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Quote for Reflection
Without the transcendent and the transpersonal we get sick -- or else hopeless and apathetic. We need something "bigger than we are" to be awed by and to commit ourselves to... - Abraham Maslow
Chapter Two
The Unseen Order
“The world’s great wisdom traditions have one thing in common: they affirm that there is an unseen order, and the supreme good in life lies in finding the right relationship to that.” This is the conclusion reached by the great psychologist and philosopher William James after a lifetime of study and reflection. But his statement only leads us to a plethora of questions. What is this “unseen order?” Does it really exist? If it is “unseen,” how can we come to know it? And how, if we so choose, do we go about finding the right relationship to it?
More than 50,000 years ago, people in Europe and Africa were making elaborate drawings on cave walls and on rock outcroppings. In Europe, they would make their way deep into caves and draw very elaborate figures – going to a great deal of trouble to fill those caves with beautiful, stylized images. An enormous amount of time and effort was involved – they had to collect and prepare the pigments, find a way to light the caves while they worked, and even build structures on which to stand to reach inaccessible places. And as far as we can surmise, all of this effort wasn’t about finding food, or shelter, or sexual fulfillment – or about propagating the species. So what was it about?
Perhaps they were the earliest art galleries, but if so, they certainly were not designed for frequent viewing; to access them was often difficult, and the problem of lighting for frequent viewing would have been quite challenging. Given all this, the best guess has to be that these works of art, sometimes deep in the earth, had something to do with the religious and/or spiritual aspirations of their creators – had to do with the sacred dimension. No other possibility offers a plausible explanation for the existence of these extraordinary paintings – at least in the view of David Lewis-Williams, a scholar who spent 40 years studying these unique creations. In his book, The Mind In The Cave, he concludes that these drawings grew out of rituals in the shamanic tradition of the time, creating a feeling of connection with the sacred for these early peoples – with the inaccessibility being part of the experience, even ordeal, involved in both creating and viewing them.
It is therefore quite likely that more than 50,000 years ago, our ancestors were trying to find the “right relationship” to the “unseen order.” And this conclusion fits perfectly with what we know of later civilizations. From the earliest periods of recorded history, we humans have spent an incredible amount of time, energy, and treasure trying to develop our connection to, and relationship with, what has been perceived as the sacred dimension. Scan the globe briefly with your mind’s eye, and you will get a glimpse of the immensity of this enterprise: massive temples to Egyptian Gods and elaborate burial chambers designed to carry those being buried to heavenly realms; thousands of temples and statues in ancient Greece erected to honor the Gods of Olympus; thousands of temples throughout the Indian sub-continent built to honor the Gods of the Hindu pantheon; thousands upon thousands of stupas, temples, and statues throughout Asia honoring the Buddha; mosques, great and small, all over the Middle East – often intricately decorated and filled with exquisite rugs and metalwork; beautiful synagogues wherever the Jewish people have settled; and the majestic Christian cathedrals throughout Europe.
The list could be much longer, but these examples should suffice to demonstrate the pattern: many of the great buildings of the world – all through human history – were conceived with a religious or spiritual purpose in mind, were built to honor the sacred domain. It seems we humans have always been trying to find the “right relationship” to something greater than ourselves. And this process continues unabated today.
As with buildings, so it is with most kinds of art. Much of the art of human history was created to fulfill a religious or spiritual purpose. From the earliest clay figures found around the globe, to the numerous and varied elaborations of pottery – and on to sculpture, woodcarvings, handicrafts, metalwork, weavings, and paintings – a majority of history’s artistic images and symbols were created to serve a religious or spiritual purpose. For direct confirmation of this, one need only walk through any of the great museums or art galleries of the world.
And the same can be said of music: through the ages, much of the world’s music was created for religious ceremony, ritual, and celebration. And so it is with the written word. The libraries of every land are filled with religious and spiritual texts, commentaries on those texts, explanations of those texts, and individual accounts of religious and spiritual experiences. No other topic has occupied as much creative and intellectual effort. And if we look closely, we will also see that much of philosophy, all of theology, and much of literature, story, and poetry – in every culture – has been concerned with trying to understand the “unseen order,” and in trying to find the right relationship to that.
If you can hold in your mind for just a moment the amount of time and energy we humans have given to religious and spiritual expression through the ages, the enormity of the enterprise will likely seem as dramatic to you as it does to me. Now add in the amount of time and energy we have collectively spent through the centuries on prayer, meditation, spiritual pilgrimage, and attending religious services, and perhaps you will begin to get a sense of the true extend of our commitment to finding a “right relationship” to the “unseen order.”
