Life is a great mystery. In spite of the fact that people and religions claim to know its meaning or purpose, if we’re honest, each of us cannot help but admit that its meaning or even the reason for life is unknown to us. So much of it appears and can feel like a chaotic mess and can easily be regarded as a random series of failures, successes, joys and sorrows. Each of us both witnesses and experiences tragedy, loss, calamity and heartbreak, occurrences that appear so completely unfair and random that they blow apart our conceptual reality and the belief systems we hold onto as a way to make sense of life. In short, anyone who gets born cannot help but see that life, while filled with wonder and delight, is no cake walk.
So much shit happens, that it could so easily be seen as unfair, unjust, cruel and random. Deceitful people run our governments. Poor and innocents are stolen from. Minorities are incarcerated when they have not even committed the crimes. One of the primary contributors to the darkness we see in the world are, in fact, our corporations. While these entities are filled with individuals who care a great deal about our planet and might have strong moral compasses, corporations, nevertheless, function almost as sociopathic entities whose primary focus is doing whatever it takes—even if it leads to terrible consequences to humans, animals and the environment—to ensure that the stock price continues to soar and that investors profit.
Each of us is filled with greed, darkness, and yet mostly we refuse to acknowledge this. Most of us fluctuate between denying the darkness inside or becoming so overwhelmed by it, that it makes us want to give up entirely. Our darkness and the darkness we see in the world and our associated suffering can make the very idea of spirit and spirituality a joke. Each of us cannot help but wonder how a God or orderly universe could create so much suffering? What sort of God would sit by as innocent children were caged for the color of their skin? What cruel God could possibly allow individuals to be wracked with illness from contaminated water? What sort of loving God could oversee the environmental decay we find ourselves in today?
Spirituality that denies the darkness is not actually spirituality. Instead, it is a sophisticated form of denial of the darkness. New Age beliefs, like the law of attraction, are a classic form of spiritual denial that forward the shortsighted belief that everything we want can be “attracted” into our lives. All we need to do is repeatedly think about it and “stay positive,” believing we can have what we want.
What are we to believe, then, when unwanted things happen, like disease? Is it then not our fault? Did we not give enough time to imagining our lean, sexually attractive bodies glowing with light? Or was the light we imagined the wrong color? Were we not positive enough? Or even worse, did we attract the illness by virtue of our innately negative thought patterns? This belief compels us to brush-off or ignore the obvious abhorrent nature of a situation or a person.
Our disgust and hate, though, are not merely qualities to be denied. They are, instead, innate capacities that enable us to discriminate true from false, right from wrong, and good from bad. Anyone with a slightly discriminating eye cannot help but see this denial afoot in all major religions. Just look at Spanish colonization throughout the Americas. Columbus and his followers believed that these lands were one vast kingdom of the devil.
Their church embraced all their deeds. The rape of children, the violation of the earth, the destruction of all that was beautiful could be condoned by the halo of the faith. Men who had sex as if relieving themselves declared all native women to be whores, and branded the faces of children while the Pope debated whether or not they were human beings. Priests who exhaled disease declared pestilence to be the will of God. In their wake they left death. Three million Arawakans died between 1494 and 1508. Within 150 years of Columbus the aboriginal population of 70 million would be reduced to 3.5 million. In the Southern Andes of Bolivia, on a mountain of silver once sacred to the Inca, an average of 75 Indians were to die every day for over 300 years. (1)
While we tend to think that Buddhism is a peaceful religion, just look at the the 2016 Rohingya persecution in Myanmar where Buddhist armed forces have been accused of ethnic cleansing, genocide, gang rapes, and infanticide of this Muslim minority.
How do we make sense of the suffering we experience and the suffering we see in the world? Is there a world order that includes not just the light but the dark as well? These are the very questions that we must contend with in order to face the question of spirituality with honesty. We cannot cordon off some aspects of life and say, “That just doesn’t fit into our concept of God, so it doesn’t exist.” We have to be brave enough to contend with the whole thing, light and dark, love and fear, greed and generosity.
The Absence of Meaning
Otherwise, we might as well agree with the skeptics that the whole thing called life is random. For many, this is the only way to make sense of the confusing mess that life can sometimes be. Yet without spirit, without a sense of principles or meaning, we are left with no other choice but to take what we can in this lifetime, to consume, to steal, to rape. After all, if the whole thing is random, if there is no order to this thing called life, what’s the point of upholding values like honor, kindness, charity, or compassion? From the perspective of a world without spirit or meaning, there is no purpose or greater meaning.
Without that meaning, we are no different than single-celled amoeba, tubes that consume, excrete, procreate and die. Nothing more. We, therefore, might as well consume as much as we can, to take what is ours' and not worry one bit about how that affects those around us. We can say, “Who cares if my choices and actions negatively impact the poor and innocent? Fuck them. I can do what I want.” We see plenty of individuals on the world stage with just that point of view, including our so-called world leaders.
Intuitive Knowing versus Scientific Knowing
For many a dog-eat-dog worldview is just the way it is, and for them the very concept of spirituality is lost on them, unless, of course, they embrace a spirituality of denial that justifies their cruel behavior. But for many of us, such a worldview denies an intuitive or innate sense that this thing called life is not random. Many of us sense, if only in moments, that there is a kind of logic to life that while at moments is graspable, at other moments is far beyond our capacity to understand.
In other words, life is a great mystery. What makes it mysterious are its dual qualities of being both coherent or intelligible and, at the same time ineffable or beyond our capacity to grasp. Our cultural drive toward a scientific worldview has forced all that cannot be seen or known into the categories of superstition, untruth, wives tales, or magical thinking. In other words, if we cannot see it in a microscope or science hasn’t identified it yet, it doesn’t exist. In our drive to understand and make sense of the world around us, we cling to only one way of knowing, that which is scientifically verifiable, and deny or suppress other forms of knowing, in particular, our innate knowing or our intuitive sense.
