Possibilities are the daughters of uncertainty - we are aware that there are things we don't know only when, for whatever reason, we want to know, and when we want to know, we look at the possibilities first. From those, we choose or discover the answer to the problem.

Where possibilities are the daughters of uncertainty, values are the daughters of possibilities. Our choices, driven by our hopes and fears, needs and preferences, depend on the possibilities open to us at a particular time.

So it's precisely because we are limited by a location in time that it makes any sense to have a reason for doing anything. Freedom, values and creativity depend on an open future. They also depend on some element of predictability. Technique and control are prerequisites for competence and mastery of any creative pursuit. They would be quite impossible if the substances and forms we work with didn't do pretty much what we expect them to do. Cause and effect make possibilities manageable. If we don't understand how something works, we can usually find someone who does. We don't have a problem with the idea that there are 'laws of physics' which determine the direction a cup will go if you drop it. Left to itself, the world of animals, vegetables and minerals follows its own nature and that's fine. Only a deep confusion or a sentimental fantasy would call it right or wrong. We judge right from wrong and apportion blame or credit when we believe something could have been otherwise, and the only meaningful way that anything could have been otherwise is if someone had made a different choice.

Values, then, can only make sense in a world where autonomous beings have free choice. This is the world of praise and blame, responsibility and irresponsibility, generosity, heroism, kindness, cruelty, depression and moral fibre. It is the world of the judiciary and insurance claims, of success and failure, of talents and bugbears and enthusiasms and disappointment.

Values, creativity and freedom are in what we might call the higher realms of our experience. Yet they only make sense in the temporal world. For the Absolute there are no possibilities, there is only What Is, which is perfect. Development of personal autonomy, of increased freedom of choice - as opposed to conditioned responses - is a temporal goal. Awareness of the context and likely consequences of our actions is also very much a temporal matter. It depends on possibilities, and on some possibilities being better than others in some particular way.

This is the best clue yet to the basic confusion between spirituality and morality. When Ultimate Reality was split into Good and Evil (God and the Devil, Truth and the Lie, the Light and the Darkness), it seemed as though values were somehow eternal, yet a quick glance at the East shows us the Yin-Yang circle which also symbolises the first division of the Oneness but carries no moral connotations at all. Good and evil, black and white, what's the difference? The main difference, it seems, is in the red herrings that are thrown up.

Suffering and Morality

A world without suffering is an incoherent idea. One utopian vision after another starts with a 'what if' of this kind and ends with a 'no thanks!'. Great for a holiday, but you wouldn't want to live there.

In the temporal world, reality is well illustrated by walking into a wall. While the mystics are telling us that we live in a world of illusions, I am saying Ouch in no uncertain terms. As the humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow famously pointed out, if the body is doing all right we turn our attention to such matters as job satisfaction and emotional fulfilment. Maslow called it the 'hierarchy of needs'. It's not clear at this point in the discussion whether it makes any sense to speak of 'spiritual needs', but our emotional and intellectual hopes and fears belong very firmly in the temporal world.

And it's in the temporal world that we develop our attempts at remedies. There are two basic strategies to alleviate suffering: the first is to organise our surroundings to make our world fit our needs, and the other is to work on reducing the needs themselves. One is external, the other internal, but both are temporal.

To humanists and many of the rest of us this is quite obvious, but there is still an astonishing number of people who feel that it is only a belief in God that stops us misbehaving. Morality does not come down as commandments from on high. When it is presented as though it does, we only take the rules on board if we happen to agree that they make sense. Morality is a practical solution to a practical problem, developed by experience and communicated and negotiated all the time in countless subtle ways as we go about our lives.

Morality is learned, and the community enshrines the current version in written or unwritten rules. These rules vary between cultures and subcultures and feedback very quickly tells you whether you've got it right or wrong. Absolute it is not. Things find their own level, according to the circumstances. On the whole, we learn the limits that different people will tolerate, and try to adjust our behaviour. This is not to deny other factors, such as whether we want revenge for something, or to ask a favour, or to express admiration, or whatever. The point is, getting on with people and coping with the world on a day-to-day basis are not spiritual, or even philosophical, issues. They are to do with possibilities.

The much-bemoaned 'decline in moral standards' and 'breakdown of family values' is often linked to the decline in the influence of organised religion. Two points come to mind: first, the 'young people nowadays...going to the dogs' whinge has been with us for millennia, but the other is that there seems to be a genuine new pattern emerging in our 'postmodern' time as the concept of individual personal responsibility and informed choices begins to replace the virtue of obedience to higher authority.

It may well be true that the decline in Church influence is a big factor in the emergence of some new patterns of bizarre behaviour. Privileged adults are throwing tantrums, or deliberately causing physical or mental harm to themselves and others. Often their victims are those they 'love' the most. The soaring divorce figures are a case in point. It could be argued that the external discipline of God's Own Morality would have prevented many of these tragedies.

It is, however, just as coherent to see the thirtysomething tantrum in the supermarket as part of the process of growing to maturity. Under a strictly imposed morality, the opportunity to develop one's unique potential is the privilege of only a very few, the ones who are destined for the higher echelons. The rest are encouraged to obey authority, perhaps to a large extent for the sake of keeping the community manageable. Now that the moral authority is being taken on board by thee and me as our own business, that manageability is certainly under strain. We are, after all, bound to make mistakes - that's how we learn our best lessons.