Of course, that we have given so much time and attention to religious and spiritual activities does not prove anything about the “reality of the unseen,” to use another phrase from William James. It only proves that most humans throughout history have considered this project, this task of finding the right relationship to the sacred, to be extremely important. Of equal significance, however, is the fact that different cultures have understood the unseen order in very different ways, and have developed many different theories about how to establish a right relationship to it. But the existence of so many different approaches does not diminish the fact that the underlying urge to make such an effort has been very strong, and consistently present, for most human beings in every culture and in every age.
Why might this be so? There are many possible answers to this question, from Freud’s assertion that religion is like a neurosis, an unconscious expression of repressed sexual desires; to Marx’s cry that religion is “the opium of the people” keeping the burdened and oppressed of the earth from breaking out of their chains; to the assertion of many mystics that in fact there IS an unseen order, crucially importance to our lives, which most of us don’t perceive because we have not prepared ourselves to see it.
However, although the urge is common to all, the ways of pursuing it seem limitless. And because there have been so many different approaches, for thousands of years we humans have argued and fought over its nature – what it is like and how it should be approached. Few other topics have caused as much strife, bitterness, and hatred – even bloodshed. But again, the commonality of this urge within the human species does not prove the existence or non-existence of the “unseen,” nor does it tell us what it might be like – but it certainly proves that the topic has always been of the utmost importance to humankind.
The Reality of the Unseen
In today’s world, however, some argue that there is nothing beyond the material realm that affects human life, nothing transcendent to the things we can see and taste and smell that might give us guidance as to how we should live, what is important – what life is about. They hold that there is no realm beyond our basic human drives which might give rise to Love, to Compassion, to Justice, or “the Good.” In this view, consciousness arose as a chance by-product of material processes, and there is no transcending principle giving order to the unfolding of the universe. In other words, there is no God, no Tao, no World of Forms, no Great Way, no morphogenetic fields, no collective unconscious, no Great Spirit, no Ayin, no Unborn, no Unmanifest, no Brahma, no Allah – nor anything at all to which these words might point, except a figment of the human imagination. Is this a valid claim? Is it true that there is nothing at all beyond, or transcendent to, the material world? Has the incredible investment of time and treasure in these religious and spiritual realms throughout human history been a complete waste of time and energy?
Or is there something valid in the sacred domain (even though it is often misunderstood), something worthy of our time and attention, something that might have an important role to play even in our lives today? One approach to these questions is suggested by University of Chicago mythologist Mircea Eliade, who for decades studied belief systems all over the world. In these studies over many decades, he came to the startling conclusion that every culture had an understanding of two different kinds of time: the ordinary time of our everyday lives, which he labeled “profane time,” and “sacred time,” which had to do with a different order of reality, a very different dimension of experience.
As Keith Thompson expressed this idea, “The ancient Greeks conceived of the ordinary passage of time – incessant, impersonal, non-negotiable – as belonging to the god Kronos, from whose adventures the term chronology is drawn.” But they also came to believe that all time was not ordinary. “They reserved the term Kairos for special time: moments when the extraordinary punctuates mundane existence, reminding that the origin of being is ever-present, overflowing with what the word ‘holy’ speaks of.”
In his work, Eliade documented at great length the existence of these two ways of thinking about time, and then made an extraordinary observation: in every culture he studied, meaning always arose from sacred time, and not from the world of ordinary time. If this is true, it would certainly help explain why we as a species have focused so much effort and attention on “the sacred” – it is where we have always found meaning for our lives.
So how have meaning systems come into being in human history? A quick look reveals that most ideas about how we should live, what is important, what values we should live by – at least the systems that have survived for long periods – have not been founded on principles that grew out of ordinary events, or ordinary time. They have not arisen from someone sitting around thinking about such things logically who then said: “Hey, I was thinking that maybe we ought to try out this belief system for a while.”
No. Rather, a person went off to a mountain, or a forest, or a desert – and after some time there – came back and said to the people of his or her tribe, “I have seen the truth. I have touched or been touched by something holy. And from this vision, now I see that this is how we should live, this is what is really important, these are the values we must live by.” The founders of the world’s primary meaning and value systems reported an encounter with something outside the everyday world (outside of ordinary time), which had given them guidance as to what was ultimately important in human life. And it is to these value and meaning systems that almost all cultures have referred, and still refer to this very day, in formulating their beliefs.
