God, Zen, and the Mystery of Being
Readings:
Text: Psalm 8
Jainist text
You have just heard two very different scriptural texts
address ing
the question of the astonishing grandeur of the universe and
the possible relation of it to a divine Creator.
Whichever you
agree with, I think you'd have to admit that they
are both at
least getting first things first! As a famous
philosopher put it,
"The first question of philosophy is, Why is there something
rather than nothing?" That is what another
called the primary
experience of "ontological shock."
If you have never experienced even a touch of the shock I am
talking about, I dare say it is because you have
never paused
from your round of busy activities to notice
that, yes, you are
alive in this world when in fact you might not
be, and that there
is in fact a world, a reality, for you to be
alive in, when, for
all you know, there might as well not be!
You are alive, but you have forgotten to notice. There is
a
world, but you have not noticed. Like the
disciples of Jesus in
the Gospel of Thomas, you have taken the very
first item of
business for granted. They approach Jesus and ask
him, "Tell us
what our end will be." He replies: "Have you
indeed discovered
the beginning that you ask about the end? He who
stands at the
beginning will also know the end." And the
disciples had not done
this.
It's like being lost and seeing a map. It is of no help if
you do
not know where you are standing! If you know the
beginning of the
journey you have to take to find the exit, you
can find the exit. But if not,
you're stuck.
Socrates found that his contemporaries had also thought
them selves
to have advanced along the path to their end, to their
destiny, to fame and wisdom, but in fact they had
never found
square one, and so had never stood upon it, had
never even begun
the race they thought they were winning.
So we must not neglect the beginning. Why is there
something
rather than nothing? The ontological shock is the
beginning of
both religion and philosophy. From this point
will emerge many
doctrines of cosmogony and creation. The Bible
contains several
of them. So do other scriptures. But not so fast!
It is possible
to start at the right place and yet start off on
the wrong foot!
I believe that all doctrines and theories of the divine
creation
of the world are spiritually dangerous,
essentially anti-religious. Please note that I am
not simply saying that religious
fundamentalists have no right to ignore and
suppress science in
the name of biblical myths. I do believe that.
But I am making a rather different point this morning:
those who
insist on a creation doctrine are sinning not
only against
science but even against religion!
For the believer in divine creation, even if the doctrine
be a
sophisticated one like Aquinas's or that of the
latest liberal
Protestant theologian, the open question of the Mystery of Being
is like an open wound! It stings and gapes, and
the believer
cannot rest till it be healed up, closed up,
smeared with the
soothing balm of an answer.
But I say every supposed answer to the Mystery of Being is not a
healing balm but rather a sedative, even a
blinding dose of spiritual
poison. For the minute you fill in that blank you are exorcizing
the chief source of religious awe. What once one gaped at
in astonishment and unbearable awe, now one
relegates to the file
drawer of solved cases.
The Bible and the Koran both picture us gazing at the
great dome
of the heavens, sprinkled with stardust, yawning
with untold
worlds and nebulae, and just as quickly the
scriptures choke off
the precious sense of wonder with a fairy tale.
"Oh, you're wondering how to account for such a grand
thing?
You're puzzled? Dumbfounded? Well, friend, don't worry! It's
really pretty simple! You see, the world was made
by an invisible
watchmaker named God. See? Now don't trouble your
head about it
again. From now on, you can take it for granted."
Well, of course, to think you've explained anything by
saying
"God created it" is absurd. It's like Erich von
Daniken
"explaining" the mystery of the Pyramids by
saying space aliens
built them! You can't "explain" one enigma by an
even bigger enigma! It's like the old Hindu
myths in which the world rests on
the back of an elephant which rests on the back
of a tortoise,
which rests on the back of something else...
But that's not the real problem. When you think you can
account
for the origin of the world by chalking it up to
a creator, don't
you see that you're draining away the wonder of
the thing? You're
just giving yourself an excuse to take the whole
thing for
granted and sink into a worldly stupor in which
you can actually
get bored! Imagine! Bored? In this world? Is it all so pat, so
old hat to you? Ennui overtakes you? If it does,
it's because you
have already benumbed yourself.
Let me read you a bit of Wordsworth's "Ode:" [I, II, V].
Once we sported in the glory and wonder of the Mystery of
Being
as a dolphin in the sea foam! But then "a glory
faded from the world." The prison walls of adult
perception, rote perception,
dull perception, began to close in, and it is
hardly perception
at all! What happened? Or rather, how did it
happen? I think the Russian Formalist critic Shklovsky
put it well:
as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic... In
this process, ideally realized in algebra, things are
replaced by symbols... Habitualization
devours work, clothes,furniture, one's [spouse], and the fear of war. 'If the whole
complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such
lives are as if they had never been.' And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel
things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to
impart the sensation of things as they are perceived
and not as they are known. The technique is to make objects 'unfamiliar'... Art removes objects from
the automatism of perception.
