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Wisdom Is Wisdom
My friend, the village atheist, keeps asking me how anyone can believe in some guy with a long beard up in the clouds directing life. The answer is simple. No one believes such a tale. My friend is a partisan Democrat, so he’s an expert in straw-man arguments, argumentum ad hominem, and other foolishness, of which he is incurable.
When I reluctantly left the Catholic Church, there was a vacancy in my spirit; I let the space to the early Buddhists, the ones in Ceylon who do not require any specific metaphysical beliefs. One of the early sutras tells of someone asking Buddha if there is life after death, no life after death, both, or neither. (They were thorough.) He replied that they have not heard him assert any of these, they will not hear him assert any of these, and the reason he will not assert any of these is that knowing the answer to any of these does not lead, does not conduce to, does not bring us to the Religious Life. And if you say I will not enter the Way until I know the answers, you are like one shot with an arrow who says to one seeking to remove it that he will not allow the removal until he knows who made the arrow and of what parentage and color hair he was. Buddha just ignored metaphysics, it seemed. Since I had probably more than one arrow in me, this sounded good to me. Buddhism offered a method, not a belief system.
Around that time, I got to sitting and hanging out with the (much later) Tibetan Buddhists. I had seen Chogyam Trungpa (Rinpoche, tulku, author of Born in Tibet, and founder of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, who was later metoo-ed) at a couple of lectures at Brandeis and was much impressed. So a few years later, I paid the ten-dollar membership fee and joined the Dharmadhatu in Cambridge. I sat with them, in their beautiful spare meditation room, gazing at the polished wooden floor with bright red cushions in my visual periphery while trying to remember to be aware of my out breath and maybe feeling intensely a presence from a corner of the room where a blond with a ponytail had taken her seat before we all lowered our eyes. Sometimes there were talks from visiting meditation teachers. After sitting, there was tea and talk with members who, unlike me, had actually taken refuge in the dharma and the Buddha and the sangha. I found the sitting and talk enjoyable, and I admired their commitment, but I could not find it in myself to give what the Catholic Church had considered the bare minimum of belief: “internal, prudential assent.” So I remained a fellow-traveler.
One time, after the sitting and tea, someone asked if there were any members who could stay and participate in a ritual with a Tibetan name. Apparently, they lacked a minyan. Since I was indeed a dues-paying member, I volunteered, making the needed tenth. What ensued was not meditation but a chant and response from us who were “slogging through the swamp of materialism, the mud of materialism” imploring one of the iconic subjects of the beautiful wall hangings (all with Indian names, some gods and some humans) to send aid, to assist, to “save us, O lord.”
This litany profoundly shocked me. Was I back in a Catholic church? After all Rinpoche’s talk about being realistic, not expecting to be saved, relying only on sitting meditation and the cultivation of virtue for “the answer,” here we were praying. Cognitive dissonance crashed upon me.
Never believing one should put all one’s eggs in one basket (I had a classical nursery education), I was at this time seeking answers in a more scientific way. If I could not in honesty have a guru, at least I could have a Jewish shrink. Stan (also metoo-ed eventually) called his practice “psychoanalytically oriented, existential, group psychotherapy.” He was my doctor because psychoanalysis itself was financially impossible for me, but even as an impecunious grad student I was able to afford his fee. He had no fixed fee. Instead, he would negotiate with each incoming patient after asking, “What’s a fee that’s fair to you and fair to me?” Mine started out at around four dollars, but we reduced it after a few months when I told him of my realization that “You couldn’t be a doctor if I wouldn’t be a patient,” a position of which he approved.
Stan did share one feature with the gurus: he was laconic and his words were often resonant or ambiguous in thought- and feeling-provoking ways. For example, after one meeting where he had said absolutely nothing, he sent us off with this: “Between now and next week it is important to remember Memorial Day.”
On this occasion, I regaled the group with my recent experience at the Dharmadhatu and my sense of wonder that a non-theistic doctrine had suddenly come to resemble a Catholic church, complete with saints, litanies, and prayers. How could they?
After I finished my rant, Stan said something like, “Maybe they understand Padmasambhava as a higher version of their selves. They may be praying to the best they can be.” That didn’t fully satisfy me, but it did create a space.
I’ve always known that Jewish wisdom and Chinese wisdom and, yes, even French wisdom must be the same: wisdom is wisdom if it be wisdom at all. It will have the same effects or fruits in the lives of those who attain it: friendliness, integrity, and compassion. The myth of cultural appropriation had yet to be devised, thank heaven.
But me? I’m still seeking, though like Sir Thomas Wyatt “I am of those that farthest come behind.” At least after all this time, I have finally begun to glimpse the depth of my own ignorance, though alas, I continue to argue politics altogether too passionately when people like my village atheist friend tell me about Trump’s treasonous deals with Putin.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Obedience and discipline, certainly. I have always admired the regularity of Muslim prayer habits in some countries, stopping everything at certain times of day. Christians in the West don’t even rest on Sundays anymore.
In my high school days, a Muslim friend fasted every day during the month of Ramadan and I could see how difficult it was on him. There was a professional basketball player at the time who fasted despite his strenuous physical activity. They sacrificed for their faith.
