Half an hour ago I was planning to write a blog post about a new book I’ve started to read, Zen at the End of Religion: An Introduction for the Curious, the Skeptical, and the Spiritual But Not Religious.
I’d planned to talk about a few subjects in the initial chapters that caught my eye. This included a mention of Traditionalism — a rather esoteric branch of spirituality that I briefly threw myself into after an editor of a Traditionalism journal asked me to write an essay for his publication around 25 years ago, maybe even earlier.
I wanted to share the essay in today’s blog post. But I couldn’t find it in a search of this blog. Eventually I realized that I’d written about the essay on my HinesSight blog on November 10, 2004, which was a few weeks before this Church of the Churchless blog came into being on November 21, 2004.
Finding the HinesSight post, “Science, Spirit, and the Wisdom of Not-Knowing,” I realized that the essay I’d written with that name wasn’t transferred when my old blog posts on the Typepad platform were migrated to this WordPress platform earlier this year. So I found the essay on my computer and uploaded the PDF file to the WordPress version of the blog post.
I put a lot of work into the 24 page essay. Here’s what I said in the 2004 blog post. I found the mentions of PDF files quaint, given how the internet has changed over the past 21 years.
When is it wiser to not know something? What distinguishes scientific knowledge from spiritual knowledge? Could I cram an Oscar Wilde quotation into the essay right off the bat? These are some of the questions that I pondered when I began to work on “Science, Spirit, and the Wisdom of Not-Knowing” some years ago. Here’s the PDF file.
Science, Spirit, and the Wisdom of Not-KnowingIt is 24 pages long, so takes a little while to download on a slow connection (you know the mantra that accompanies PDF files: “get the free Acrobat Reader if you don’t have it already”).
This essay is, like so many of my writings, a masterpiece of intellectual brilliance, spiritual inspiration, and crisp writing. Sadly, the essay also is, like so many of my writings, virtually unknown to the world outside of my own cranium.
I submitted it to “Sacred Web: A Journal of Tradition of Modernity” after the editor of this journal asked me to write a piece on the evils of scientism—the cocky attitude of modern science that it has all the answers. The editor had read my first book, “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder,” liked it, and wanted me to put science in its place again.
The problem was, “Sacred Web” is a promoter of the “Traditional” metaphysical perspective that the editor describes here (scroll down the page to find the editorial). Frithjof Schuon and Seyyed Hossein Nasr are some of the noted writers and thinkers in Traditionalism. I had to familiarize myself with them before I could write the essay.
And the more I learned about Traditionalism, the more I became wary of this approach to religion and spirituality (the intellectually voracious can read an extensive critique by a Muslim here; I agree with his basic points about Traditionalism, but disagree that Islam is the one true religion). For example, Traditionalists have a strange fondness for medieval times, when the Church ruled every aspect of society.
Since Traditionalism has a close connection to Sufism, and thus to Islam, any philosophy that longs for the good old days when fundamentalist religion ruled the cultural roost has to be looked at with a wary eye after 9/11/2001. Especially after 11/2/2004, because the American religious right would exchange hearty high-fives with most of the tenets of Traditionalism—leaving aside the minor detail of whether Islam or Christianity is the traditional religion that we bow down to.
Anyway, the essay wasn’t at all what “Sacred Web” wanted, as I ended up being much more supportive of science than the editor had anticipated. That was rejection #1. I then sent a shorter version of the essay off to “Science and Spirit” magazine, figuring that my title was right up their alley. That was rejection #2.
So now I say, screw this one at a time rejection business, I’ll put the piece up on the Internet for everyone in the whole world to ignore simultaneously. Or not, depending on the whims of Google, Google-searchers, and HinesSight readers. It’s fairly serious, because I had to write it in a quasi scholarly journal style. But it also will be of interest to anyone interested in the via negativa approach to spirituality—emptying your consciousness of what isn’t real so what remains is.
Why did I decide to put it up today after years of languishing on a hard disk? OK, I’ll admit it: I just bought a $20 program that makes PDF files, and I had to try it out.
