The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well as one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.
-- Paul Tillich

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #PaulTillich #Ambiguity

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Panopainting #Protest #MarchForOurLives #Florida

Ain’t superstitious

In the old Willie Dixon song, he claims not to be, but believes the signs anyway: “Well, I ain’t superstitious, but a black cat crossed my trail…”

Stevie Wonder has a different take: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer – superstition ain’t the way…”

Sam Harris writes, “Math is magical, but math approached like magic is just superstition—and numerology is where the intellect goes to die.” The same thing, perhaps, applies to metaphysics.

Metaphysics can be a slippery word these days. “Metaphysics is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, logic, and ethics. It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.” (Wikipedia) But Harris (ibid.) lists it along with mythology and sectarian dogma.

While it is true that probably all religions are filled with mythology and sectarian dogma, they do not all approach metaphysics like magic – and it seems to me, from experience, that metaphysics, at some level, is inseparable from the contemplative life.

[W]hen we look closely, we can’t find reliable external evidence of consciousness, nor can we conclusively point to any specific function it serves. These are both deeply counterintuitive outcomes, and this is where the mystery of consciousness starts bumping up against other mysteries of the universe.

If we can’t point to anything that distinguishes which collections of atoms in the universe are conscious from those that aren’t, where can we possibly hope to draw the line? Perhaps a more interesting question is why we should draw a line at all. When we view our own experience of consciousness as being “along for the ride,” we suddenly find it easier to imagine that other systems are accompanied by consciousness as well. It’s at this point that we must consider the possibility that all matter is imbued with consciousness in some sense—a view referred to as panpsychism. If the various behaviors of animals can be accompanied by consciousness, why not the reaction of plants to light—or the spin of electrons, for that matter? Perhaps consciousness is embedded in matter itself, as a fundamental property of the universe. It sounds crazy, but … it’s worth posing the question.

Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

Sam Harris again,

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Sam Harris, Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality without Religion

Things that seem very strange at first glimpse (like Willie Dixon’s black cat) may turn out on closer examination to make an uncommon degree of sense. Annaka Harris (op cit.) quotes a personal communication from Rebecca Goldstein to the effect that, “[c]onsciousness is an intrinsic property of matter; indeed, it’s the only intrinsic property of matter that we know, for we know it directly, by ourselves being material conscious things. All of the other properties of matter have been discovered by way of mathematical physics, and this mathematical method of getting at the properties of matter means that only relational properties of matter are known, not intrinsic properties.”

If matter is, as it seems, fundamental to existence, or at least to the material universe, and if it is in some way intrinsically conscious, then Paul Tillich’s conception of God as “ground of being” (being-itself rather than a supreme being among, or above, other beings – as the apostle Paul quotes from Epimenides (Acts 17:28), “[f]or in him we live and move and have our being”) seems inescapable. Only, as Tillich himself suggests, we may then have to give up using the word “God”.

There is, it seems, no way to “fall out of” being. If being itself entails consciousness, then even to say that individual consciousness ceases at death is, to say the least, problematic. And in any case, our conventional sense of an individual self is an illusion, as contemplatives throughout history have discovered. It is only a fiction of convenience, a way for the mind to locate itself, for a moment, in the body of which it is aware. (See Susan Blackmore’s wonderful book Seeing Myself for the correspondence of contemplative and neuroscientific insights here.)

It ain’t necessary to be superstitious: the belief in things we don’t understand turns out to be a mistake. There is enough wonder in what is.

#AnnakaHarris #awareness #contemplative #PaulTillich #practice #RebeccaGoldstein #SamHarris #StPaul #StevieWonder #SusanBlackmore #unknowing #WillieDixon

Part of a whole

In an excellent article on the Humanists UK website, Jeremy Rodell quotes Albert Einstein:

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe – a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to the affection for those nearest us…

There are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny, only being.

This comes very close to my own sense of the ground of being as not simply another name for a personified God, but (as Paul Tillich himself saw) the metaphysical source, Being itself, (forgive the capitalisation!) from which anything comes to be at all. Perhaps the closest expression I had found before I read Rodell’s article was the Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen sense of the pristine awareness that is the fundamental ground itself.

