One of the major roots of tension and paranoia in the United States today is the conflict between religion and politics. It has a fascinating history, which is largely a religious history. Most citizens of the United States who claim to be religious are either Christians or Jews, inheriting a form of religion that is based on a monarchical model of the universe. But the nation itself is a republic, ideally and theoretically democratic, having philosophical origins in an outburst of mysticism that occurred in Western Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, associated with such individuals as Meister Eckhart, John of Ruysbroek, Angelus Silesius, and Richard Tauler, and with such movements as the Anabaptists, the Brothers of the Free Spirit, the Levellers, and the Quakers, which arose in the three centuries following as a consequence of this mystical outburst.1
Mysticism implies democracy because it is the discovery of what George Fox called the Inward Light in the hearts of all men, of God not only above but also within, thus challenging the authority of the state and the divine right of kings with the authority of the individual conscience. It realizes and implements the views that all men are equal in the sight of God, or rather, at the level of their inmost divinity. From such insights and stirrings as these, as well as from economic pressures, hundreds and then thousands left the feudal and monarchical order of Europe, came to this country, and eventually established a republic as their form of government.
How can one believe that a republic is the best form of government if, at the same time, one believes that the universe is a monarchy? For, obviously, if the universe is a monarchy with God himself in charge, then monarchical principles are the best for ruling. Jews, Catholics, and Fundamentalist Protestants believe emphatically that God is the heavenly king and father who must above all be obeyed. However, is it possible to be religious, to have faith in God, without believing that the universe is a monarchy? Does the idea of God necessarily imply the principle of monarchy at the base of the universe? Surely not, for there are, outside the Western world, many traditional and, for want of a better word, religious views of the universe wherein God—or whatever name may be used for the ultimate reality—is not conceived as a monarch. This would generally be true for the Hindu, and most definitely for the Buddhist and Taoist. The Hindu does not see God as ruling the universe as a king imposes order by force on inferior subjects. He sees God, not as ruling, but as acting the world as a drama in which he is the player of all the parts, so that the whole multiplicity of individual beings are not his subjects but his roles and masks (personae). Usually, the actor himself is so absorbed in each part that he forgets he is merely playing, but, in certain individual instances, he wakes up and says, “Well, at last I have discovered that I am God in disguise.” In Hindu culture this discovery is considered, not as madness or megalomania, but as a matter for congratulation, since it is not as if the finite individual had suddenly claimed to be everybody’s boss.
But if we, in the context of the Hebrew-Christian culture, wake up and discover that we are God, we are accused of subversive blasphemy or total insanity, since it is understood that one is claiming to be the universal monarch. At the present time this is giving us considerable trouble, especially in the industrial-electronic, democratic-republican style of culture that has been emerging in the modern world. For we are being brought up under the sway of two mutually inconsistent philosophies. On the one hand, we are told that we must be responsible, and that it’s up to us, as independent citizens in equality with all others, to assume responsibility for the government of our country. On the other hand, instead of doing just that, we are also looking over our shoulders for support and authority from tradition, law, and monarchical order deriving from the father and the past. Thus when people do something we don’t like, our first, naive reaction is to say, “There ought to be a law against it!”
To give a specific illustration, one of our major social problems today, particularly for young people, is our mistrust and dislike of the police. They have a terrible public image because we are asking them to do what we should be doing for ourselves. We have saddled ourselves with an army of armed clergymen charged with compelling us to be moral, with results that are dangerously confusing to both the citizen and the policeman. Let us not forget that the police officer does not necessarily enjoy this role. For the delegation of such authority to officials of the state is both a hoax on oneself and a source of corruption in the state. Moral behavior is significantly and truly moral only when it is voluntary. Morality by compulsion reduces us to a state that is less than human. It results in a perpetual infantilism in which we ask a governmental daddy to force us to behave as we think we ought to behave but do not want to behave, and toward whom we must therefore have ever-growing resentment.