If a PDF creator has been missing in your life, check out Tracker Software’s free trials. I got the “Lite” version. You just click “print” in Word, choose the virtual PDF “printer,” and, voila, a PDF file is produced. Real simple, real slick. There might be better cheap/free PDF creation software, but so far I like this one.
Since I’ve become considerably more atheistic from the time I wrote the essay (probably around 1998, judging from the footnotes), glancing through it I could tell that my current self wouldn’t agree with much of what my previous self believed. But, hey, that’s the nature of life. And of Zen. This is how James Ishmael Ford describes the Second Noble Truth of Buddhism in his book that I almost wrote about tonight. And did, a little bit.
Second. We are composed of parts in constant motion. In truth we’re constantly being created and destroyed. While these “parts” are all insubstantial, our human minds perceive each moment in motion as if it were solid. When we hold too tightly (Samudaya in Sanskrit) onto that which is constantly changing we experience this disequilibrium. It’s the ultimate fallacy of our organizing brains. It serves us in many ways, but ultimately betrays us.
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That’s right Brian you’re a legend in your own mind and a rumor in your own time.
Enjoyed reading that piece by the Brian of …what, near thirty years ago? …That is, didn’t read all of it, I mean it is kind of long, isn’t it? But I read the first two pages of it, and the last two pages, and skimmed very quickly through the rest. I believe I’ve got the gist of it. Correct me if I’m mistaken, but, your predilection for science notwithstanding, what you seem to be going for there for the separate-magisteria idea, is that right?
No doubt the you-of-today has evolved miles and miles away from that you-of-near-thirty-years ago. (I know I have, indeed, so evolved, and all in the last ten years or so.) …Well, of course you have, back then you were still a card-carrying RSSB leading light, and official speaker and official scribe, weren’t you, still very much under their spell.
The you-of-long-ago seems to be basing his worldview on that one foundational error. Namely, that spirituality covers a domain that is beyond the reach (or at least the full reach) of science. In other words, the separate magisteria thing.
I’m pretty sure the you of today would be happy to set the you-of-then right on that. Nothing, but nothing, is outside the purview of science. Whatever factual truth there might be in spirituality, is very properly the domain of scientific enquiry. Everything factual is fodder for science. And nor is science necessarily material, as the you of three decades of ago seems to imagine. Science studies reality; and reality, as it has revealed itself reliably to us, happens to be material. Is all. Should reality turn out to be extra-material: well then, fine, but even so, the essential method of science is still the tool to properly get to the root of the factuality of it.
And no doubt the you-of-today sees the flaw in the Rumi story at the end of the essay. It’s a cool story, and indeed carries a sensible moral: but where it errs is in imagining that it speaks to the factuality of spirituality. That’s completely, laughably circular: as clear a case of fallacious question-begging as any I’ve seen. (That said, certainly it’s a great story, in as much as it points out the importance of expertise in technique, as opposed to merely abstract factual knowledge of a technique. The problem is, it is valid only when the technique itself is about something that’s actually there. Whence the circularity, which is why the question-begging.)
———-
And enjoyed reading your very first blog post, Brian. Re-reading, I should say, because I remember that first piece, from back when I’d first read it.
From your essay
”Frithjof Schuon writes that criticism of
modern science “is made on the grounds that it claims to be in a position to attain to total
knowledge, and that it ventures conclusions in fields accessible only to a supra-sensible
and truly intellective wisdom, the existence of which it refuses on principle to admit.”20
And taking a positive approach, Seyyed Hossein Nasr holds that one way modern science
could be integrated into a higher form of knowledge would be for it “to accept the
limitations inherent in its premises and assumptions.”21”
Science makes no such grandiose claims. But when a variable can be isolated from others, science does a phenomenal job of examining it, uncovering its invariably more complex innards, effects and influences.
But as to the whole, in which all things are contained, it has no method to explore.
Meditation is such a method, and it can and has been employed using a scientific approach. In keeping within the bounds of science, science has shown the effects upon the human mind and body of various forms of contemplation upon the great infinite whole. And those effects are generally healthy, even if there is no news of the whole. Nothing, that is, except in the ecstacy of the practitioner. An ecstacy documented by practitioners in thousands of pages down through all recorded history.
I thought there was something there.
And I was wrong.
I thought there was nothing there.
And I was wrong.