Copyright 2012, Randy Strauss, All Rights Reserved.
July 18, 2012
Michael Krasney,
I thoroughly enjoyed your book Spiritual Envy. It was interesting to hear so candidly about your thoughts and experiences wrestling with this issue. At the same time, I have some different answers you might want to explore (if you're willing to give up the envy...)
Below I've written about three fundamental logic mistakes you make in the book, then I'll tell you about myself and "spiritual atheism."
I'm an atheist about God but about many mysteries I'm an agnostic. I doubt there's reincarnation, but if some of the accounts are true, there might be something not completely unlike it. There might be something (well, not really a "thing") to consciousness, something to also explain the hundred-monkeys phenomenon, but it needn't posit something like "soul" or "God" or anything person-like, or mind-like.
The idea of multiple dimensions, whether there are multiple "separate" universes in the multiverse, or overlapping ones, presents a rich tapestry of patterns to explore that could explain a lot of coincidences without requiring any magic.
We're stuck in our ways of thinking. Babies recognize faces almost at birth. It's deep in our wiring. We created gods of the Sun and the weather. Anything that has any similarity to humans we anthropomorphize. We see faces in trees and relate to ships as "she", or even the ocean itself and "mother earth."
I once heard a software user interface expert talk about software. A program must have a consistent "voice". If some alerts are commands and others are requests and others are conversational, users don't like it- they can't trust it. It must have a consistent personality. Why?
We relate to people. And if we're relating to something that disappoints us, it's the same disappointment we have when someone lets us down or betrays us. It's in our wiring. We look for people everywhere. In trees, in the wind, in animals.
It should be no surprise that we've anthropomorphized the universe. We look for a person to relate to in the sky. Of course we're disappointed when it doesn't act like a person! Many people are unable to see the desires of their own wiring. If "God" doesn't act like a person, instead of thinking, "maybe there's no God", they rely on the cop-out, "God acts in mysterious ways."
You think you envy people with faith. Many who believe in Jesus also feel empty at times.
That feeling of emptiness is perhaps "lack of connection." Does it ever go away? Probably it does, during a date, or during a party, or a hike, or during sex. Maybe it's not really a profound feeling. Maybe it's mundane but accidentally got hooked up with profound thoughts.
At one point you said about your children, "I prayed they would be born healthy."
We're all wired to be social. When we don't know who to reach out to, we reach out anyway. Why reach out if there's no one there? So we conclude there's someone there. Even if in many ways we don't believe in god, we have these tendencies, in thought and action to relate to others.
Consider that you believe in God, and you don't. Or rather, your mind believes at times and at times it doesn't. Our brain is usually (always, mostly?) arguing with itself. There are different parts of the brain, different circuits that handle different things. Some of those believe more or relate more. Some of those don't.
Most of us believe a myth that we're "a person"- somehow consistent. It's a myth. Usually our unconscious mind protects us from the most debilitating self-argumentation by filtering out the quieter voices. But they're still there. You're not who you think you are. There's much more to your brain than your brain is capable of understanding.
You wrote, that spiritual people or people will faith can "resign themselves to death with the comforting notion that everything happens for a reason."
Anyone can go comfortably to death by letting go of life. It has nothing to do with what comes next. We cling to life for negative reasons, like:
This points to beliefs- belief that I am needed, or should be needed, or belief that without me, life won't work for others, or a belief that the young shouldn't die or that one should be ready for death. Such a person might be an atheist, but they're also a believer.
Many people are afraid of "where they'll go" or what they'll experience in death. Again, these are more beliefs. Atheists believe in no God, but it's the attachments before death that cause them to fear.
Similarly, it's not your uncertainty about God that plagues you. You don't want certainty about God, you want certainty about being loved after death, being cared for after death, not being alone or tormented after death.
Some people are afraid of emptiness, and meaninglessness, as if these are sad or lonely. They're not- those are added meanings. Real meaninglessness is just meaninglessness. Whatever you think it means, it's not that. The same with emptiness. If you fill it with questions and doubts, you're dealing with murkiness, not emptiness.
It's difficult to get true meaninglessness. The best way to understand it is to keep looking at what you think it means, and realizing it's not that. What does it mean for life to be meaningless? Nothing more than that. Nothing else.
Look at your life- it's full of meaning. There's intellectual curiosity. There's seeking. There's connecting with people and contributing, expanding people's minds and even giving them wondrous new thoughts and "Aha!" moments. You help enrich peoples lives and even help keep their brains healthy, both with your interviews as well as provoking them to read and learn other things. Your life is full of meaning.
But none of these things are there without you. And none of them are in life. None of these things actually exist in our physical world of things, objects, mass, energy, motion and forces, but they exist for you and me. Perhaps life is empty and meaningless, yet we keep creating meaning. The meaning we create doesn't exist in the physical world, but it exists in our mental worlds. For us, they exist when we create them, as we act, and as we appreciate and remember.
Most of our lives is imaginary. Home, security, love, money, possessions, family, peace, war, all of these are conceptual. None of them exist. We confuse these with actions or people or things. A house is physical, but a home is whatever we call "home". One house can't become another, but what we call "home" can change quickly. A dollar bill is a worthless piece of paper at home. But go to a store and it is suddenly, almost magically, worth whatever we can trade it for. Love is fleeting unless we keep creating it. Love never dies or is lost, but if two people stop creating it, it's no longer in a marriage. And, it can be recreated in a moment. This is all due to our wonderful way of confusing things, making the unreal seem to be real for us.
