January 8, 2010
- Open Question -
Read an article on Futurismic that quoted a question from another article that really got me thinking. I figured I’d throw it out to my readers here:
Why are we as a species so driven to find a definition for God?
The more I ask myself the question, the more I realize I can’t find an answer. It’s kind of tripping me out.
Maybe this whole “Zen” thing is having more of an effect than I think… ;)
Feel free to expound at whatever length you wish. Any and all answers are welcome.
(links to larger version)
I think it’s because we want (maybe even need) to believe that we ourselves have some higher purpose and–perhaps more importantly–will continue to exist in some way beyond death. The terminal nature of our existence is hard to accept. Belief in God allows us to connect the transience of our own lives with something that is eternal. Belief in God is also often used culturally as a means of grounding moral laws and beliefs that serve important communal functions. What interests me most about religious beliefs across time and cultures is how much various religions have in common. I’ll stop there for now.
Comment by Helen — January 8, 2010 @ 4:39 pm
I think that question is phrased with a lot of underlying assumptions of scientific materialism.
Are we really a species? If we are we are a species that seeks God. Other species don’t appear to seek God or is it just a “definition of God” So the question’s why?
We have God within us as part of our nature, the Atma. We seek to reconnect with our source. The other species were never seperated becauase they aren’t conscious (pre-sumably)
They don’t have an awareness of the awareness of seperation.
Comment by Ted — January 8, 2010 @ 4:48 pm
Something to do with the Fall, then? (There my theology runs out.)
Comment by speedbird — January 8, 2010 @ 4:50 pm
Thanks Helen. I’m not going to reply to any comments here until next week, as I’d rather have a bunch of answers from people (sort of a poll) rather than a fullfledged discussion.
Anyway, we’ll see how this goes…
Comment by Ian — January 8, 2010 @ 4:58 pm
Oh, and thanks Ted and speedbird as well! :)
Comment by Ian — January 8, 2010 @ 4:58 pm
Semi riffing on @mrteacup’s words, whenever we label the Absolute, we’re expressing our own incompleteness.
The development of our egoic self-identity I sense is synchronistically linked to our labelling the Absolute. When one concept disappears, so does the other.
Don’t know how far this insight leads (shallow or deep), but thought I’d share anyway.
Thanks for your beautiful site/blog Ian. See you on Twitter.
@dustmapper
Comment by @dustmapper — January 9, 2010 @ 5:06 am
Great questions. I think the answer is a simple one. There comes a time for many humans (usually when we are quite young) when they have an experience that leads them to believe that the mundane, habitual way of viewing reality may not be the Truth. So what then is the Truth? I think that’s where the whole business of ‘defining God’ comes in to being.
However, in some ways it is a losing battle. Trying to definitively describe the Source by means of its contents has never provided any sort of consensus on the issue. We are left to discover what lies beyond by utilizing that aspect of our nature which lies beyond. Deep calls to deep.
At best, the rational mind may act as a pointer, or as a means of providing instructions for how one might being this journey toward discovery. Reason is not to be discarded, but rather to be put in its rightful place. We should keep this in mind when attempting to define ‘God’.
Comment by jackson — January 9, 2010 @ 2:23 pm
Thanks everyone, for these wonderful, thought provoking answers.
Because it seems we are all in agreement. The need to search for and define God springs from our own interpretation of ourselves as existing somehow apart from God/the eternal/the absolute. Its as if we’re in a sort of God-eclipse, that the absolute somehow in our mental blindspot.
From there, the question seems to become, why do we think that a definition of God (be that “old guy on a throne”, “Zeus/Thor/Horus/Shiva”, “Buddha-nature”, or anything else) will be able to reconnect us to that divine presence?
Perhaps, instead of being disconnected from God, its that we are simply unable to cognize ANYTHING without a definition. That there is something about the defining mind that creates blind spot over the divine. We look for it with a certain set of mental perceptual apparatus, and we cannot find it, so we think it doesn’t exist.
Does the solution then lie in further developing those apparatus, or in abandoning them?
Thinking about this, we seem to be at an impasse. Forward? Or back?
