This is not a problem. We've thrown out a lot of bathwater, but we know the baby's still around here somewhere. We haven't lost the Eternal. What we have done is to find a lot in the temporal world that we had thought was in the realm of the Eternal and has turned out not to be after all.

We have no need of 'that hypothesis' because it's not a hypothesis. A hypothesis has to make sense in a paradigm space. There is no temporal way of looking in which the Divine can take its place as a meaningful thought. The Dao that can be spoken of is not the real Dao. All we can say is 'not this, not that', where this and that are temporal concepts.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that a great deal has been written and spoken about the spiritual life. Much of it is confused, for all the reasons we've looked at, but now that we've found a path through that confusion we can see that plenty of useful things have been said and can still be said.

Zen and the Eckhart

One of the standard preoccupations of the medieval scholastics was the problem of how we can say anything about God, which at the very least indicates that they were fully aware that the Divine transcends all of our worldly experience. They knew that we cannot know God, which contrasts very sharply with the claims of many present-day Born Again Christians who insist that they know God personally, and ascribe all sorts of attributes to this person, making him out to be a guy you'd really like to meet. If we're looking for spirituality in our Western tradition, the medieval scholastics do seem to be a much better bet. One who has been made relatively accessible in recent times is Meister Eckhart, a fourteenth-century German Dominican theologian. He wrote profusely, both passionately in the vernacular and precisely in the Latin. He was hauled before the Inquisition for political reasons, and much of his writing has had to be pieced together by painstaking scholarship.

Two of Eckhart's favourite themes are: detachment, and the birth of God in the soul. We touched on detachment before; the idea seems to be that we should try not to get caught up in our feelings. One of Eckhart's images is that of a mountain of lead standing against a small wind. This looks for all the world like a total renunciation of awareness. We are, however, encouraged to be passionate about one thing: the birth of God in the soul. Only this can be allowed to move us. Eckhart's image for this is 'melting', suggesting a total compliance - the opposite of the mountain of lead. There could be no clearer indication that the spiritual life is utterly removed from temporal considerations.

In contrast to the weighty doctrines of the West, Zen Buddhism has a lighter touch. Zen goes for the direct approach: no doctrine, no goal, no rules of behaviour. Certainly life in a Zen monastery is, by all accounts, highly structured, but that's not the point. Obeying the rules is not the way to enlightenment. (Sadly, inevitably there are Zen cults that have missed the point in this way.) Enlightenment looks like a goal, but the message you eventually get the hang of is that the only goal is to see that there is no goal. The immediate emphasis is, inevitably, on emptying the mind.

It seems to take just as long for the message to get through with Zen's attempt at the direct approach as it does over here in the West with all the baggage. Nevertheless it's a great help for us, at this point in history, to be able to look at both approaches. It gives us a 'stereoscopic' view of the Absolute. Indeed, it could be argued that it's the widespread interest in Oriental spirituality, especially Zen with its uncluttered image, which has helped us to see the wood for the trees, or the Way for the signposts, in our own tradition.

Zen has its signposts, to be sure. One of them is, surprise, surprise, detachment. Again we find the image of the heavy immovable object, and the complementary image of transparency, of offering no obstacle or resistance. As before with the geodesic dome, sticking fast to the analogy (perhaps by asking about the ground the heavy object is placed on) is climbing the signpost, not following it.

Detachment

It can be highly misleading to say, as so many writers do, that 'people are so materialistic nowadays', and that 'the hectic pace of modern life' is the root of our problems. The picture conjured up is one of a swarm of well-fed and comfortable people still desperately scrabbling for a bigger slice what life has to offer. Yet we also hear that 'there is a spiritual hunger here in the affluent West which is greater than ever' (and the Churches aren't equal to it, etc., etc.). If our material affluence were our problem, then the ruined Names at Lloyd's would all be sprouting haloes. The fact is, it's not the material comforts that we need to detach from. We're generally not attached to what we have, but to what we want and haven't yet got. Happiness is by no means correlated with wealth. Happiness is sought in what we lack.

What we lack depends to some extent on where we are on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So the process of detachment slides up and down the hierarchy with our hopes and fears. It's what really matters right now that we have to detach from. This might explain why it is said to be easier for poor people to step into the Light. When hope gives way to faith that 'Thy Will be done', the miracle (which is the reverse of Murphy's Law) becomes clear. When hope gives way to despair, of course, it's a different story, which is why we go through all that pain.

When our attachments are more abstract than the problem of the next meal or where we're going to spend the night, we are inclined to kid ourselves that we're on to 'higher things' and, even, closer to God. God is no longer the One who feeds and clothes the lilies, He has become a mathematician, or a rarefied level of consciousness.

