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Deep intuitions can flourish only when there is enough space granted by not knowing, in the recognition that conventional ‘wisdom’ does not apply. What we take to be ob-vious may prove an ob-stacle; it may ob-trude on, ob-fuscate, ob-struct, ob-scure, and ultimately ob-literate the truth.
This is not just true of poetry: ‘If the study of science teaches one anything’, writes Polkinghorne, ‘it is not to take everyday thought as the measure of all that is.’
Language is a tool that was evolved for everyday use. In philosophical thinking of all kinds, according to Whitehead, we wrestle with ‘the difficulty of making language express anything beyond the familiarities of daily life … the struggle of novel thought with the obtuseness of language’: one of the problems of philosophy, according to him, was the ‘uncritical trust in the adequacy of language’, for ‘in philosophy linguistic discussion is a tool’ – it is a useful servant – ‘but should never be a master’.
In the Eastern tradition, then, there are many such statements of the impossibility of capturing the source of all things in language.
To repeat, my point is not that I can explain existence: I can’t. I merely question the claim that there is nothing here to explain.
Laws cannot cause anything to happen. They are merely a description of an observed regularity in phenomena.
‘At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.’
What we need, in fact, is a word unlike any other, not defined in terms of anything else: a sort of un-word. This is no doubt why in every great tradition of thought – and perhaps beyond that, in every language of every people – there is such an un-word. It holds the place for a power that underwrites the existence of everything – the ground of Being; but, as I shall suggest, it holds a place for more than that, otherwise some such phrase as ‘ground of Being’ would itself be enough. To Heraclitus it was the logos; to Lao Tzu the tao; to Confucius lǐ; in Hinduism Brahman, and to the Vedic
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God is above all not a thing alongside other things – even one equipped with ultra-special powers.
Science helps inform philosophy and philosophy helps ground science.
It is perfectly true that invoking God does not explain anything. But, importantly, that is not its purpose. The recognition of God is not an answer to a question: it is to fully understand the question itself.
There is nothing shameful in not knowing: the human mind is inevitably characterised by its ignorance more than by its limited understanding. But the deeper ignorance is when we choose to put out of mind what it is we do not know, and pretend to know what we never can.
I believe that, in the necessary process of achieving a fit between our understanding and what there is to be known, our present materialist culture has disregarded Schelling’s advice, and contracted the scope of what we allow to exist to our limited understanding, rather than enlarging our understanding to meet the scope of what exists.
The primary response, therefore, is not intellectual. It is awe and wonder – not mere curiosity, which motivates us to find out more information, more knowledge (valuable as that is), but wonder at the immensity of what we must recognise we can never know. Yet that very wonder is what increasingly we lack.
Put another way, the left hemisphere as servant has provided a vital role: drawing attention to the limits of its service.
As far as humanity is concerned, the summit of knowing is knowing that you do not know. Such was the expressed conclusion of, to name only a few, the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, St Paul, Montaigne and the Indian saint, Swami Ramdas. Wisdom is so far from being knowledge in the usual sense, of knowing many ‘things’, that one of the only pieces of advice offered by wisdom traditions is to value not-knowing.
By this I understand that true knowing, understanding, is not a matter of accumulating facts, but a form of perception in which one at last sees into the depth of things as it were ‘at once’, and recognises them for what they are, no longer overlaid by our projections
‘To know truth, one must get rid of knowledge’, said Lao Tzu: ‘nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness, from which men shrink.’
And it is only through the encounter that we can know – not through argument, or any amount of thinking in the abstract.
‘Seek not to understand so that you may believe’, wrote St Augustine, ‘but to believe so that you may understand.’62
As Wendell Berry writes, ‘the incompleteness of a system is rarely if ever perceptible to those who made it or to those who benefit from it’.63 The left hemisphere is effectively a closed system, dealing with the comfortably known and familiar, in which everything refers internally. Adopting this mindset makes it hard to ‘see’ what is meant by the divine.
typically, according to computer scientist Paul Graham, programmers are ‘satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs.’
In other words the darkness is not merely negative, but the active opening of a field of potential, what I have called active receptivity: the mode of the right hemisphere’s attention.