It is almost a platitude to say that a free society cannot exist without mutual trust and without individual assumption of moral responsibility. To ask the government to be responsible for law and order is to ask for a police state. In a free society the function of the police is primarily to give information (for example, as to the conditions and flow of automotive traffic) and assistance (for example, in the event of such disasters as fires and earthquakes). By and large, and in the long run, it becomes more and more apparent that threats of punishment, and the actual penalties of fine or imprisonment or even death, do not significantly promote civilized and rational behavior. On the contrary, they may in fact foster crime as an expression of resentment, and it is well-known that the Mafia-type syndicates that are involved in gambling and prostitution do not want laws against such activities to be repealed. Repeal would lower the price and open up the market. Thus, in lobbying for the maintenance of sumptuary laws against moral crimes without unwilling victims, the criminal syndicates work hand-in-hand with the churches. Never was there more convincing evidence of the implicit identity of prudery and vice, of righteous, boss-type God and malicious Devil. As Lao-Tzu put it:
The more laws and regulations are given,
The more robbers and thieves abound.
All this implies, therefore, that a mature religion (or religiousness) must abandon the monarchical image of God. And this is the God of whom many theologians are now saying, “God is dead!” But, as we have seen, if there is to be any image of conception of God at all, this is not the only option. The Bible has, of course, passed down to our present cultures a mythomorphic image (or idol) of God modeled on the tyrant-kings of the ancient Near-East—the Pharaohs of Egypt, the great Chaldean lawgiver Hammurabi, and the Cyruses (Kyrioi) of Persia, in whose likeness God is still venerated when we sing “Kyrie eleison—Lord have mercy,” and whose titles “Kind of kings and Lord of lords” are still used in the Church of England’s prayer for the King’s (or Queen’s) Majesty:
O Lord our Heavenly Father, high and mighty, King of kings, Lord of lords, the only ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth: most heartily we beseech thee with thy favor to behold our sovereign Lady Elizabeth the Queen …
This is obviously the language of court flattery, and the very design of the church in which such words are heard is the royal court, or basilica, where the king sits enthroned upon a dais with his back to the wall, flanked by a semicircle of ministers and guards, and approached by subjects who prostrate themselves or kneel, so as to be in a disadvantageous position for starting a fight.
Yet today a curious transition is taking place in, of all places, the Roman Catholic Church. (Always keep your eye on the Catholic Church: it is a spiritual weathervane. It’s the most conservative institution in the Western world, and thus anything changing there is change at a very deep level.) All over the world, Roman Catholic churches are shifting their high altars from the East end to the center of their temples, so that the God-Christ no longer sits with his back to the wall but comes forward to be the center of the congregation—since “the kingdom of heaven is within you.” There is, perhaps, no official realization and, certainly, no open statement of what this change implies, for fundamental transformations begin at an unconscious level. But by this gesture the Church is turning itself into a flower, a mandala, instead of a militarized court, and this intimates—along the directions of Teilhard de Chardin’s theology—a radical alteration in the Church’s ideas of man’s relation to God, as of the very nature of God.
What we are beginning to see is a new realization—influenced, no doubt, by oriental philosophy—of the relation of the individual to the basic energy of the universe that Tillich called “the Ground of Being”—in an attempt to find some name for “the Which than which there is no whicher” bereft of all the gloomy and pompous associations that stick to the word “God.”2 For this relationship is no longer to be conceived as that between king and subject, commander and soldier, paterfamilias and filially pious child. It is, instead, the stelliform relationship of star to its rays, center to circumference, hub to spokes, or even role to actor. If God remains in any sense king, the universe is then his crown—not something lying abjectly at his feet.
Concurrently, religion as a way of life ceases to put its emphasis on doctrine (teaching), law (commandments), and obedience, and religious “services” become instead celebrations from which words and preachments increasingly disappear. Actually, the very word “religion” means bondage, or submission to a rule of life. Used in its most exact sense, “religion” is the way of life of a monk or nun undertaking the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—the latter virtue ranking (in practice if not theory) higher than divine charity. Catholics will, for example, reprove Protestants for interpreting the Bible according to their personal opinions and not to the authority of the Church, forgetting, however, that the notion of the Church’s authority is their own personal opinion. Likewise, supposedly “liberated” people of our own times who put themselves under the authority of a guru fail to see that they themselves confer authority on the guru by choosing him.
