Alan Watts once said that in order to "save" religion, all holy books should be locked away for 1,000 years. I agree. Why? The literal interpretation of words. It does not take anyone gifted to see the religious fallacies of the Robertson's, Jackson's, Falwell's, mullah's, iman's, priest's etc. Listen to them all and at some time they are going to start quoting to you out of their selected scripture and the written word,of course,and in their opinion, is the final institutional arbiter, harsh, implacable, doctrinaire.
But words are only metaphors, tools or signposts to pitch you out into the realm of the mystical. They can not verify it, or deliver it. And institutions declare that its not necessary anyway. They just say believe in it and we will socialize it. And unwittingly or not they reduce it to politics. They become Strindberg's one-eyed cat, seeing either from the left or the right but never stereoscopically. Only one-side and flat.
There was religion before institutions and holy books. It grew from everywhere; agrarian planters, herders, northern shaman, mystics; from the cave paintings of the Pyrenees to the folk tales of North American Plains Indians. In most, it evolved from individual experiences orally transported and manifested in nature. Nature has been largely extracted from religion today and treated as something totally other than ourselves.
Following are a few excerpts from a philosopher, a poet, a scientist, and an Oglala Sioux.
From Rudolf Otto, "The Idea of the Holy":
The first function of a living mythology, the properly religious function, is to waken and maintain in the individual an experience of awe, humility, and respect, in recognition of that ultimate mystery, transcending names and forms, "from which", as we read in the Upanishads, "words turn back".
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But the individual, in the apprehension of this mystery becomes selfless, and at the same time blended into the wholeness of life.
From "Natural Music" by the poet Robinson Jeffers:
The old voice of the ocean, the bird chatter of little rivers,
(Winter has given them gold for silver
To stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks)
From different throats intone one language
So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without
Division of desire and terror
To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger-smitten cities,
Those voices also would be found
Clean as a child's; or like some girl's breathing who dances alone
By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers.
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But it was Erwin Schrodinger, a nobel laureate physicist, who, in 1964 in "My View of the World" captured the idea of the religious eternal as well as anyone:
There are grassy slopes all around, with rocks thrusting through them; on the opposite slope of the valley there is a stretch of scree with a low growth of alder bushes. Woods climb steeply on both sides of the valley, up to the line of treeless pasture; and facing you, soaring up from the depths of the valley, is the mighty, glacier-tipped peak, its smooth snowfields and hard-edged rock-faces touched at this moment with the soft rose-color by the last rays of the departing sun, all marvelously sharp against the clear, pale, transparent blue of the sky.
According to our usual way of looking at it, everything that you are seeing has, apart from small changes, been there for thousands of years before you. After a while-not long- you will no longer exist, and the woods and rocks and sky will continue, unchanged, for thousands of years after you.
What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you he has begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this 'someone else' really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, in in your father's father...thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justfies you in obstinately discovering this difference-the difference between you and someone else-when objectively what is there is the same.
Looking and thinking in that manner you may suddenly come to see, in a flash, the profound rightness of the basic conviction in Vedanta: it is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense- that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza's pantheism. For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you-and all other conscious beings as such-are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what thee Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as "I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world."
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From Black Elk Speaks as told to John Neihardt:
I was still on my bay horse, andd once more I felt the riders of the west, the north, the east, the south, behind me in formation, as before, and we were going east. I looked ahead and saw the mountains there with rocks and forests on them, and from the mountains flashed all colors upward to the heavens. Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children on one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.
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I felt something along this order once, travelling thru the Grand Tetons, alone, at 3AM in the morning,lost, in a van on some secondary road and nearly out of gas. It was the fall of year and I was driving by a certain range of the mountains listenting to El Condor Pasa on casette:
seanet.com
Momentarily, a full fall moon began to rise over the back side of the range and over the course of a couple of hours yellow-white light cascaded down from peak to base. This gives you an idea of it, but only an idea:
wpni01.auroraquanta.com
The important thing was the complete and immediate washing away of ego, self, importance in the presence of something bigger and more enduring; alone, but unified, insignificant, yet complete. Those old coincidences of opposites the human condition is heir to; washed away in a moment and re-aligned. It's those moments where nature and man "intone one language" that elicits religious awe and where "words turn back" The stillpoint, as Eliot called it. "where the dance is"
To me, these are the religious moments. From that grows the religious feeling. But to preach it and prosyletize it is to completely miss the point. It's personal and with gratitude it should be accepted if it comes. |