We all have our own limits to what we can cope with. Personal growth is the process of learning to cope better, and the process of learning can be very painful. Where people used to have only the priest to turn to, now in increasing numbers we seek counselling. This is not because counselling has replaced the priest's function; it is because the priest's spiritual function never did address this kind of problem. If the priests were any good at comforting people in trouble, it was because of their temporal communication skills.

Suffering and its remedies, then, are well and truly in the temporal world. The idea of Divine Purpose is, ipso facto, beyond our ken, so our values and morality have been brought in to replace it.

Sin and a purpose in life

The word hamartia, used in the Greek Old Testament and translated as 'sin', means nothing more sinister than 'missing the target'. In the same vein, metanoia, translated as 'repentance', just means 'change of mind'. A heavy-handedness, which is not in evidence in those-who-know, has become the hallmark of most if not all the established religions. One result of this is that we are not the slightest bit surprised when we hear of priests and nuns abusing children and frightening them into decades of silence - it's part of the whole tarnished image we have of the Church. The revulsion many of us have felt at the grovelling stance of 'repentance' is enough to drive us away from the whole caboodle for a very long time. You don't teach children humility by humiliating them.

It's nothing new that the development of official religion is driven by such earthly mechanisms as fear and personal power. The deep problem is that, because of the nature of the institution of any organised religion, it is being called upon to serve two completely different, and mutually incompatible, functions. On the one hand, religion is the repository of spiritual understanding, and sin is a concept that belongs in the province of that understanding. On the other hand, ministers of religion are expected to pronounce on what is right and what is wrong, which is in the province of personal growth. The confusion is immense. We are told that God is Love. We think of love as a feeling, a value, something Good. It doesn't take much to make the step from this to the idea that the Absolute has an opinion about what I am doing with my life. But the Absolute logically cannot have opinions. Whatever sin is, it has nothing to do with commandments and right and wrong. A clue to this is the legend of the Fall, where the first sin was to discover the difference between right and wrong. We can pick up this clue later, but meanwhile it is essential to understand that sin is neither right nor wrong, but a concept which (somehow) stands above and beyond our judgements.

A purpose in life based on deep personal values is a noble thing, capable of the highest quality of altruism and heroism. The deliberate project of self-development is arguably of a higher moral standard than the emotional contortions of trying to stick to a received code of conduct with a ritualised remedy for mistakes. For most people who are bothered about this kind of thing, the goal is to be a better person, not just a richer or more comfortable one. Love and respect are high on the agenda. This is quite unproblematic, and few would disagree with it. Those who do disagree tend to roll along the lines of: 'Human beings are naturally lazy and selfish, so without God their deepest aim can't possibly be altruistic'. Be that as it may, lazy and selfish people don't often last long on self-development courses and if they do, the experience is very painful and the outcome sadder and wiser. The yoke is difficult and the burden massive, but the outcome is to be more conscious in one's interaction with others and the world, and less prone to self-deception and wishful thinking.

In summary, the only concept we can possibly have of a Purpose comes from our human experience of suffering and wishing things were otherwise. The Eternal ineffable Plan does not connect with our values, however obvious or universal those values might seem to us. Our purpose in life is here in the sweaty, earthy, temporal world. It depends on our wishing things were otherwise.

Interconnectedness of values

Kipling advised us to look upon the two impostors, triumph and disaster, both the same. The implication - which is so hard to get the hang of - is that they are both unreal, or as the usual terminology has it, 'illusions'. Those-who-know can tell us this till they're blue in the face, but we still feel, and the feeling, if not the object, is real enough.

There is the trivial sense in which opposites depend on each other: beauty would not exist if there were no ugliness, for instance, and the pair of opposites gives rise to a dimension of experience. Since opposites exist only in the temporal world, though, there is also a sense in which these dimensions all relate to one another. A nuclear blast is beautiful. Someone can't stand the smell of hyacinths because of an association with funerals; someone else is allergic to churches; all kinds of everything remind me of you. Yes, values are impostors if we imagine they pretend to be absolute. We find ourselves, not for the first time and not for the last, in a seamless web of relativity that provides no support but at the same time removes the need for support. In the temporal world we don't need absolutes; we can discover the joys of free-fall.

It's misleading, then, to say that values need to be absolute to be real. In the temporal world they are real because they are relative to the immediate situation, including the individual's own pain and preference. Logic has told us that the Eternal has no opposites, so whatever Divine Love is, it's not a positive judgement. Bliss is not very very happy any more than infinite is very very long. It is true that Jesus of Nazareth gave us a neat compression of the Ten Commandments, and the neater the compression the more Absolute it might seem, but however accurately One puts One's finger on The Point it's still received as temporal advice. Well, say the study groups, it means we have to love ourselves. Elsewhere The Man tells us that unless we hate our parents we're on the outside. Divine Love, it is becoming clear, has nothing to do with the way we feel.

Next Section

0: Introduction
1: Is anything wrong?
2: Values and possibilities (Top of this page)
3: Physical Worlds
4: Earthly Paradigms
5: Mind, Body and Brain
6: Transcendence and Consciousness

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