Detachment for the busy little scientific temperament, then, would be something like 'giving up the need to understand'. This is not the same as giving up understanding, which is a mistake that is probably at the root of the disparagement of the intellect in many New Age circles. Rationality is as much God's gift as green fingers or a sunny disposition.

Not a molecule out of place

It's time to be more precise about the concept of sin. We are accustomed to seeing detachment and emptiness as a goal to attain, perhaps as precisely the target that hamartia is missing. If instead of looking from poor humble little old me up towards detachment, we imagine ourselves looking back from that sublime state, we might get a better idea of the target.

So here you are, at peace with the universe (it happens to all of us sometimes). There's nothing in the world that you would change; everything's exactly right. It's a feeling we might get when something we wanted has at last arrived - the dream job, being in love, springtime, somewhere congenial to live. All of these things are temporal, and temporary, and no less wonderful for that. This sublime state can equally well come out of the blue, either as a general feeling of contentment or acceptance, or even as yer actual transcendent mystical sense of eternity. However it appears, is has a quality of joy, that there's not a molecule out of place.

Research, such as that carried out by the Alister Hardy Society in Oxford, indicates that between one-third and two-thirds of people have had at least one experience, however fleeting, of transcendence. The same research has discovered enormous diversity in these experiences, and is having terrible trouble classifying them. This suggests that the Light that your next-door neighbour has seen may well be quite different from your own, and therefore that the experiences themselves are not definitive.

The Eternal, as we have seen, is not just in a space that is incompatible with the ones we know, but transcends all our spaces. The encounter with the Divine is something which can't be communicated, and with a little thought we can live with the fact that there may be no such thing as 'the authentic' spiritual experience.

Once in my late teens, I was given a glimpse of eternity. It came out of the blue, while I was doing some chores. In my case, the experience was entirely impersonal. It was like looking at the Universe from the inside - from the inside of molecules, from the inside of events going on, including the vacuum cleaning. There was no 'myself' - I simply didn't exist. The vacuuming was being done through 'my' molecules. There was no judge, just perfection. Imperfection was literally unthinkable.

The experience was so utterly at variance with the description propagated by established Christianity that I actually forgot about it for close on twenty years. During that time, the busy little brain continued on its pilgrimage.

As I said, the experiences themselves are not definitive. Mine very definitely had no Personality about it whatsoever. Others report a person-to-Person interaction, or a sense of a Presence that is benevolent. When an elder of the local Quaker meeting says, quite matter-of-factly, that he compares notes and shares jokes with the Lord all the time, I've no reason not to believe him. For some people, the personal God might be as real a first-hand experience as they have ever had. C.G. Jung was one such, and although his father was a parson Jung knew from an early age that his father could never understand. It's not in a paradigm space that is teachable, like washing up or quantum electrodynamics.

But there is no way that someone's description of a Personal encounter could be just another way of describing what I saw. Spiritual insights are nothing like scientific, or even philosophical, observations. Perspective relativity is as irrelevant as my personality on the inside of Eternity. Some writers have referred to (and mapped out) 'stages' of spiritual development. I would venture to suggest that progress through stages is very much in the temporal world, and involves moral development, awareness and choice. While it is possible to do 'spiritual exercises', such as learning to meditate or practising Taijiquan, this training only comes into its own in retrospect. Where personal growth involves a lot of hard work, spiritual insight seems to catch people, in all walks of life and at all stages of personal maturity, unawares.

Missing the target

But sooner or later the feeling passes, and something that could do with improvement catches the attention: the homeless perhaps, or child abuse, or sick donkeys, and we find ourselves, for all the best reasons, well and truly hooked. This is no less an 'attachment' than the desire for a new car. It matters, and it matters now.

The picture created is that of a slippery slope which starts with attachment, and rapidly slides to not wanting to let go, then fear of letting go, then values and wishing things were otherwise, and before you know it you're stuck in a goopy treadmill, where every problem solved brings a new problem. Sin is as good a word for it as any.

Trying to climb out of this mess using temporal concepts is not going to get us anywhere. The best that personal growth can do is to make the treadmill bearable enough to start to look back up the slope. Rules like celibacy or poverty have to be used with care: in a very real sense they are like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. The way back home, of course, is not to give up what we desire, but to hold the desire itself lighter in the hand, and loosen our grip on our cherished values.

