Jesus: Lost and Found
At one point or another, I suppose it is inevitable that we should ruin this dinner party by talking about religion. [From the upcoming book, Jan 1st, 2023]
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As William James, this American “father of psychology”, wrote in his 1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience: “Religion, whatever it is, is man’s total reaction upon life”. It’s how we relate to the whole. Also known as: “the question of life, the universe, and everything”. Or, simply: What is of ultimate significance? What is, when all is said and done, truly important?
Let’s keep this broad view of what religion is in mind. What, then, can a sincerely ironic stance do for our religious relationship to reality, ourselves, life, the universe, and everything? Where does it leave that “faith” we were just speaking of?
Here, you can see a similar but distinct progression as the one outlined above: from sincere belief, through nihilism and skepticism, towards sincere irony. If sincerity would mean something like “believe in Jesus as the son of God, and as your personal savior who made miracles happen” where God is the ultimate source of all true, good, and beautiful in the world and the everpresent creator of it all, the nihilistic stance is simply to not believe in any of that: it’s bullshit.
And, of course, it is bullshit. Jesus couldn’t heal the sick, turn water into wine, or walk on water, nor was he born by a virgin, nor was he the son of God, nor was he resurrected. Mohammed couldn’t move a mountain, and Buddha didn’t fly around and cast fireballs (yep, that’s a thing in the scriptures); he didn’t even teleport across the Ganges. And even if God was in the world making miracles happen, why on earth would the focus be on wine and fireworks, or getting teenagers pregnant without consent (i.e. the Virgin Mary)? It’s preposterous not only at the level of empirical claims; it’s preposterous even at an existential and spiritual level, just too dumb to do any notion of God or [other placeholder of ultimate significance] any justice.
Yeah, yeah, of course we don’t believe in that stuff. But there are mysteries, things beyond our comprehension, things like… special and difficult-to-understand capabilities of rare, accomplished, spiritual masters, right? Things like Rupert Sheldrake’s biology of morphic fields, new frontiers of science that rediscover spiritual perennial truths beyond the rational mind. Or at least the possibility thereof. There are synchronicities and serendipities too unlikely to have occurred naturally. There are energies. Flows.
No, it’s all bullshit. There aren’t any miracles. Not even just a little, not even in a profound transrational sense, not even in the distant East. So stop it. No, Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of telepathic dogs isn’t correct. There aren’t any morphic fields and dogs aren’t telepathic. Certainly, with Joseph Campbell, that great interpreter of myths, we can look at “walking on water” as a metaphor for “mastering our unconscious” and so on; but believing in the miracle itself very demonstrably does harm. I won’t bore you with the work of the “new atheists” who labor to show this, but they do have a point.
It can feel a bit brutal, but it’s time to take the red pill. We live in a world entirely devoid of all magic and all miracles. That is to say, we live in a world where things are caused by other things in replicable, if complex, manners. That’s the same as understanding that there are no nooks and crannies left of magic or miracles, not even at farthest reaches of the mind, the universe, the far East, life, and everything. All in this sense “metaphysical” claims of all the religions are entirely false; and there is really no need for a shred of mercy or sentimentality about it.
Well yes, I see what you’re saying Hanzi, but…
No, seriously, stop it. You’re not doing yourself or anyone else any favors with that stuff. There is no “but”, no “both and” here, no “higher synthesis”, no hidden pattern in profound symbols that reveals an esoteric truth that unlocks your chosenness, no meditative insight that saves the metaphysical claims of any of the religions… No multiperspectivalism that puts you into contact with the indigenous spirit worlds. No healing practice that sends energies through the deepest layers of consciousness across continents.
That’s what killing God feels like: it’s a brutal dead-end. It’s not supposed to feel good or right. It just is what it is: the death of ideas that are false. And then we go after all the saints and sages (they’re mediocre), every miracle, every siddhi, every magic residual in the known universe. Kill, kill, kill. Die, die, die.
And together with the magic, we also kill off all crazy guru abuses, many of the cults (but cults can and do still show up in political and self-development guises), and our tendency to disregard and disrespect science. We also kill off New Age abuse of desperate people, the cruel commercialization of the human soul where sad people pay for expensive crystals. Oh yeah, and then we kill the notion of “the soul” because that’s also magical thinking. Santa, too.
And now, if the red pill has been properly gobbled down, and only now, do we take the blue pill. It’s the ultimate marshmallow test of humanity. Real magic is felt, not believed. Or let me restate that a bit more precisely: Magic is an experiential, not an objective, category. Magic is never in the thing itself, it’s always in the context, in the relationship. Magic lives in the larger weave of relationships within which “the thing” arises as a part of our experience. It’s about the sense of connection to wholeness, to oneness, that is accessed through our way of experiencing that particular thing. So, sure, a new agey crystal or gem can be magical and in some sense have magic powers (disregarding the not-so-magical underbelly of that mining industry…). But it’s not the crystal itself: it’s what it awakens in us and how it helps us see the beauty of the world.