Ideas, the native currency of the left hemisphere, can be discussed at arm’s length; direct awareness, the native currency of the right, has no arm’s length about it: it is immediate in experience.
From every side I saw how clearly the edifice of Western civilisation – its literature, its poetry, its architecture, its painting, its music – at all times and in all ages was to a large extent an expression of a spiritual impulse.78 And one we have largely lost.
Indeed erotic love may be the closest that many of us in our secular age get to experiencing the sense of something sacred.
To compare the spiritual and the erotic is not to denigrate the soul, but to recognise what erotic love can be: while clearly distinct phenomena, they have common facets, not least of which being their capacity to induce awe, to transform one’s vision of the world, and to forge a sense of connexion to something much greater beyond both space and time.
In this period, life in the ‘dimension of depth’ is replaced by life in the horizontal dimension. The driving forces of the industrial society of which we are a part go ahead horizontally and not vertically … He transforms everything he encounters into a tool: and in doing so he himself becomes a tool.
The reason that the religious symbols became lost is not primarily scientific criticism, but it is a complete misunderstanding of their meaning … The first step toward the non-religion of the Western world was made by religion itself. When it defended its great symbols, not as symbols, but as literal stories, it had already lost the battle
One of the most profound psychological descriptions of the general human predicament becomes an absurdity on the horizontal plane
‘The meaning is not in the words, but it responds to the inquiring impulse’.
What there is to be known is reciprocally bound up with the way that we attempt to know it, something science generally glosses over. The way we choose to attempt to know anything has moral implications, a point I have repeatedly emphasised. The myths of religions convey truths that are absent from everyday thought and language, and speak directly to us at the deepest level of our understanding of life itself.
In fact one of the reasons for having religion is constantly to remind us of a broader context; a moral order; a network of obligations to other humans, to the earth, and to the Other that lies beyond.
A religion forms the bridge between worlds, which is the purpose of metaphor – and the purpose of ritual, which is metaphor embodied.
Trust depends on shared beliefs; religion is the manifestation of that trust, and the embedding of it into the fabric of daily life.
God is not a force in physics that we have not yet discovered.
Religion offers deep, imaginative archetypal truths about the human condition that cannot easily be expressed in any other way, never mind in the sort of prose you might expect in a science text book.
Science is – at least purports to be – purely a matter of cognition. Religion is about the whole business of human being, human existence.
There are, of course, many religions. But one of the striking things about those religions with their different placeholder ‘un-words’ for the divine – logos, lǐ, tao, ṛta and so on – is that none of these ‘un-words’ suggests a thing, but always a process: a dynamic source of energy, often imaged as fire or water – or, at another level, as love and life. Though ṛta is the ultimate foundation of everything, ‘this is not to be understood in a static sense … It is the expression of the primordial dynamism that is inherent in everything.’92 Like lǐ, like logos, and like the tao, it is creative
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We saw, in previous chapters, that time as experienced cannot be represented and still be time; that space cannot be represented and still be space; that flow and motion cannot be represented and still be motion and flow. These elements are not further clarified by language, but rather become something else in its clutches – a derogation of what can be known only through direct experience.
The fact that spiritual traditions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes, Bohr said, ‘means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer.
The point is, the difficulty lies not in finding the right words: the difficulty lies in there being no right words, and so when we use words carefully we must always be both saying and un-saying.
‘Thinking they know things when they know only words, they will not know their ignorance and will never wonder.’
‘To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen, and having some likeness to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike.’
Within religion the left hemisphere helps us supplement ritual with theology.
Halakhah, by necessity, treats with the laws in the abstract, regardless of the totality of the person. It is aggadah that keeps on reminding that the purpose of performance is to transform the performer, that the purpose of observance is to train us in achieving spiritual ends
Aggadah maintains that he who saves one human life is as if he had saved all mankind. In the eyes of him whose first category is the category of quantity, one man is less than two men, but in the eyes of God one life is worth as much as all of life.
The animacy of the lifeworld, in short, is not the result of an infusion of spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologically prior to their differentiation.
Panentheism sees everything as sacred, not just for our use.
The intended meaning is that the logos, the universal origin, ground or reason, became embodied.