If life means something, then living it for a different reason is swimming upstream. Most people swim upstream a lot. Life is hard. They fail. They're not rich enough. People don't respect or love or understand them enough. They don't get enough sex. Politics is a big fight with stupid people. None of that's real, and yet people live like it's true. We swim upstream a lot.
If life means something, then living without knowing it is similar- doing the wrong thing, swimming upstream. So if we know what life means and we're swimming upstream, we doubt ourselves. Either we're living wrong or we're mistaken about what life means. It's hopeless.
If life means nothing, than living it for any reason is also swimming upstream. Unless you accept the reason as created. One of the purposes of my life is to live as an example for others. Why? Because I say so. Done.
Who says that you need love and purpose? You do. Then you experience that you're missing it. It's simpler than "the secret" and involves no magic, not even coincidence. Neuroscience is revealing that more and more of our reality is reflected in our language, and changing our language changes and shapes our reality. There's no language, except in the moment of our thinking, speaking and listening. We create it moment by moment. We create, not reality, but our reality, our world of meanings.
We don't perceive the world. Our nerves fire in response to a combination of the world and our interpretation of it, how it occurs to us. We have a model, in our heads, of ourselves and the world, and we forget that it's just a model, and that most of it we made up. The world is at least subtly different from our model, and sometimes crucially different, and sometimes wholly different, like when we think "there is hope", or love, or success, or wealth.
People of faith are sure because they feel sure. You're the same way. You doubt not because you think you doubt, but because you feel you doubt. There are myriad assumptions you make about your world, and myriad leaps you make with your "logic". You make them because you feel they're right.
Most people never tease apart reality from the myriad things we add to it. Most people aren't conscious about all the meanings they add to life, and all the mistakes they add to their logic. Teasing this apart can't be done alone. You can't figure it out by yourself because you're thinking inside your contexts. You need a master, or a course. Fortunately, there are many. But they're not analytical. It's a skill. You need practice and coaching.
At the end, when you see that life is empty and meaningless, it's quite wondrous. This is where the existentialists failed. They thought it meant something that life was empty and meaningless. It doesn't. That life is empty and meaningless doesn't mean life is wondrous. Mostly we stop at some meaning and don't ever get to true meaninglessness. Go further. Life just happens to be wondrous.
Here, I'm using "spiritual" not meaning "of the spirit", which I don't believe in, but "with spirituality", with the same kind of bliss and reverie which we mostly associate with those who seem to have deep spiritual connection and belief.
I'm a computer scientist, a mathematician and a problem solver. I'm 55, twice a graduate of Stanford, enlighted by Siddha Yoga, and also a graduate of many Landmark Education courses. Plus I've done a few other courses, meditations and life altering things, like walking on hot coals. (Have you taken Tony Robbins' 6-hour evening, The Fire Walk Experience? Anyone can walk on hot coals, yet so far there has been no rigorous scientific explaination of how it's possible. In fact, when I did it, I lowered my consciousness for a moment, got burned, raised it again and had no other injuries...)
Like you, I'm a Jew. My dad is an atheist and my mom an agnostic. I grew up hearing nothing substantive about God until 8th grade and knowing almost nothing of religion until my 3rd year of college. I married a reform-Jewish woman. We are still affiliated with the reform synagogue where our 2 boys were bar-mitzvah'd.
I'm an atheist. Though there was plenty of "God" in Siddha Yoga, I never ascribed to it. It seemed beside the point. My Siddha Yoga path was to read their correspondence course for 4 years. It was given by D R Butler, who left Siddha Yoga and now writes: Truth Of The Present Moment (He'd be a good one to interview, though I haven't read much of his blogs, or the course he now gives.)
In the course, we delved deeply into what the identity is. Superficially, imagine a child starts with no personality. He feels good, connected to his mom and the breast. He learns haphazardly, all about the world of things. At some point he begins to learn language and think about himself, since we distinguish, in language, him as a separate being. Over time he experiences traumas of separation and bad feelings and he deals with it, always dealing with it in terms of "me" as separate.
While there is lots of "reality" in you and me as separate beings, it's all a mind trip. We speak of "we" about our family, our community, our work groups, our country, humanity, even life on the planet. When we do that, we have a sense of "we", but we still persist in experiencing "me" as separate.
There is no "separateness" as a thing. It's not a thing. Science can't identify anything that's "you" on a molecular level. You and I are huge collections of atoms, molecules, cells. None of them has an experience of "me". That only comes from an idea possessed by a huge numbers of cells working together in the brain. It's a creation of complexity. It's not wrong, it's just not a thing.
We believe in all sorts of magical things- me, you, separateness, love- they're all magical thinking. And most of them work a great deal of the time. Many believe in eternal love, and 2/3 of marriages end in divorce. Many believe in God, but God doesn't exist. It's more of the same.
God is a belief in something we don't know, but we think we know something about- the power, the love, the connection. Even if all the miracles in the Bible are true, they can be explained well short of an all-powerful being. Even if the dialogue that quotes God is true, there's no reason that God was honest, or that wrote down the important bits.
The Bible was written by humans. Any "divine reality" is added by the reader. If you want to study something much more valuable than the Bible, study yourself reading it. There's nothing divine about you, but if you study yourself, you'll get much closer to the source of divinity.
Copyright 2012, Randy Strauss, All Rights Reserved.