We can reconstruct God, yes, but only after we’re done properly killing them. Now, we are free to reconstruct religion, to delve head-first into the faith of the faithless (with the words of the philosopher Simon Critchley).
So the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything, can indeed be a better one than an absurd “42”. Once you’ve grounded the wire of spirituality with relentless skepticism and ironic distance and the most ruthless nihilism imaginable, you can begin to reclaim the spiritual realm. If you want to be crude about it, you could say that spiritual experience exists within and beyond the traditional religions, but that it becomes a good and constructive force in our day and age only at the other side of atheism. By first mastering atheism, for all of its unimaginative and judgmental simple-mindedness, we can begin to unleash the power of spirituality in our lives and beyond. Religion and its rapture is recaptured from the monster of modern life.
Enter sincere irony: the teachings of ironic prophets. The religions that can grow and prosper in this realm aren’t exactly religions as we normally think of them. They excavate and revive not the metaphysical and miraculous claims of the contemplative traditions of religions, but their existential truths. And yes, the religions are true, they were right, as all of them point to insights that are correct and profound but of which modern mainstream consciousness remains oblivious. And what a strange oblivion — that we discovered the greatest truths centuries ago but then forgot them!
Take Jesus, for example. It is true that we lost him as the literal son of a heavenly father and cosmic creator in our merciless purge of all magic from the world. We lost him, of course, in the sense that we no longer believe in what are, if you’re entirely sober about it, childish bullshit fairy tales. But now we can find him again, in a more mature and adult relationship. He’s not our savior or daddy figure. But he’s not entirely wrong, either: non-judgment and forgiveness really are higher truths if you look at it, there are very good reasons indeed to try to find universal love for all and to live by it; and, yes, we really are sinners in that we shouldn’t think of ourselves as inherently good but rather become good by always seeing how we are flawed and limited in our moral and cognitive capacities. And yes, there really is a whole kingdom of God within us, waiting to be discovered there at the highest reaches of our inner subjective states — states that also reach into the depth and core of our being. And yes, people who came before us really did go through torture for us to be here — not just Jesus, but all the martyrs and heroes of humanist values who gave us freedom, dignity, and equality — so a little damned gratitude wouldn’t be such a bad idea. As far as I can see, Jesus has more correct and insightful things to say than almost anyone I can think of. Hallelujah, man.
Likewise, with the Buddha, we can see that you literally can advance through the stages of meditative absorption if you diligently practice meditation — the so-called jhanas — and that this even shows on a brain scanner. And yes, these stages of increasing absorption are roughly yet correctly described and they can be taught and learned. And yes, our desires are always functions of our own minds and end up being frustrated one way or another, and we do well to transform their nature towards becoming less self-centered. And yes, we really do experience a loss of the discrete “sense of self” if we reach the deeper meditative and “higher” inner states. And all experience, pleasurable or painful, even the sense of having a separate soul, really does melt away in a radical emptiness and sense of ultimate freedom if we study it closely and attentively enough. Once we identify with the deeper layers of the mind, and with the consciousness of which we are a part, we can easily see that doing harm to others, to anyone, is in a sense doing harm to ourselves. So even the law of Karma has something going for it: What goes around comes around. That’s true even on a practical level. On average and over time, we tend to benefit from kind actions, when they are performed with discernment (so: actions that are just, as we shall return to in coming chapters). The more we focus on others, the easier time we usually have maintaining a good subjective state ourselves, and genuinely kind actions tend to reward us with nice surprises later down the road, if seldom in the ways we expected. So the focus on compassion is simply, well, correct. Even if counter-examples show up in the short run (we try to be kind and feel cheated, etc.), Karma is certainly worth believing in, sincerely.
If the Buddhist truths get too boring for us, we can plunge deeper yet — into their Hindu and Vedantic roots, and there burn in the sun that comes if you fixate your mind in its entirety upon what is ultimate, what is “absolute” rather than relative (all the facts of the world being relative). That stuff gets you going, it’s religion on fire. It sets literally everything, everywhere, all at once aflame, including the grimmest and most tragic sides of existence which you now see as part of the greatness and seriousness of ultimate reality. The Bhagavad Gita’s most famous passage says it all: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.”
Speaking of feeling one great unification under God: With Islam we can experience a sense of wholeness or oneness that has indeed been shown empirically to support happiness and wellbeing (whereas the bleak belief structures of Buddhism, “everything is suffering”, actually tend to make you less happy unless paired with extensive contemplative practice). By focusing on one principle, one God, one path, we can feel more at home in the universe. Research has even shown that Muslims have the highest score of sense of “oneness” (which in turn correlates with life satisfaction) and atheists have the lowest. Oneness is a genuinely psychologically helpful fiction, like the belief in free will. People feel better and are healthier if they believe in free will, even if it factually speaking doesn’t exist. You get a sense of direction and control, and that affects how your mind self-organizes and avoids dumb excuses. Praise Allah for those placebo effects!
