Human consciousness is a gift that allows us to wonder about the unseen and unknown mystery of life. Throughout the ages, humankind has used religion and spirituality to provide a context for containing our questions about the transcendent. More than providing answers, spirituality and religion provide us with a way to ask questions and reflect upon the ineffable.
Spiritual traditions are legacies describing how prior generations explored the transcendent. This accumulated wisdom can guide us in our struggles to make sense of life and death, as well as helping us grapple with our essential nature.
Topics covered below:
Our Need for Religion
Religious Exploration
Comparative Religion
Our Need for Religion
Human consciousness allows us to be aware of our existing, being alive and ultimately dying. The nineteenth century phenomenologist Edmund Husserl felt that asking questions about life, death, and the nature of existence is essential to our genuine humanity. It may be a part of our nature to question the ineffable, but searching for answers in a way that leads to flourishing requires psychological and social support. Questioning reality in isolation can be madness. Carl Jung strongly felt that spiritual journeys into the transcendent without a strong sense of self grounded in the manifest would surely lead to insanity.
People throughout the ages have used religion to remain open to the mystical and explore the nature of existence. Although religion can be seen as a resource for getting answers, it can be more helpful to use religion as a form of support during our spiritual searching. Religion is based in faith and belief, powerful states of mind; but not necessarily sources for answers to all our deepest doubts and questions. In fact, many people suffer greatly when they expect religion to remove all doubt and provide answers to ineffable questions. Belief is never fact; belief is there to help us with our doubt.
Truth in a religious context addresses religious doubt, but is not explanatory about existence and the ineffable outside of the religious. Sometimes, in order to assuage our doubt, we may assert that religious truth is explanatory beyond the confines of religious inquiry. This use of religious truth as explanatory defines fundamentalism. To the fundamentalist, religious truth is certain and answers questions about the nature of things as well as the nature of the transcendent. Although fundamentalism may provide the comfort of having answers, is can also be painful for those individuals who nonetheless struggle with doubt.
When we expect religion to provide us with answers, we obscure the profound support and comfort obtained from faith. The transformative wonder of our spiritual journey lies in being able to tolerate not knowing if there are answers, while continuing to believe in something transcendent. Not knowing and still believing is the consciousness of spirituality. When not knowing and belief connect within us, we have attained a level of faith that can sustain us, even without answers.
Spirituality and religion are methods for experiencing and thinking about the ineffable and transcendent. In any exploration, we need a map, a coherent set of constructs, if we wish to organize and advance our discoveries. Spirituality and religion provide those conditions. Unfortunately, for the postmodern skeptic the emphasis on religious truth as explanatory has closed off an entire realm of spiritual and religious thought. For the skeptic or the postmodern, religious truth is dismissed not only as non-explanatory, but also as heuristic in our spiritual development. However, being a postmodern skeptic does not decrease our need to inquire about the meaning and nature of life. Without the spiritual dimension, the skeptic is left with only radical materialism as truth. For the skeptic, materialism and scientism can also become explanatory truth, terminating any curiosity about an ultimate nature of things.
The religious fundamentalist and the radical materialist are foreclosing an expanded exploration of the transcendent by adhering to their respective truths as fully explanatory as to the nature of all things.
Religious Exploration
One method of exploration is Harold Bloom’s religious criticism. Bloom, professor of literary criticism at Yale, explores American religion through the lens of a culture critic. His perspective is not value driven and does not seek to judge or refute religion. Through critical analysis of the teachings and religious practices, Bloom teaches we may come to understand the meaning of a particular religion and its connection to our culture. A perspective of understanding a religion can help us frame our own questions and create our own answers.
Bloom shows us that contemporary religion in America has a uniquely American flavor distinctly different from traditional European Christian orthodoxy. This uniqueness is most distinct in those religions that arose in America such as Mormonism, Christian Scientism, and American Baptist. Original American Baptist emphasized that each individual must develop their own understanding and personal expression of faith. This individual tolerance fit well with the changing cultural landscape associated with the Western expansion because American Baptist allowed for each preacher and community to articulate how to express and share their faith. At that time there was not a strict set of behavioral contingencies that went along with being a Baptist.
A focus on individual interpretation was embedded in all the original American religions. This emphasis on developing one’s own inner truth was based in the belief of an internal connection to the Holy Spirit with an emphasis on experiencing religion over doctrinal teaching. This echoes the ancient Gnostic teachings that each individual contains a divine inner spark. Learning to embrace this divine inner spark was the goal for an individual’s spiritual development.
For over a century Americans participated in organized religion with a uniquely individual spirituality. This spirituality extended to the American culture at large through the spiritualist movement and, according to Bloom, was echoed in the literary legacy of the transcendentalists of the nineteenth century, such as Emerson, Poe, and Melville.