Rodell goes on (ibid.):

Almost all humanists would agree that the scientific method is by far the best way to understand objective truths about the world, including brains. But subjective experience is not, by definition, open to direct observation by anyone other than the person experiencing it, though it is undeniably both ‘real’ to that person and, as far as we know, unique, as we can’t get into the minds of others other than through their descriptions, or their artistic expression.

This “experiential spirituality” (Rodell’s phrase) is the realm of contemplative practice, surely. Our practice is very simple, no more than a matter of being set free from the entanglements of discursive thought in order to find ourselves consciously resting in the “groundless ground” of all that is. This is our home, after all; we can never fall out of being, and if philosophers like Philip Goff and Annaka Harris are right (not to mention the Dzogchen teachers like Longchenpa) even consciousness itself is fundamental to coming-to-be. The part, in effect, is not other than the whole!

#AnnakaHarris #contemplative #isness #JeremyRodell #Longchenpa #PaulTillich #PhilipGoff #practice

Atheism and metaphysics

Metaphysics can seem to be a rather slippery term. On the one hand it can be taken to be “the study of the most general features of reality, including existence, objects and their properties, possibility and necessity, space and time, change, causation, and the relation between matter and mind” (Wikipedia) but on the other, being the study of, in one sense, how things come to be, it is too easily conflated with religious creation myths, or with cosmologies intricately involved with religious doctrines of causality and phenomenology.

But “according to modern scientific knowledge, mental events and processes presuppose the existence and reality of material things. Thinking, for example, implies the existence of a bird or a mammal with a brain. Or a momentary event, such as the proverbial cat sitting on the mat, presupposes the real existence of the cat, the mat, the earth under the mat, as well as a real human observer of the event.” (Morris)

But for me, that which is intended by using the term “ground of being” (Tillich) is precisely that which can be known directly as “no-thing” in contemplation. I am not talking here of an idea, a common factor in a Huxley-like perennial philosophy, but of a repeated and very direct experience of what Quakers have referred to as “the light”, as described for instance by Emilia Fogelklou (she writes in the third person): “Without visions or the sound of speech or human mediation, in exceptionally wide-awake consciousness, she experienced the great releasing inward wonder. It was as if the ’empty shell’ burst. All the weight and agony, all the feeling of unreality dropped away. She perceived living goodness, joy, light like a clear, irradiating, uplifting, enfolding, unequivocal reality from deep inside.”

This kind of experience can of course not be described terribly clearly, nor can it be communicated directly, and any attempt is likely to fall into superlatives such as Fogelklou’s. But the experience is as real and direct as any sensory experience, perhaps more so, and it has a curious undeniable quality, a great lifting and healing of the heart. I use Tillich’s term for it not because I have any particular attraction for that as an idea, but because it seems to get closer than anything else I have read to the encounter itself. There is a visual analogue that sometimes occurs in meditation – and which can lead to the experience I am trying to describe – of the visual field itself, seen through closed eyes, extending suddenly through and beneath what ought to have been the observing mind, but which is no longer there.

Now, I have long enough experience in contemplative practice to know that experiences are not things to hang onto, still less to seek after, and I would not be happy if any words of mine sent anyone on a quest for experiential chimeras. Yet the experience itself, with all its indelible affect, has occurred so often over the years, since childhood, that I find myself referring to it over and over again, and it remains for me a kind of lodestone.

Are these metaphysical experiences, insights? Are they therefore somehow at variance with the fundamental insight of atheism that the idea of another, supernatural, layer to existence, within which the human self can somehow transcend, or survive, the electrochemical apparatus of the central nervous system, is illusory? I don’t think so. Daniel Dennett’s insight into human phenomenology as a “benign user illusion” coincides well with the Buddhist conception of things as empty of intrinsic existence (śūnyatā) – all of which seems to me to be a formal expression of what I have come to experience as “no-thing.” Andreas Müller:

All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost…

What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.

#AndreasMüller #atheism #awakening #BrianMorris #consciousness #contemplative #DanielDennett #EmiliaFogelklou #PaulTillich #philosophy #practice #religion #Wikipedia

I am an atheist

I have written here before (most recently here) of my increasing difficulty with organised religion, its practices and its dogmas, its internal turf wars and its external grasping after the levers of political and, worse, military power. What I haven’t discussed clearly enough, perhaps, is my unease at a far more fundamental level. It has taken me far too long fully to admit this unease to myself, let alone to attempt to write about it. Even now I am nervous about setting it down in permanent form.