Of course, Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists are all just people with the same strengths and foibles of human nature. But the grass is always greener on the other side, so considering dissimilar cultures often helps us to understand our own’s particular shortcomings. Affluence feeds faith by education and opportunities, but there is much we have lost in our comforts.
I would also argue that as one “Looks to the religion of your own people,” one should scrutinize it and criticize it as one would a religion from a foreign land.
This is often called “The Outsider Test for faith.” In other words, if you had not been indoctrinated by parents or friends or your community or your culture to believe X, would you find X convincing?
Often a parent will tell their child, “If your friends were all jumping off cliffs, would you just go ahead a jump off too so you could fit in?”
There’s a lot of groupthink in religion. That’s not a good thing, in my opinion.
Your choice of words makes this very interesting. You talk about a test for faith and then introduce an argument for convincing. Faith is not given to the rational realm and, based on my appreciation of Jung, that’s a good thing. The elements of faith need not be rational because they often tell a tale of humanity while also giving one a common language and reference with other believers. Some years ago I was online with a woman who bemoaned society’s inability to pass on wisdom to its children. I noted that Christianity does, of course it doesn’t always take, but it does often enough.
Faith is much like jumping off a cliff, giving up one’s sense of control of reality and, again, I’m not against it because I think the likelihood of a person developing as humane and rational a world view as, say Christianity, is highly unlikely. And most importantly, an important lesson I learned, most people simply aren’t going to choose to think for themselves when it comes to the complexities of cosmology and theology. They do as they’ve always done: Adopt the beliefs coming from a respected source. Groupthink is here to stay for the foreseeable future, in religion and not.
And back to your first point “The Outsider Test for faith.” If belonging in a larger sense is one of the most stabilizing emotional factors provided by religious belief, what’s the emotional value in making oneself the outsider?
In the end I agree with your opinions personally, I never had faith as much as I tried, I’m too rational, too independent and perhaps too controlling. Avoiding groupthink is a necessity for me and most all my life I’ve stood outside the human drama looking in.
It all depends on what kind of cliff the religious group are asking you to jump off of. If the religious group is asking you to not murder or steal and to be kind to others, that’s more like a walk in the park than a jump off of a cliff. However, if the religious group is asking you to give everything you have to [their interpretation of] God, then that’s quite different.
Quite often if I tell someone that I tend to describe myself as an agnostic or an atheist, that I am not sure if a God exists or if God does exist, I am not sure of God’s “personality”, what he supports and what he condemns, I am asked, “But where do you get your morals from?”
It’s as if that unless one believes that Mohammed heard the word of God in a cave or believes in a virgin birth, well, then let’s just go out and kill people willy-nilly. And then on the other hand I am told that if I don’t believe what I am supposed to believe I will be cast into hell and will burn forever. I am tempted to say, “So you want me to worship a God that engages in the worst kind of blackmail?”
I could never subscribe to the idea that our eternal fate hinges on our beliefs about whether a guy rose from the dead 2,000 years ago.
Sure, sometimes the music at church was very nice and often the sermon was uplifting, quite a contrast with the silliness I often read in the Bible.
Yes. Many times I attended church and most of the people seemed nice. I can attend church. No problem. I can say a prayer. But to really believe what seems to be the core of Christianity or Judaism or Islam, no way Jose.
Perhaps because God is not a boss who watches when we punch in and punch out, but how we do our job?
How we can honor the sabbath is debatable. That we should is not. It’s among the Commandments given to Moses, the most basic tenets of just living.
My grandpa was fined multiple times for opening his shops in violation of Blue Laws. I don’t always stay at home on Sundays, relieving gas stations, restaurants, and grocers of cause to be open. I can’t imagine hospitals, police departments, or militaries ever taking a day off.
But there is a focus and rhythm of life which befits the soul, created with purpose not limited to survival and comforts. Life should be ordered in a way that prioritizes God in ways that are not always convenient. And faith must be shared publicly, as a community.
In that regard, I can respect many Muslims, Hindus, Shintoists, and anyone who sacrifices time and attention regularly for spiritual devotion. If we do not need bells to stop public activities while all are forced into prayer, there are other ways to promote spiritual discipline in public life. Even small traditions matter, like praying before meals.
Poor people, keenly aware of their needs, often place more emphasis on prayer traditions. In widespread affluence, modern Americans have lost some good habits.
Faith can’t come until after you realize that you’ve been pushed off the cliff.
Here in Indiana, the state legislature recently allowed grocery stores to sell alcohol on Sundays. Even though there are lots of churches here in the Indianapolis metropolitan area, lots of people use Sunday as a day for doing yard work, running errands and going to state parks.
But all of that is overwhelmed, in my view, by America’s real religion: Professional football.
When I was in junior high school a classmate of mine asked me, “Why did God create the world in 6 days?” Answer: “So that on the 7th day he could have a beer and watch the football game.”
Is ‘masthead’ the correct term for eighteenth century boat nerds?
No, that’s for newspaper maniacs.