This could be regarded as highly dangerous advice. Your seasoned saint can breeze through life with no regrets nor thought for the morrow, leaving a trail of lucky accidents. The rest of us would leave nothing but chaos in our wake. Abandonment of concern and self-control in the name of detachment obviously isn't on. So the usual argument goes as follows: the desires you have to give up are the selfish ones; your altruistic and 'sensible' values must stay in place at all costs. Hello guilt. Back to the temporal treadmill we go, and this time there's the threat of eternal damnation to boot. Ouch.

We are well used to associating sin with selfishness, probably because of the political problem of keeping us all in order, but our greasy slope didn't seem to mention selfishness. The problem was attachment, which brings us to the wise and sneaky question: what are these precious objects attached to? Why, the self, of course, poor little old me. But before the attachment took hold this self didn't exist. In the sublime state of eternity, even if the experience was describable as Personal, these attachments simply weren't there. The attachment, the values, the wishing things were otherwise, and the self that attaches, values and wishes are a logical consequence of each other. When one appears, so does the other, and when one vanishes, so does the other. Neither of them exists in eternity. All of the mystics agree on that.

Selfishness and altruism are now looking like a mere by-product of this temporal world we have created to carry all of our myriad attachments. In our different ways of looking, all of these things have their relative reality. In eternity, they have no reality at all. As Eckhart and others have pointed out, we are nothing, not just very very small and insignificant, but no-thing, non-existent.

Eckhart declared that all sin arises from concupiscence, which is best described as a longing for what you don't have. Death came into being at the same moment that concupiscence (or evil) was conceived. Saints die, like everyone else; the comment that the wages of sin is death is not a promise of bodily immortality to those who repent. A non-existent thing can't die. But when consciousness creates a paradigm, the One becomes many (the myriad creatures, as the Dao De Jing puts it), the many interact according to the paradigm, and hey presto, among other things, you've got life and death.

The problem is not putting yourself and your personal interests before those of others. The problem is having a sense of self at all. In other words, it's not what you do with it; it's what you've got.

Who told you you were naked? Consciousness is sin.

Consciousness

The C word has been used in an arm-waving but I think reasonably harmless way throughout the discussion so far. We all know what consciousness is - until, that is, some bright spark skewers us with a demand for a definition of it. We've all got a vague idea that consciousness has something to do with awareness and understanding; we also associate it with free will, with making our own deliberate choices. It is our highest achievement; it is what sets us apart from the apes. Yet because of consciousness, an angel with a flaming sword stands between us and enlightenment.

The scientific temperament is a sucker for elegance, and the story of the Fall resonates irresistibly with the observation that what the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over. The Big Misunderstanding is not about whether the story is true, but within the story itself. We were kicked out of Eden when we found out that things could be otherwise. The corollary, as many of the faithful would have it, is that the appropriate response is to try to reverse the process and become as a little child, to return to Eden. This is precisely what the mystics seemed to be saying. The original sin was to find ourselves, now we must let go of ourselves to find bliss. If that was all there was to the story, then the busy little brain would probably have woven a way of thinking around that. It is, after all, satisfying enough - it fits all the observations we've made so far. The conscious self is an illusion; we aren't 'nothing but', we're faithful reflections of our surroundings in whatever way we choose to see them. Within the illusion, we have all the freedom we wish for, and wisdom becomes a happy, rather than unhappy, choice of wishes.

There is, however, a part of the story that doesn't seem to find its way into many sermons. The legend goes that God was angry when the humans ate from the tree of knowledge, and kicked us out in case we were to be so bold as to eat from the other forbidden tree, the tree of life, or immortality. The flaming sword wasn't put there to enforce the punishment; it was put there, so the story goes, to stop us becoming like God Himself. The garden had the two trees, prominently placed. Yet it was logically impossible for us to stay in the garden once we became conscious. Why did the serpent lead Eve to the tree of knowledge and not the other one?

This brings us to a startlingly original hypothesis put forward by Julian Jaynes (1976). Jaynes suggested that consciousness arose much later in our evolution than we had previously assumed; it came after the advent of written language, in particular after the time of the Iliad. The Iliad is populated with heroes and kings who each had their own god who was very specific about what he wanted the person to do; the people obeyed their gods, and when they came unstuck had to wait around for further instructions. The hypothesis is that these inner instructions were hallucinated from within the brain - in particular, from the right hemisphere. Jaynes calls this configuration the 'bicameral mind'; there's the bit that decides what to do and the bit that obeys without thinking, without interpretation, like an automaton. In the bicameral mind there is no consciousness. The process of the evolution of consciousness began when this state of blissful unawareness started to break down. Habit and predictability can make and sustain a well-organised civilisation, but a combination of developing travel and trade between peoples on the one hand, and natural catastrophe on the other, stretched the bicameral processing beyond its capacity to cope. The gods were letting the people down as they encountered the unknown. Religion began to appear, as people looked to charismatic individuals who were still getting their bicameral messages, but at the same time some individuals were beginning to get a glimpse of knowledge of good and evil.