Although the individual spirituality of these early American traditions was immensely popular, over time the American religions became increasingly less individualistic and more doctrinal. This shift away from individual spirituality may prevent many twenty-first century individuals from being able to utilize established religion for personal spiritual development. However, the past shows us it is possible to develop a communal religious environment that is individualistic yet meaningfully integrated with the culture at large.
An individual inner spirituality in a shared community may fill the needs of those individuals whose postmodern skepticism precludes doctrinal endorsement, but who nonetheless feel a longing to explore the transcendent. The materialist and scientistic answers may be ultimately pragmatic, but may not satisfy our deeper need to question why we exist and how to find meaning in life.
Comparative Religion
Exploring the nature of various religions can help us see how others have answered the ultimate questions of life. One form of comparative exploration is to distill the essential truths that appear in many religions. A pioneer in this exploration was William James. In Varieties of Religious Experience, James defines the universal orientation of religion as a “belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” Like James, Aldous Huxley, in his book, The Perennial Philosophy, describes the basic truths that seem to underlie all religions. Huxley was fascinated by questions of human consciousness and in The Doors of Perception became the literary voice for the consciousness movement of the mid-twentieth century. This interest in a shared human consciousness led him to distill many of the world religions into their fundamental wisdom.
The research of Huxley and James emphasized individual religious experience and the commonalities of all doctrinal religions. Allowing ourselves to resonate to these universal foundations can help us develop our religious spirituality without doctrinal imposition. Through a focus on the common elements in various religions, we can reflect on the transcendent without the doctrinal idiosyncrasy that can alienate the non-believer. Embracing the universal aspects of religion may allow us to explore our deepest questions without the conflicting interference of religiosity. These universal themes help us to contemplate our need for meaning and connection to things greater than ourselves, even in the absence of religious belief or indoctrination.
Religious doctrine, ritual, and practice provide a context for billions of people to explore the ultimate questions. For a follower of a religion, the teachings and practices provide comfort in life, often providing meaning and purpose, and guiding behavior. The unique and distinct nature of religion reflects the heritage and culture of the adherents. For many people, the meaning of their religion is tied to the uniqueness and distinctiveness of the rituals and not the shared universals with other religions.
A pioneering giant in the field of comparative religion, Huston Smith Link, felt that each religion has a unique meaning and value that should not to be distilled to common denominators. Unlike Aldous Huxley and William James, Huston Smith found that the specific teachings and practices of the world religions address different aspects of our human needs for meaning in life. He felt the rituals were not just place holders for a common human longing, but were powerful ways that people found to bind themselves together as a culture exploring the transcendent. He came to this appreciation through his personal journey, going well beyond academic voyeurism. Huston Smith embodied an openness to spiritual exploration, seeking knowledge and understanding through experience. Starting his life as the son of Methodist missionaries in China, Smith progressed through the consciousness explosion of the 1960s, through decades as a Zen Buddhist, and ultimately finding his deepest spiritual resonance as a Sufi.
The force and power of unique religious behavior can be seen in communities that embrace ancient myths and symbols. For example, modern adherents of some ancient religions continue to define themselves by their inherited religion’s cultural artifacts, symbols, and rituals even where the underlying teachings have been lost. Gerrard Russell in his book, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, Link describes a number of twenty-first century communities in the Middle East that continue to practice ancient religions. He describes how the Yazidis in northern Iraq have rituals that suggest a legacy stemming from the ancient Roman cult of Mithras. The religious community of Druze in Lebanon have specific social hierarchies that are definitive of their religion, but are only dimly aware of the teachings in their religion. Russell indicates that the Druze appear to adhere to some religious practices that have roots in the mystical cults of Pythagoras from ancient Greece.
Russell describes visiting and living in these communities and seeing firsthand how these people have a vital religious experience that gives them purpose and meaning. Because of his diplomatic travels, he was able to enter into these communities that still adhere to religions whose roots are often unknown. Russell shows us the power of religious adherence in support a cultural identity. He states,
“…the groups featured in this book seem to me to address three things that troubled me during my time in the Middle East: humanity’s collective ignorance of its own past, the growing alienation between Christianity and Islam, and the way the debate about religion has become increasingly the preserve of narrow-minded atheists and literalists.”
Religion has been a constant part of human culture from time immemorial because it helps people manage living. It can sustain our sense of purpose and identity through membership in a community. Alternatively, it can provide a structure through teachings and rituals for our unique spiritual development. Moreover, religion can teach us tolerance and understanding when we allow ourselves to see religion as a manifestation of how others have answered the Ultimate question.