God is usually understood, in monotheistic religions, “as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith” (Wikipedia). I have very gradually come to realise that even at the most overtly Christian periods of my life this did not describe anything I could relate to the ground of being (Paul Tillich) of my own experience. I have increasingly found it impossible to “maintain the truth that God is beyond essence and existence while simultaneously arguing for the existence of God.” (Tillich)

Spirituality, it seems to me, is far more about the discovery of meaning and purpose in direct experience – ultimately of the ontological ground itself – than it ever has been about supernatural entities however exalted. As I keep saying, this is actually very simple: it is just a matter of practice, and some measure of honesty in thinking through the implications of one’s experience.

Sam Harris, in a passage I’ve quoted often here before, writes:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Waking Up

I’m not sure I’ve encountered a better summary. And yet Harris also writes (ibid.) “…many spiritual teachings ask us to entertain unfounded ideas about the nature of reality—or at the very least to develop a fondness for the iconography and rituals of one or another religion.” I have been trying no longer to entertain unfounded ideas.

Nontheist Quakers, among others, have of course long engaged with this issue. But for me, at this late stage in my life, something simpler is needed. I have to own up to having discovered myself to be an atheist. There is no need to imagine the supernatural. The mystery of the natural is, at rest in its ground, all that we are. In that there is all the peace and clarity I had not expected, but had so long sought.

#atheism #contemplative #PaulTillich #practice #religion #SamHarris #surrender

Atheism and the Tao

The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao
The names that are given do not contain their true meaning
Within the nameless is the true meaning
What is named has a mother and she is the mother of ten thousand things
The un-seeable is always seeable within the internal to those who are not bound by desire
Those who live in a state of desire see only the external illusion of manifestation
These two opposites are born from the same source
The source contains its mystery in darkness
Within the darkness is the darkness that is the gateway to the mysteries

(Tao Te Ching, tr. Dennis Waller)

In all the translations of, and the writings about, the Tao (when spoken, ‘Dao’) there is an insistence that words and names are superfluous, that the Tao – while apparently having no objective reality of its own – can only be experienced subjectively. It is a philosophy, a pursuit of wisdom and a study of natural realities. Tao is not a religion: that is Taoism. We must, however, use words to explain how Tao came to be written down, what part it played in history and what its relevance is in the modern world.

(Pamela Ball, The Essence of Tao)

As Pamela Ball points out, the Tao is not a religious concept, any more than my much (over?) used phrase “the ground of being”, which I derived originally – if I remember correctly – from Paul Tillich via Richard Rohr. But in many ways they are both pointing towards the same truth: that the ontological source of all is, though quite literally inconceivable, able to be encountered.

So what has any of this to do with atheism? Well, it is next to impossible to approach this inconceivability of the utter beginning of what is from within the creedal framework of organised religion. (A few have managed it – witness Eckhart’s Istigkeit or Merton’s point vierge – but they are rare geniuses out on the perilous edge of their faith.) But without these constraints it seems more possible, if no easier, to find words for what has all too often been set aside as ineffable.

This is why experience, whether by a formal practice of meditation or by sheer force of circumstance (as in, for instance, near death experiences), will never be supplanted by even the most sophisticated reasoning. “I can’t find the words…” may be the beginning of wisdom.

#atheism #contemplative #DennisWaller #LaoTzu #MeisterEckhart #PamelaBall #PaulTillich #religion #RichardRohr #Tao #ThomasMerton #unknowing

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗜’𝗺 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴: "𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗕𝗲" 𝗯𝘆 𝗣𝗮𝘂𝗹 𝗧𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗵 -

Existentialist "socialist" Christian philosopher Tillich in his classic 1952 book on meeting uncertainty and anxiety in the modern age, probably a fitting follow-up to 1951's Arendt!

#books #bookreviews #bookworm #readreadread #tbr #tbrpile #tbrlist #quotes #reading #paultillich #thecouragetobe #existentialism #christianity #faith #philosophy

𝗧𝗕𝗥 𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗲: 𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘀 -

It's Spiritual Literacy Month! And some other titles I haven't gotten to this year. . .

