Thursday, October 30, 2008

the problem of holiness

The problem highlighted in my first "Irreligious Religiosity" post produced one overriding response: if everything is holy... what isn't holy, and does the word "holy" even mean anything?

I don't have time right now to go into this conundrum in detail, but a large part of the problem is our imprisonment in the world of language and concepts. An attempt at discursively delineating my religious position is bound to end in failure, but I take comfort in the fact that I'm not the first or only person to be "mired" (I don't really think I'm mired, but it may seem that way from a ruthlessly logical perspective) in the paradoxes produced by cleaving to a nondualistic position.* Consider the company I keep:

1. What, in Taoism, is not Tao? Does "Tao" mean anything when everything is Tao?

2. In pantheism: what isn't God? Does "God" mean anything when everything is God?

3. If, in Mahayana Buddhism, the conviction is that everyone (and, according to some masters, everything) is enlightened, what's there to strive for? Does "enlightenment" mean anything when everyone and everything is "already there"? (I see hints at an answer in places like the Heart Sutra.)

4. From a theological voluntarist perspective: if everything is the will of God, do we categorize even those things that horrify us as a function of God's will? What's the significance of doing anything, when it's all equally God's will? Philosophically speaking, how do we justify divvying up divine and human responsibility for this or that tragedy? Here we see how this problem has repercussions in theodicy.

I'm not sure that any of these riddles is soluble in a logical manner. As much as I prize logical thinking, I think we are, as some half-remembered public television science program once put it, feeling beings that happen to think. We approach reality primarily through emotional experience; logic, manifesting itself in greater and lesser degrees, is what gives that experience a specific, explicit structure.** Because logic requires premises as starting points, even logical discussion begins with something like a leap of faith. How we come to embrace the fundamental premises-- the basic convictions-- that orient our lives is most likely not a logical process, if it can be described as a process at all.

More on this later, I hope. And once I have more time, I'll be writing Part 2 of "Irreligious Religiosity."





*A long time ago, a reader questioned whether the term "nondualistic position" is even coherent. I sympathize, and have no good answer to that. Such are the pitfalls of language. We're edging ever closer to that dreaded meeting with Jacques Derrida, but when I do finally drag the old boy out of his casket, I plan on using him to my own ends.

**It's likely that the general structure of experience is hard-wired into our consciousness; the ways in which human beings approach reality are shaped and constrained by human nature, starting with the nature of the five senses and the stimuli they convey (or generate!). Contra certain schools of postmodernist thought, we aren't natureless tabula rasas immune to description by certain "totalizing metanarratives," such as the one being constructed by neuroscience. In Hindu terms, there is indeed a "dharma of being human." That dharma might not be something that can be written up in a single tech manual, but it's there. To borrow from St. Paul, this dharma is that in which we live and move and have our being.


_

1 comment:

ClearlyEnlight, said...

Within this world duality exists. Within the spirit world in this dimension there are only two sides—the light and the darkness, which battle against each other.

Within the world of Pure Consciousness there is no duality, only the absolute totality of reality of the Divine.

As humans, the extreme few have been able to enter the state of pure consciousness and cope living as a human.

Pure consciousness is the context of holiness. The majority of humans living at a lower level of consciousness cannot figure it out, thus, we observe many forms of duality.