The foregoing is a long and scholarly work put into a (perhaps somewhat idiosyncratic) nutshell, and has necessarily omitted all the well-researched arguments for the hypothesis. Judging by the cover notes, different reviewers have come away with quite different impressions of the idea. Nevertheless, whether we decide to take Jaynes' paradigm space on board or not (and I do feel strongly inclined towards it), it does provide an interesting perspective on the origin of the idea of a personal God who takes an interest in our everyday triumphs and woes. It points up a very deep unquestioned assumption contained in our predicament: that the myriad wise sages who pepper our spiritual writings really do know the Ultimate Reality. It may be that at least some of them could be no more than throwbacks to the bicameral hallucinations. The flaming sword is superfluous: once conscious, we wouldn't want to revert to Eden.

So our consciousness says things like: if you want to develop empathy with someone, try to remember to put yourself in their shoes; if you want to improve your social skills, don't talk so much about yourself; if you want to find yourself, develop body awareness, and so on. God's tools in our hands. But this is all in the realm of what we have called personal development, which has nothing to do with the Eternal to which the forward-looking component of the spiritual traditions aspires. The big, strong King of Kings is the wrong God. It is what happens when temporal concepts are taken to extremes.

Conclusion

Time to take stock. Now we know a lot more than we did in the throes of the original bafflement.

First of all, the spiritual quest is not going to provide us with a set of rules or even guidelines about the right thing to do next. Spirituality is outside time, and outside the kind of consciousness which wants everything to be made explicit and sorted out. That longing for certainty, for clear pointers that will ensure that we never make any mistakes, is missing that target entirely.

The target that our consciousness is aiming for, however, is no less noble. Right and wrong may be on a level beneath the spiritual life, but it is central to our temporal existence because it is the touchstone for our choices among possibilities. Our time, as so many writers agree, is characterised by the breakdown of moral authority, which carries with it the dawning understanding in an increasing number of individuals, of our own personal responsibility for our choices.

The conscious choices which are most likely to bring about the preferred outcome are the ones which are the best informed. Knowledge is competence. And yet, as everyone prone to the scientific temperament knows, the more you think about a dilemma, the more the two sides balance. When a decision is really important, we have to rely on something else, and the most promising place to look is in the wisdom of the body, which has been shaped by its whole life so far.

This is the development of our everyday consciousness, which has been prompted by the breakdown of moral authority in the same kind of way that (in Jaynes' scenario) the bicameral mind gave way to the development of moral authority. Instead of looking to others to tell us what to do, we now look to others to teach us, formally or informally, how to look within for ourselves.

But that whole project, according to the spiritual traditions, is the quintessence of sin. The deliberate development of your own consciousness, talents and contributions is precisely a fostering of your very own way of being separate from the Eternal.

Consciousness is the very essence of sin because it depends on values. The process of developing consciousness therefore shows us, in more and more detail, what the Divine is not. As soon as something is dreamt of in your philosophy, it is not Divine. By a continuing process of elimination, we put away childish things, like the idea that the Divine Will has anything to do with how hard you beg it for good weather at the church fundraising do. Like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, it has vanished. We are conscious of the idea of design, and therefore God is not a Designer. We are conscious of justice and therefore God is not just. We are conscious of mathematics (eternal truth if ever there was one) and therefore God is not a mathematician. We are conscious of our loved ones and therefore Divine Love, whatever it is, is something else. This is why our consciousness can't grasp it, not because it is so big, so strong and so mighty. We can't grasp it because whatever we think of is not It. It is in this sense that the Divine is quintessentially other.

The final question is: has all our hard-won personal development inadvertently landed us on to the spiritual path willy-nilly? It rather looks as though it might have done. In the pursuit of choice, awareness and our individual identity we've found that the ego recedes in importance (emptiness), the things that used to matter so much are dissolving into new ways of looking (detachment), and the connection to the seamless web of reality is becoming by degrees more tangible (Oneness). But the Divine we were seeking has vanished completely.

We are free to grasp the nettle and take our noble sin, our conscious awareness, with all its morality, its judgment, its values and preferences, as far as it will go. It is the relentless pursuit of sin - of making our own choices and claiming our own freedoms and honouring our own responsibilities, combined with our increasing awareness of the here and now through the wisdom of the body, which clears the obstacles to the Divine within us, about which, they all agree, nothing can be said.

back to zendao home page