratic jump from one thing to another, peculiar associations of apparently unrelated things, breaks, imagination, intuition, feeling. In other words that whole assortment of mental clutter that Enlightenment Reason has dropped into a shoe box and shoved under the bed in its immaculatley kept bedroom as being of no importance.
Now, I can't deny that Enlightenment Reason has been very successful. It has prodded and probed, it has found interesting patterns, it has made predictions and a few have turned out to be good. Enlightenment Reason has found what it was looking for, a vast stratum of reason and rationality in the universe. And finding all this reasonableness has encouraged Enlightenment Reason in believing its assumption that reason is the key to truth.
But what if there are other strata in the universe that don't so readily correspond to logic, but to those other ways of thinking that Enlightenment Reason would like to ban? What if, when the lights are out, those things crawl out from their shoebox under the bed and doodle in crayon on the bedroom walls?
Enlightenment Reason denies that there are any such doodles. There is nothing that could possibly doodle like that, so they can't be real. But I think the doodles are there. I think I've caught glimpses of them myself, and members of my family have also seen things that look suspiciously like doodles. Other people claim to have seen them as well. Enlightenment Reason has tried to hide them with the chest of drawers and call us all liars or idiots, but it is in denial. Unfortunatly it is denial of the wrong sort. It needs to take seriously what Jesus said, quoted at the top, and learn to deny that it has all the answers.
Apparently the doodles have started appearing in the downstairs loo.
Recently I have been undergoing a process of denying the certainty of many of my religious assumptions. However, this has not happened as a result of doubt or disillusion. It has happened as part of my ongoing spiritual practice. The journey to God has led me to the point where I regard concepts of God as approximations. They point to God, but they don't describe God any more that a roadsign pointing to Penzance describes that particular Cornish town.
I have accepted for some time the ancient view that God is ultimately more than any words, concepts or images can describe. But it is taking me a while to take on board what that might imply.
Here is one thought:
If God is mysterious, more than can be described rationally, then what of the universe? If the universe truly comes from such a God in some way, perhaps the universe is also mysterious, and likewise beyond the ability of reason to descibe completely.
A lot of people wont like that idea. Since the Enlightenment the assumption has taken hold that the human capacity to reason using investigation, logic and deduction would establish objective truth about the universe. The thought occured to me just today that this is taking only one way in which the mind thinks, and extrapolating it to the behaviour of the whole cosmos. But the mind also thinks in other ways. There is the erratic jump from one thing to another, peculiar associations of apparently unrelated things, breaks, imagination, intuition, feeling. In other words that whole assortment of mental clutter that Enlightenment Reason has dropped into a shoe box and shoved under the bed in its immaculatley kept bedroom as being of no importance.
Now, I can't deny that Enlightenment Reason has been very successful. It has prodded and probed, it has found interesting patterns, it has made predictions and a few have turned out to be good. Enlightenment Reason has found what it was looking for, a vast stratum of reason and rationality in the universe. And finding all this reasonableness has encouraged Enlightenment Reason in believing its assumption that reason is the key to truth.
But what if there are other strata in the universe that don't so readily correspond to logic, but to those other ways of thinking that Enlightenment Reason would like to ban? What if, when the lights are out, those things crawl out from their shoebox under the bed and doodle in crayon on the bedroom walls?
Enlightenment Reason denies that there are any such doodles. There is nothing that could possibly doodle like that, so they can't be real. But I think the doodles are there. I think I've caught glimpses of them myself, and members of my family have also seen things that look suspiciously like doodles. Other people claim to have seen them as well. Enlightenment Reason has tried to hide them with the chest of drawers and call us all liars or idiots, but it is in denial. Unfortunatly it is denial of the wrong sort. It needs to take seriously what Jesus said, quoted at the top, and learn to deny that it has all the answers.
Apparently the doodles have started appearing in the downstairs loo.