This latter form of perception has been given short shrift. Since the scientific revolution, we have overestimated the value of the intellect, which can only analyze, consider, debate, and understand. In turn, we have completely devalued our bodily sense of truth, our innate sense of grasping and knowing.
This innate quality of knowing was the very essence of our hunter-gather ancestors’ religion. Hunter-gathers still living today in remote parts of the world depend on their external senses along with their inner felt experience as a way of knowing the world around them. In fact, their very survival is predicated on the dual capacities of sensing and feeling. Without it, they run the risk of getting mauled by a cougar or starving to death.
As our ancestors shifted from a hunter-gatherer life to a more agrarian one, they relied less on their ability to sense the world around them for their survival. Instead, they needed to keep track of the amount of grain in their granaries, to understand the seasons, when they would harvest and when they would plant seeds. They needed to forge agreements with other farmers or landholders to share access to water.
Humans shifted from needing to sense the world around them to needing to understand the world around them. The world shifted from something directly known to something conceptualized. This approach to life became even stronger in the industrial revolution and now and especially, in the information age. Slowly and imperceptibly, humans have lost touch with or even value their direct experience. If we sense the truth of something, we have little trust in it unless our intuitive knowing is backed by science.
Iterative Meaning Making
In spite of the fact that we place such little value in this intuitive knowing, many of us cannot help sensing a greater meaning or purpose to this thing called “my life.” We innately sense that our lives matter, that our suffering is not just a random mistake, a glitch in our DNA, a lack of serotonin, a random fluke of nature or a broken and prejudice legal system gone awry. These facts of life are undeniable. The world is filled with a lack of justice, and yet many of us, if only momentarily, experience an intuitive understanding of an orderliness in the world and of our lives in which something intuitively makes sense.
That intuition, that sense does not always hold up to scientific scrutiny, nor can we reduce it to a simple formula or story. Mostly what we come up with intuitively are hypotheses, best guesses until more knowledge or experience comes along. In other words, intuitive knowing is iterative. We sense something, interpret it to the best of our ability only to realize that our initial interpretation was partial or incomplete. If we remain honest with ourselves, we stay present with the process of sensing from moment-to-moment because whatever we sensed and interpreted a moment ago has surely already changed.
In other words, an honest approach to spirituality remains open and flexible. It’s actually a moment-to-moment encounter with life. It’s not fixed nor is it formulaic. It doesn’t deny the intellect or analytical knowing but it also doesn’t deny what we sense in our hearts and guts. It doesn’t leave out the darkness we inevitably confront in ourselves or the darkness we see in the world. It isn’t reductive either. We cannot reduce the great mystery of life to Four Noble Truths or Ten Commandments. While those instructions may be helpful, to rely exclusively on them is to stay stuck in concepts rather than confronting the direct, unmediated experience of life.
Contextualization
Spirituality, then might be thought of as the creative attempt to explore life by making sense of it. It is the innate drive within each of us to make our lives matter and to give them purpose and meaning. After all so much of what we both experience and perceive around us can so easily be passed off as cruel, unjust, and random. Nevertheless, we humans can make meaning of the most demeaning and inhuman experiences; in fact, when faced with such experiences, our ability to survive and thrive depends on this capacity. However, making sense of it in such a way that either denies the darkness, passes it off simply as a test of survival of the fittest, or whittle it down to a five-easy-step formula is overly simplistic.
An honest approach to spirituality requires that nothing is left out, the good, the bad and the ugly. At the same time, it necessitates that we stay at the razors edge of knowing such that we believed yesterday is no longer valid today. As Holocaust survivor, psychiatrist and author, Victor Frankl aptly commented about the horrors he saw and experienced in the concentration camps:
We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. (2)
Most importantly spirituality creates an order to our lives. It gives context to the apparent random nature of our experience. The words context comes from the Latin roots con- meaning with or together and -text come from the same root as textile. Context weaves apparently arbitrary interactions and experiences into a greater whole. When we contextualize our experience, we do so in order to create meaning or see patterns in what appears to be random squiggles.
The act of weaving a greater meaning into apparent accidental nature of of our lives gives them order. At TED2018, psychiatrist Essam Daod tells the story of Omar, a five year old Syrian refugee who arrived on the island of Lesbos on a rubber boat:
Crying, frightened, unable to understand what's happening to him, he was right on the verge of developing a new trauma. I knew right away that this was a golden hour, a short period of time in which I could change his story, I could change the story that he would tell himself for the rest of his life…
Omar looked at me with scared, tearful eyes and said, "What is this?" as he pointed out to the police helicopter hovering above us.
"It's a helicopter! It's here to photograph you with big cameras, because only the great and the powerful heroes, like you, Omar, can cross the sea."
Omar looked at me, stopped crying and asked me, "I'm a hero?"
Without this reframing, Omar likely would view this moment simply as an overwhelmingly frightening one. By contextualizing it as a “hero’s journey,” Daod is weaving meaning for this small, frightened boy. He’s giving dignity to the indignity he has to endure.
We are not, as the saying goes, “human beings having spiritual experiences,” but, instead, “spiritual beings having human experiences.” This perspective juxtaposes our regular, commonplace view of our lives. Instead of seeing them as a series of random mundane experiences interspersed occasionally with transcendence, we see the potential within each experience—even the darkness we face—as opportunities to grow and evolve, to fulfill an unseen potential inherent in each one of us. Sensing and touching this potential is foundational to any true experience of spirituality.
Footnotes
(1) Davis, Wade. One River. Simon & Schuster. New York. 1996. Print
(2) Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl, V., Beacon Press, 2006. p. 77.