Sentiment

Heaven-and-Earth is not sentimental;

It treats all things as straw-dogs.

The sage is not sentimental;

He treats all his people as straw-dogs.

Between Heaven and Earth,

There seems to be a Bellows:

It is empty, and yet is is inexhaustible;

The more it works, the more comes out of it.

No amount of words can fathom it:

Better look for it within you.

Tao Teh Ching (J.C.H. Wu Translation)

I go to sleep in the daytime, muddle my mind with a fast procession of confused dreams.  In the last of these I am doing something in the garage when I see a light out the side window.  I go out and see a man I don’t recognize shining a flashlight through the window from over the chain fence between our lot and the neighbors’.  I walk over to him through the snow on the hillside, asking if he is who I think he is.  He smiles strangely but doesn’t say anything.  I reach out and grasp his lapel lightly, asking who he is, what he is doing.  But as soon as I touch him my vision is gone, and his jacket is like snow sifting through my fingers.  I hear his breath, slightly labored, hissing in and out.  But it is not his breath, it is mine, and my eyes fly open, awake all at once.

I don’t expect this to go anywhere or make that much sense.  I’ve considered before that I may be semi-intentionally hobbling myself with low expectations.  But I don’t know.  I let the regular impulses to stray into my thoughts on things metaphysical go unanswered a long time.  And this is the reason: I know I don’t have the time to organize any of it to a coherent system.  Even if I did I’m not at all sure I have the aptitude or the inclination to do so in any manner of lasting value.

But where was I.  The spirit.  The breath.  It’s an interesting metaphor, breath, the little wind that inhabits us.  And when it’s gone, we’re gone.  Only the shell left behind, uninhabited.  That’s a common enough sentiment but there’s actually a lot of metaphysical assumption in it.

I’ll tell you how I got started thinking about the idea of the spiritual.  I was rereading Bertrand Russell’s seminal atheist essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” again recently.  As a Christian I obviously disagree with Russell’s conclusion and many of his premises.  But it is a good essay, and an important one, and I feel like anyone who accepts the name Christian would do well to explore it and come to some conclusions regarding how they feel about what it says.  Perhaps I’ll get into my reactions to it some day, but in any event, I was particularly thinking about one of Russell’s assertions.  He writes:

I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.

I think I agree with this sentiment to some degree. I don’t think many people come to religious beliefs or faith by way of exploring the logical mechanics of it (though such explorations are a significant part of the process for some).  I think people whose convictions are more than simply ingrained and unexamined indoctrination adopt religious beliefs because of experiences that I would characterize as spiritual.

And that’s where the question occurred to my mind: in the conception of materialism, do spiritual and emotional mean the same thing?  Does the concept of the spiritual have any significance outside of a supernatural interpretation?

I have issues with the idea of the supernatural.  It is a tricky, muddy concept.  In one sense it seems intrinsically oxymoronic.  If you are considering the totality of existence, is there anything that is not natural?  But I’m not sure that isn’t just a rhetorical dodge.  Certainly in the everyday context I recognize an everyday definition of the natural, and I do not seek (and in fact repudiate) “supernatural” explanations of things: psychic surgery, mediums, commonplace superstitions.

So I could be accused of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in defending the integrity of my “spiritual” convictions.  I consider their basis to be different, but I can’t offer any proof of the difference: I recognize this as a matter of my personal, subjective experience.  The opponents of faith sometimes call this sort of basis for belief an “argument from religious experience” and reject it on the basis that experiences are not facts, which I agree with - but of course, I am not really trying to make an argument.  I’m just trying to understand, and perhaps find some common language that does a better job of explaining than conflating the merely emotional with the spiritual.

The temporary conclusion I came to, considering all this, was that I could accept Russell’s description of my state of faith or belief as an “emotional” one, at least for the sake of discussion, and that I would be prepared to justify participation in religion on that basis alone, at least until I make more progress on working out some thoughts about what exactly I think it is that characterizes the spiritual in language, something that I have been chewing on off an on.

So maybe I’ll talk about that later, possibly I will branch into a sort of essay I’ve been rolling around with the incredibly provocative title “There is No Such Thing as an Atheist.”  Or maybe I will talk about my cats, since every time I wander into this sort of territory I feel completely out of my depth after about 3 sentences.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 4, 2009 at 10:05 PM