#books #literature #bookreviews #bookworm #tbrpile #tbrlist #dierdrekessler #paultillich #thecouragetobe #jackkornfield #buddhaslittleinstructionbook #rosamundstonezander #theartofpossibility #hermannhesse #trees #daytripper #fabiomoon #gabrielba #vsnaipaul #indiaawoundedcivilization #gilasher #epistemicfriction

𝗧𝗕𝗥 𝗣𝗶𝗹𝗲: 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 𝗡𝗼𝗻𝗳𝗶𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄 -

What is the nonfiction I'm most looking forward to reading this next year? Here are some!

https://youtube.com/shorts/BadNWyYhxw8

#books #literature #bookreviews #bookworm #tbrpile #tbrlist #2025preview #tbr2025 #nonfiction #brianrichardson #ernstcassirer #philliparringon #theartofpossibility #kurtvonnegut #albertmurray #theomniamericans #abreathoflife #claricelispector #thecouragetobe #paultillich #democracyawakening #heathercoxrichardson

Luther, Schleiermacher, Tillich

Die Theologie ist geprägt von facettenreichen Denkansätzen, die sich aus unterschiedlichen Epochen und individuellen Fragestellungen speisen. Martin Luther, Paul Tillich und Friedrich Schleiermacher stehen exemplarisch für drei bedeutende Ansätze, die jeweils auf ihre Weise den Glauben, die menschliche Existenz und die Beziehung zu Gott interpretieren.

Martin Luther, der Reformator des 16. Jahrhunderts, legte den Fokus auf die Rechtfertigung des Menschen allein durch den Glauben (sola fide) und die Schrift als oberste Autorität (sola scriptura). In einer Zeit, die von kirchlicher Machtfülle und Werkgerechtigkeit geprägt war, betonte Luther die Unmittelbarkeit der Beziehung zwischen Gott und Mensch. Der Mensch ist nach Luther vor Gott gerechtfertigt, nicht durch seine Taten, sondern durch den Glauben an die Gnade Gottes, wie sie in Christus offenbar wird.

Friedrich Schleiermacher, der im frühen 19. Jahrhundert wirkte, legte den Schwerpunkt auf das individuelle religiöse Bewusstsein. Für ihn war Religion weder ein System von Lehren noch eine bloße Ethik, sondern primär das „Gefühl schlechthinniger Abhängigkeit“ vom Göttlichen. Schleiermacher suchte eine Synthese zwischen aufklärerischem Denken und pietistischer Frömmigkeit, indem er die subjektive Erfahrung in den Mittelpunkt stellte. Seine Theologie zielte darauf ab, Religion als Grunddimension menschlicher Existenz zu verstehen, die alle kulturellen Bereiche durchdringt.

Paul Tillich, ein prominenter Theologe des 20. Jahrhunderts, versuchte, die Theologie in den Kontext der modernen Welt zu stellen. Er definierte Gott als das „Sein selbst“ oder den „Grund des Seins“ und legte den Fokus auf die existenzielle Dimension des Glaubens. Tillichs Konzept der „Grenzsituationen“ zeigt, dass der Mensch in Momenten der Angst und Sinnsuche Gott als das Fundament seines Seins erfahren kann. Für Tillich war die Theologie ein Dialog zwischen dem zeitgenössischen Menschen und den ewigen Fragen des Seins.

Im Vergleich zeigt sich eine Entwicklung von einer Theologie, die sich auf die Autorität der Schrift (Luther), über die subjektive Erfahrung (Schleiermacher) bis hin zur philosophischen Reflexion der Existenz (Tillich) konzentriert. Während Luther die objektive Gnade Gottes betont, rückt Schleiermacher die subjektive Wahrnehmung Gottes ins Zentrum. Tillich wiederum versucht, diese Ansätze in einem existenziellen Rahmen zu integrieren, der die modernen Fragen nach Sinn und Sein beantwortet. Gemeinsam ist allen drei Denkern der Wunsch, den Glauben an Gott in ihrer jeweiligen Zeit zu vermitteln, doch sie tun dies mit unterschiedlichen Methoden und Schwerpunkten, die die Vielfalt theologischen Denkens illustrieren.

#christlicheGlaubenslehre #FriedrichSchleiermacher #JesusCasa #MartinLuther #PaulTillich #religiösePhilosophie #Theologie #vergleichendeTheologie