But in living this question, there is no duality. All ways are forward, if we are based here. For we are always here and the divine is here, anything else makes no sense. The task, then, becomes finding a way to grow/develop our perception so as to see that we are the divine (as much as anything else is).
Can we know this directly, without needing a definition to hang it on? Hmmm….
Comment by Ian — January 11, 2010 @ 2:41 pm
>> there is something about the defining mind that creates blind spot over the divine.
Cool…!
*
Not sure what more I can contribute but a darn good read, while it springs to mind:
http://www.amazon.com/British-Summertime-Gollancz-Paul-Cornell/dp/1932265236/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263246364&sr=1-1
Trade you a Mahasamatman for an Alison Parmeter… :)
Comment by speedbird — January 11, 2010 @ 4:51 pm
Fuck yeah! Thanks Speedbird!
Comment by Ian — January 11, 2010 @ 5:21 pm
Yeah, good jacket copy! Couple of caveats: 1.) Cornell writes an entirely authentic Brit experience; I have no idea how easily that crosses the Atlantic! 2.) I skimmed it far too fast first time and had to go back and do it again. Like I say, a darn good read.
*
Another associated thought does spring to mind: the idea that there is no room in the ‘world’ for the divine. The Gnostics took that to an extreme, of course; but I’m thinking about things like No Room At the Inn; ‘do not love the world’; ‘the kingdom is spread out on the Earth, but people do not see it’…
Comment by speedbird — January 12, 2010 @ 11:07 am
Well, if that’s the case then we’re clearly fucked. If we can’t see it, we can’t see it. That’s not going to help with anything, so I’ll take that with large grain of salt. Besides, the gnostics were a depressing bunch anyway. Comes from having your divine messenger hung on a cross, I suppose. In fact, I think alot of the trouble with Christianity through the ages has come from that very fact. What would Christianity be if Christ hadn’t died?
Actually, I’m reading something by Rene Daumul called Mount Analogue that talks about this very thing. I’m posting some quotes from that relatively soon. Never thought this would turn into a quote blog, but there you have it. It seems to have taken that on, for now at least. :)
I think you’d like it speedbird, though I haven’t finished it yet so I can’t speak for the overall experience of the book. Some great ideas though.
Comment by Ian — January 12, 2010 @ 11:14 am
> If we can’t see it, we can’t see it.
I don’t think that’s what’s meant by this. Just that the Truth is obscured by Stuff. When you actually look beyond the Stuff the Stuff is just a thin veneer over a huge expanse of Truth. It’s not ‘can’t see it’ so much as ‘do not see it’. So I err towards the idea of working to get beyond Thought (and especially beyond ‘Economics’ ;-D)
> having your divine messenger hung on a cross
Again, I really don’t think that’s supposed to be the point! Which is one reason why I dislike the musical ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’: they kill him at the end, and then everyone goes home. What’s that all about?! I sat in my seat perplexed wondering why everyone was standing up and getting their coats. What stopped Lloyd-Webber writing the Resurrection scene? Crazy fool. That’s the whole point of the story, surely; otherwise it’s just a joke without a punchline. Handel did rather better, I think.
*
Mount Analogue sounds trippy, please post some extracts! [Swap you that for 'Goose of Hermogenes' ;-D]
Comment by speedbird — January 13, 2010 @ 3:34 am
I agree with what you’re saying here, but I think where I’m coming from is that if the stuff is just where we’re stuck in, and the truth is always there regardless. It’s our insistence on treating our stuff as stuff that stops us from seeing the ever present truth. Or at least, that’s the part of the puzzle I seems to working on right now. :)
And yeah, Christianity without the resurrection is just a really depressing story. But leaving the redemption of the story in the non-rationalistic (by that mythical or highly spiritual) leaves those of us in a rationalistic society pretty depressed…
Hermogene’s Goose looks awesome, and the most recent printing was published on my birthday (funny little coincidence). Yet another one on my list.
http://www.amazon.com/Goose-Hermogenes-Gothick-Ithell-Colquhoun/dp/0720611776
Daumal quotes coming soon, along with some background, heopfully.
Comment by Ian — January 13, 2010 @ 12:46 pm
And having just re-read my original question again, I think I have an answer.