I am sure this is right, both the diagnosis
and the prescription.
What has happened to us? We no longer perceive, because we have
learned to know, to recognize.
We are mostly like a surveillance camera, like a computer that
apprehends data, thus "knows" it, but does not
know that it
knows, does not perceive. It does not
experience that it knows
something. And neither do we. Oh, once we did. When we first fell
in love, and we delighted in the charms of our
beloved which were
new every morning--at least for a few mornings,
and then that
little smile, that gesture that once so charmed
us, it becomes
routine--and thus invisible. It is filed
away in the memory bank.
Have you noticed that we hardly even hear sentences spoken
to us?
All we look for, and all that registers, is the gist. We cannot
remember the wording of a text we read because we
are reading for
the gist, and if it is a literary text, where
style is supposed
to count for something, we have missed the whole
thing.
The Zen masters say we fail to perceive the world anymore
because
it has become habitual. We let words and concepts
substitute for
things. It is like the changeover from barter to
currency
exchange, exactly like it. We used to exchange
actual things,
squealing goats, pungent herbs, fabrics smooth or
rough, things
we could see and feel and hear--and could not
help but seeing,
feeling, hearing. But then all we do is exchange
coins and bills
that stand for value. And then it is checks, then
plastic credit
cards, soon computer clacks.
And this might not be bad, but it is the same for our
whole
lives! As Shklovsky
said, habituation devours everything! And our
whole life is scanning a text. We are inured to
everything,
numbed to everything.
Shklovsky prescribed art,
literature, as the cure, art that
strips away the blindfold of familiarity and
forces us to perceive again
the things we know.
Perhaps this is why Jesus is depicted in the gospels not
as some
dull pulpit preacher (like me), feeding his
audience with more
concepts, more sleeping pills, but as an artist,
a reciter of
poetic couplets and a spinner of riddles. When
asked why on earth
he didn't just use straight talk, he said,
"Because having eyes
they see not, and having ears, they hear not." In
other words,
like Shklovsky said,
the truth is so familiar to them, they're so
habituated to it, that they can no longer see it
at all. Familiarity
breeds invisibility! And so Jesus must use the language of
artistry to make the stone be perceived again as
stony, the soul
as soulish.
This, of course, is why the novel and the film The Last Tempta tion
of Christ were roundly condemned, hotly denounced. They
took the too-familiar gospel and shook it up,
really deconstructed it, and
unleashed it in something like its original
shocking colors. It had once again become what
Paul said it had
been in his day: a scandal and a stumbling block.
Bultmann spoke of the need to "demythologize" the gospel
for the
benefit of modern man. But I think
Shklovsky and Tomashevsky were
closer to the truth. We need to "defamiliarize"
the gospel.
I am a firm believer in the spirituality of blasphemy. I
believe
that only in the experience of shock and
startlement can one be
jolted out, shaken out of one's lethal
complacency. When in Last
Temptation one of the clerics rebukes Jesus, he says: "That's
blasphemy!" Jesus responds: "Didn't they tell
you? I'm the saint
of blasphemy!" Yes! That is the Christ-figure
that has meaning
for me. The Last Temptation is a true
Gospel to me, just as much
as the official four.
But Jesus was not the only saint of blasphemy. The Zen
masters,
too, were expert in the art. Think of the famous
image of the Zen
mystic who tears up the scroll of scripture,
another who casts
holy icons into the fire as kindling!
Since concepts and words merely substitute for the Real,
the Zen
masters knew they had to find some other way to
strip off the
veil. So they taught with slaps in the face,
sermons of silence,
teasing riddles designed to force you to reason's
dead end.
If we want to learn to see again, even if for a moment,
the glory
that has faded from the world, we must seek the
paradox, the
volatility, the unstable explosiveness, the
inherent absurdity of
our religious myths and symbols. If we do this,
they may be able
to help us. Otherwise they will only get in the
way. They are
only ladders to be climbed up and then jumped
off! This is why I
am in the habit of treating sacred things with
levity, lest they
become idols.
Those psychologists who study sleep patterns tell us that
people
get the most irritated when deprived of sleep.
When they are trying
to grab a few needed winks and the experimenter prods them
awake, they get surly fast!
And it has been my experience that the same is true in the
spiritual realm. When the alarm clock of some
new religious shock goes
off, people don't want their "dogmatic slumber"
(as Kant called
it) disturbed! They grab the clock and, with a
cry of "Heresy!"
or "Blasphemy!", they pitch it out the window!
You probably
remember throwing a few clocks out yourself! I
know I have.
Awe at the Mystery of things is the key to a religious
attitude.
It is the source of freshness of perception. Do not kill it and
nail it into a coffin called "God." Do not even
mummify it in a
mummy case called "the Mystery of Being"! Because
it is not an
"it"! That's taking the first step to labeling it
and filing it
away!
Robert M. Price
CopyrightŠ2004 by
Robert M Price
Spirit of
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