With indigenous religions and rituals, we can begin to reconnect to our bodies, to our communities, to nature, to the complexities of the world around us. We can come into contact with spirit worlds, not as a source of magic in the literal sense, but as a source of relationality and connection, not to mention a sense of enchantment. How inventive we must be, and how attentive to respecting the wisdom of the oldest cultures on the planet, to tap into this ancient homestead of the human psyche! Animist worldviews, for all the differences between them, were in some way or form how humans lived and expressed themselves for tens of thousands of years. They make up our mental homestead. It does seem plausible to think that what humans adapted to for so long also makes sense at a psychological level, more so than our modern lives. Arguably, the more we connect to this source, the greater a role indigenous wisdom can play in creating new forms of sustainable life and community around the world. This is a genuinely exciting prospect that more and more people have been exploring the last few years.
I would even include, among the things we can playfully reconstruct, the zeal of the revolutionary, of the communist, the anarchist: the belief in the possibility of overturning the injustices of society, of imagining new worlds for humans to live in. This is the fire of the French Revolution and its sense that this moment can birth new worlds through an uncompromising commitment to justice. Many of the people who were part of anarchist Catalonia in the 1930s later remembered it as the happiest and most beautiful days of their lives. What a source of energy and agency such “revolutionary happiness” can bring! “The irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist” as philosophers Hardt and Negri once wrote about, can be channeled, if it is only approached responsibly; that is to say, playfully and ironically. And, of course, one must understand that there is no such thing as what Leon Trotsky called “the permanent revolution”; revolution occurs in moments of seismic change, in social and psychological earthquakes; it is analogous to falling in love, as discussed by the Italian sociologist Francesco Alberoni. You can’t always be falling in love; it’s a transformation that occurs a few times in one’s life, if one is lucky (no matter what people say in pop songs and speeches to spouses). Between such “moments of movement”, there is institution, habit — longer stretches of mediocrity. But still, these moments — of the dramatic, the tremendous, the musical — are real enough, and they can be sparked. They really do happen in people’s lives; a sense of complete, shared ecstasy taking over one’s entire being, and they really can change society. And they can at least partly be rekindled here and there in our lives.
Beyond the political passions that stir the soul, even the occult can be played with: dark rituals, satanic cabaals, sex magic, and so on. Sure, the Order of the Golden Dawn never quite delivered on its mysteries and magic spells, nor did any of the many esoteric groups that sprang up around the last turn of the century. But reinvented magical rituals that draw upon the inner beast and its carnal desires, or upon unfiltered dreams and raw emotions, can certainly release strong forces within our lives, at least during short, revolutionary moments. For what it’s worth, such forces inspired rock bands by the dozen, too. The variety of practices called “chaos magick” involves making ourselves entirely suggestible, entirely open to new beliefs, so as to actively reshape our own minds — in effect hypnotizing ourselves. Chaos Magick and other occult paths can help us hack our minds, dramatically and profoundly: they include the “fuck like a beast” insight to a degree that Christianity and classical (theravadan) Buddhism do not. Or, less drastically, there is the ongoing popularization of BDSM and so called “sex positive” events. Tantric sex is part of such explorations, as is tantra in the deeper and original sense (spirituality beginning from embodied experience) and the careful use of sacred and mysterious symbols. Pagan revivals of Odin/Wotan and summer solstice rituals can also play a part here, but make sure not to link these to those crazy far-right ideas. It’s just too good to be properly pagan for a while not to try it.
[If you’re reading this in a setting where it’s not entirely inappropriate, you may now roar like there’s no tomorrow and a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie is about to begin.]
And, of course, there’s the whole reinvention of psychedelic culture and practice, making it more therapeutic, science-based, and responsible (a promising area — I’m also connected to the Psychedelic Society in the UK and I do respect their work — but it is one in which I’d like to see more caution and healthy conservatism; addiction and psychiatric harm from psychedelia are real things, as are abuses within this field). However, I’ll leave that last discussion to others.
Simply stated: There are a lot of blue pills to take, and they can bring us closer to truth, rather than farther away from it. This includes “transrational” truth; existential truths that lie beyond our analytical minds, but somehow ring true from a place within and beyond us.
Oh, and let’s just be honest — how we long for the ecstatic, for some real magic in our lives, for what life was supposed to be. As the mystical traditions taught, and the religions hinted at in their mythologies, truth brings us closer to magic, while illusion has it that the world is plain and mundane. In that sense, all the religions were right, and today’s prevailing atheist-rationalist-materialist-reductionist-scientist worldview is plainly false. It’s a magical world, so wake up and play.
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