Some of these foundational stories are: Moses went up Mount Horeb, and came back with the Ten Commandments to guide his people – given to him by God. Jesus was baptized by John, spent 40 days in the wilderness over-coming the temptations of Satan, and returned to teach his message about the kingdom of heaven – what it is like, and how to get there. Mohammed spent many months in meditation and prayer, and finally received the vision from Allah that gave rise to the Koran and the birth of Islam. The Buddha left his home and family and spent many years as a wandering ascetic, finally sitting in stillness under the bodhi tree for many days until he experienced a complete awakening from the illusion of the ordinary world. Only after this realization did he begin to teach.
In the ancient Greek world, Plato wandered and studied for years, and finally, through the guidance of Socrates, came to experience the existence of a World of Ideas, a world of Pure Form that lay outside the everyday world, but which gave meaning to our lives in it. In ancient China Confucius also spent his life wandering and studying, and from his studies came to the conclusion that there is a Way of Heaven, the following of which provides the path to meaning and fulfillment in life. Also in China Lao Tzu described his lifetime’s realization of what lay behind the everyday world: “There was something formless and perfect before the universe was born. . . I will call it the Tao.” And his guidance? To find fulfillment, we must live our lives in accordance with this Tao. And in the Upanishads of India we read about the one transcendent reality, the Self: “Self is everywhere, shining forth from all beings, vaster than the vast, subtler than the most subtle . . . only in deep absorption can the mind, grown pure and silent, merge with the formless truth.” And life’s purpose? To recognize ourselves as “One with That.”
There are many, many other examples of foundational stories that could be given, but the point is clear: the world’s primary belief and value systems, originating with the most revered names in human history, all seem to have arisen from and point to something outside of ordinary time. The founders of these great systems all maintained that the beliefs and values they promulgated came from a source transcendent to the everyday world – from a realm that could best be described as the “sacred.” That all of these seminal figures agreed upon this point does not prove it to be true, but to ignore this overwhelmingly common theme from the most respected names in human history – within overwhelming evidence to the contrary – would be quite unwise.
But it is also important to recognize that the teachings of these foundational figures were also different in many, many ways. Perhaps much of this difference can be attributed to the need to adapt the deeper truth they were experiencing to a particular time and place. But it is also quite possible that some of these figures were mistaken about some of the things they taught – that they saw part of a deeper truth, but not all of it. As Saint Paul said about his own understanding as a human being on this earth, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; . . . now I know in part.”
Accepting that perhaps some of these figures knew only “in part” does not mean that everything they taught was wrong – any more than it would make sense to dismiss all of the advice given by your wisest friend just because he or she was wrong about one thing. A much wiser course would be to examine the beliefs these seminal figures had in common, and to give significant weight to the things commonly held – in the same way that, if investigating an accident, you would give special weight to the points upon which all the witnesses agreed, while giving less weight to the things upon which they disagreed. And perhaps the deepest common theme we find is that “there is an unseen order, and the supreme good in life lies in finding the right relationship to that.”
Lest we make the mistake of thinking this is only about the past, it is crucial to realize that most people living today were raised in cultures whose beliefs arose from the bedrock of these ancient meaning and value systems. Where else have belief systems come from? All of the main cultures of the world trace their roots to this sacred ground. (There are many other foundational stories besides the ones cited above, of course, but all attribute their origen to an encounter with an unseen order.) At this very moment, the values and beliefs that are being taught to children all over the world – and that give rise to how the children of today will live and understand the world – come from systems of thought that sprang up from this “sacred ground.”
Again, this proves nothing about the existence or non-existence of the sacred dimension, but honoring the cumulative wisdom of thousands of years of human history, and paying attention to the guidance of the most respected figures who have ever lived would seem to be the most rational place from which to begin our inquiry. We might have to work at sorting the wheat from the chaff, but one of the great advantages of the current era is the availability of unprecedented resources concerning the value and meaning systems of the world – both past and present. By focusing on the ways in which these great belief systems, and foundational figures, have agreed with each other, rather than on their differences, we have an invaluable place from which to undertake our own journeys. Ignoring this unique treasure would seem, at the least, unwise.
References:
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Penguin Books Edition (1982), p. 53
A chapter heading in William James Varieties of Religious Experience
Keith Thompson – article in Noetic Sciences Review - Spring 1997
Ibid
Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell, number 25
Stephen Mitchell, The Enlightened Heart, p.4
1 Corinthians 13:12
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