HOLINESS IS NOT RELIGION

This is in my Kahil Gibran mode, so be warned of portentous epigrams.  A little too facile, a little too marketable, a little too self-conscious.  But earnest.  I was delighted to discover that Gibran did portraits of centaurs, so I threw them in here as well.  When I looked for Gibran's portrait, I found them at http://centaurican.wordpress.com  You can think of some metaphorical relationship if you want to: why should I do all the work?  

THE RELIGION PUZZLE

The trouble is that we’re not talking about the same things at all.

The original source is a feeling of holiness, a FELT thing that comes to a person and is simply that, not even share-able with friends.  You just FEEL it.  The trigger might not be the same for any two people.  It’s effect on you would be measurable by instruments like a lie-detector: it is physical as well as mental and emotional.  Holiness is not.  It is ineffable.

You might feel it when you’re drowning, when you’re getting married, when you’re being tortured, when making love, when summiting a mountain, while dancing -- it just happens.  It is a whole body experience -- in fact, maybe that’s what we really feel: a wholeness, a harmony, an embeddedness in existence, when the entire body is focused and alive.

It doesn’t seem controllable, though one can prepare for it.  And one can turn away from it.  It has nothing to do with race or nationality or state of wellness, neither youth nor age, gender or any other of the distinctions we make.  Some will claim other species can feel it, but it’s unproven.  How would you?  Still, it’s pre-language, though language can reach it, touch it, possibly even call it -- as can any other art.  Possibly this is the underground spring of neanderthal art.

by Salvador Dali

If several people feel it -- let’s say while standing on a ridge overlooking the sea at sunset -- then the sharing is a new dimension.  It’s felt, it’s communal, some would say it was aesthetic, it just is what it is -- no explanation needed.  But sometimes at that moment a group needs movement and song, if only simple percussion.

Ecology is what sustains life, presses variety into it, for sea people are different from mountain people, those on fertile land are not like those on desert.  This is the engine of evolution because it changes what is necessary for survival -- not more aggression or force, but more fittingness and more ingenuity.  When things are going well, there is gratitude and joy and well-being.  When things are going awry, there is worry and seeking and maybe suffering.  

The business of how to act can be codified in books or can be structured by childhood when adults had the answers and the strength.  This is NOT the same as holiness.  It is a moral structuring, a plan for what should be done.  This is the part that get mixed into politics and government and called “religion” but it has nothing to do with holiness.  It’s about “authority” and the REAL authority, which is -- as it was among tribal peoples -- a matter of success.  If stuff works, that’s its own self-generated authority.  But people try to assume and defend that authority to themselves, even if they fail.  

If some people are pretty good at knowing the practices that bring success, they can become leaders.  Often part of leading is telling stories, so they do.  When writing was invented, people wrote down stories, but actually the first use of writing was accounting and that is the dominant use of writing.  It’s a form of morality, describing rules and boundaries -- what is fair and who is owed.  Soon authority and power become part of this.  Punishment stops being natural consequences and starts being imposed by the group in degrees: stigma, bureaucratic regulation, criminalization, death sentence. 

Leaders like to have a place from which to lead and it helps if that place is impressive, so now there are palaces, which have nothing to do with holiness (indeed, often the opposite!) and temples which try very hard to seem at least imposing but may or may not convey holiness.  To be awed or overwhelmed is NOT to feel holiness.  To be impressed by wealth destroys the feeling of holiness.  Institutions that identify themselves as religious have little or nothing to do with holiness.  The possible exception might be the kind of Quakers who sit quietly waiting for the Light, their word for the feeling of holiness.  Asians do better than we do.

“Civilization” as we know it is only ten millennia long, coinciding with climate change (which means ecological change) that pushed people into new regions where they had to learn new things, like domestication of animals and growing of crops.  For only two millennia the Western version of civilization, based on writing to record commerce, has followed trade routes throughout the planet.  It has proven to be destructive because all construction must be accompanied by deconstruction in order to get the materials.  This culture is profit-based, which means seeking sources of wealth for itself at the expense of everything else.

Holiness had nothing to do with it until civilization accrued enough wealth to take humans into outer space.  As soon as we could see the planet from space, holiness returned in a new way.  Still immanent through the Earth, the sacred is now also transcendent if we open ourselves to the spangled surging galaxies.  The most important realization is that we are pinpoints in existence.

The next most important realization is that we exist at all, and that’s not a reason for despair but for celebration because we are there, participants, transformations passed through by time, creating time. Something will come after us that doesn’t look like us.  

But whatever it is will undoubtedly feel the same holiness.  Because this is the third most important realization, that we are aware, conscious, able to know that we are feeling at all.  This is the cutting edge of human evolution.  Call it art.  Holiness calls us to reach out for even more awareness, more participation, better fittingness to a limited planet.

But this opens us up to more pain, more suffering -- both of which are awareness.  Holiness does not remove them.  In fact, pain and suffering will try to shut down awareness and a sense of the holy.  They tell you what to brace against, to oppose, to diminish.

If an institution, which includes both the body of dogma and the bureaucracy that supports and maintains it, will take on this duty of reducing suffering and let universal awareness guide its morality (see above) then the institution is “good.”  But if it varnishes over whatever damages the planet, then it is “evil.”  But only from a human point of view because of the destruction of ecologies where we can survive.  The planet does not care.  It loves the moon, not us.  (Love is a metaphor for attraction.  Planets do not have emotions.  They have gravity.)

If an institution claims “compassion” but in fact merely alleviates immediate suffering without addressing the dynamics that cause the suffering, it is NOT necessarily compassionate and may simply be courting prestige and approval.  See http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-industrial-complex.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130727&_r=0  On the other hand, a fully human person cannot tolerate suffering humans.  Because the next realization is empathy, feeling in our own minds and bodies a mirroring of others.  

This means we can share the feeling of holiness.  It is a capacity, not an inevitability and it is not done by institutions, which have nothing to do with holiness and cannot recognize it.  For individuals to mirror any of the feelings of other human beings, it is necessary to encounter others directly and in detail.  There is no such thing as generic suffering, though holiness seems to be only one universal thing, but easily mimicked and often claimed illegitimately.  We must be open to the world and our connection.  It is our only future.