“Because there isn’t one”
Comment by Ian — January 13, 2010 @ 12:47 pm
>> Because there isn’t one
Heh :-)
>> leaving the redemption of the story in the non-rationalistic
Hmmmmmm… something seriously important here, methinks. A proper Mystery. I’ll leave that to stew awhile.
>> Hermogene’s Goose
Actually I found it so strange as to be almost unreadable; there seemed to be nowhere to stand to get a grip. Presumably Daumal ain’t quite like that.
Comment by speedbird — January 13, 2010 @ 6:37 pm
Well, I’ve been reading both Mount Analog and a book of his poetry (“Le Contre Ciel” though its an English translation) at the same time. MA is perfectly fine, reminds me a bit of Borges, and the poetry in LCC is pretty straightforward as well.
But LCC starts with something called “32 poetic keys” (I assume a nod to the Kabbalah) that is a strange mix of Hegelian philosophy and Surrealistic poetry, with a little Hindu mysticism thrown in. THAT has sent me head spinning round, let me tell you.
I can only read one or two at a time without getting a headache, and even though (after a month or so) I’ve finally gotten through 26 pages of them, I’m still not sure I have a grip on of any of it.
But like I said, the rest of his stuff is easier to digest.
Comment by Ian — January 14, 2010 @ 10:52 am
OK, let’s try and join some pieces here. Suppose we can’t look easily at Truth in its entirety; but only through the medium of Stuff. That’s what Stuff is /supposed/ to be for. Of course most of it isn’t. Stuff is all medium, all ways-of-seeing. As such, Stuff is an extension of ourselves. To focus exclusively on Stuff and not to use it as a medium to see Truth is itself a particular kind of flawed way-of-seeing. Stuff begins to hide behind Other Stuff, and the world starts to look onion-like. Except it’s all just a skewed projection from inside ourselves.
Comment by speedbird — January 14, 2010 @ 11:24 am
Yeah, I think that’s a good summation, as far as I can see.
I think of the relationship between Stuff and Truth as sort of like iron filings and a magnetic field. The Stuff is aligned to the Truth, and all the Truth is in the Stuff and the Stuff is in the Truth, but the Stuff is not the Truth in and of itself. If you take one of the filings and hold it up to your eye, you won’t see any magnetic field on it, but that doesn’t mean the magnetic field doesn’t exist.
This is the same idea. If we get ourselves into a situation where we’re continually peeling layer after layer of onion away, what we’ve got is an infinite onion. Now stop peeling and imagine the onion itself.
Comment by Ian — January 14, 2010 @ 11:42 am
Did you know that there are some evolutionary biologists who argue that the ability to understand narratives and to narrate is so essential to our survival that it is an inherent trait (i.e., it’s not learned, it’s part of our nature as a species)? We must understand cause and effect and sequence to make sense of our world and survive. When I think about how many of the gods of early cultures explain natural phenomenon, it makes sense to me to connect these theories of the importance of narrative to the function and definition of god. God and other deities provide avenues for narrating purpose, whether it’s why the sun goes away every night and comes back every morning or even more asinine arguments for why an earthquake kills 50,000 people. We often use the divine (however self- or socially manifested) to narrate meaning out of chaos.
Comment by Helen — January 15, 2010 @ 12:51 am
Well put Helen. I’ve been thinking of the divine as sort more like a direction, something to be interpreted from your surroundings (like how “up” is always up, rather than a place you can get, you’re never at “up”).
But I hadn’t thought of the search for meaning as the same thing. In the sense you’re talking about, God IS meaning (or if you prefer, truth). Or rather, the divine manifests in the relative AS meaning, and as the relative changes, so too does the manifestation of the divine. But the divine itself is never-changing.
I’d like to believe that all social and cultural aspects are part of our nature as a species. When taking a long view of history, we seem to be in the midst of an intense period of change. Perhaps this is how species evolve, in sort of growth spurts where a lot of change happens all at once, and then we settle in for a while again. And I would say that, if this is the case, our narrative abilities must tied into it VERY deeply.
Comment by Ian — January 15, 2010 @ 11:13 am