The monarchical conception of the universe, implying religion as a way of obedience, perpetuates forms of ritual, worship, and liturgy with a dominant emotion of groveling guiltiness and intensely earnest obsequiousness. Absolutely no laughter is allowed. The Romans had a saying that when priests laugh before the altar, the religion is dead. But how, then, could Dante’s vision of hell, purgatory, and paradise be entitled the Divine Comedy? How could he have described the singing of the angels as the “laughter of the universe?” The underlying supposition of monarchical religion as that you as an individual are something quite other than God. You are merely a creature, evoked out of total nothingness by a fiat, or whimsy, of the divine will. Contrary to the republican axiom that every man has certain inalienable rights; you have no right to exist whatsoever: you exist solely by the will and at the pleasure of your sovereign Lord, and between you and your divine Author there is an absolute metaphysical and ontological gulf. The very core of your being is not the Ground of Being itself. You exist on probation.
Yet as a result of the philosophical thought and the scientific investigations of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, this conception of the order of the universe has become implausible. We simply do not believe in it, although there are many who feel most strongly that they ought to believe, which is why there are so many sermons in the churches on the need for a revived faith. When it is necessary to have billboards proclaiming the “The family which prays together stays together,” we realize that both the family and prayer are obsolete.
In fact we believe that the universe is a mindless mechanism; that mankind is a biological fluke on a minute and utterly unimportant planet. That is to say, we still view ourselves as subjects and minions—but without a king; as slaves with no other master than the laws of nature—and there is no lawmaker. This is the image of the universe as a completely computerized bureaucracy with a high percentage of inefficiency. In such circumstances, man’s only recourse is to fight nature and beat it into submission, realizing at the same time that his victories are only temporary, and that his role is essentially tragic since
all which it inherit shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
We have developed this mechanistic view of the world because we began, historically, with the model of the universe as an artifact made by God. Perhaps it is not insignificant that Jesus was the son of a carpenter.
Looking at things this way, we can preen ourselves as realistic, tough-minded men who face the hard and brutal facts without illusions or wishful thinking. The more lifeless, mindless, and dead our concept of cosmic energy, the more the individual can come on with the role of tragic hero. We put ourselves down, as biological flukes, in order to put ourselves up as hard-fact-facers taking pride in the skill and intensity of our hostility toward our environment. The natural outcome of this attitude is a technology that exploits, erodes, pollutes, and destroys our physical surroundings.
But any biologist can demonstrate that man and his physical environment constitute an inseparable field or pattern of energy. (That this, unless he is the cantankerous, “what-a-realist-I-am” kind of fellow who insists, for example, that birds hate flying.) It is nothing more than a conceptual myth, a hallucination, that the human organism with its ego-ghost-chauffeur (Koestler’s Ghost in the Machine) is other than or apart from the total process of nature, and that human intelligence functions separately from the marvelously integrated organization of plants, insects, bacteria, animals, gases, and geological formations that constellate its environment. Thus the current commonsensical attitude to nature that sees man as the ruler and conqueror of the world is, in fact, an emotional hangover of the former view of the universe as a mindless chaos put into order by the monarchical power of God the Father, which, as we have seen, has ceased to be plausible.
What, then, is the coming direction of intelligent religious thought and practice? Let me begin with a slightly facetious fantasy. Within 20 years, Asia will be laced with super-highways, littered with hot-dog stands, billboards, and neon-signs, and every coolie will be sporting a business-suit. On the other hand, our own highways will be sprouting grass, and there will be an abundance of stately lamaseries and ashrams. People will be strolling about in easy robes, fingering rosaries and twirling prayer-wheels. There will be enormous schools of philosophical and theological inquiry, as also of meditation-practice celebrated for the superb chanting of Sanskrit and Chinese sutras, and frustrated Tibetans will be coming to Chicago to study Buddhism.
The point is that the direction of our spiritual endeavors will be away from interminable verbiage and laying-down of laws. Hitherto, all our churches have been talking, preaching, and praying places—reverberating with words upon words upon words. The new religious values will be in the domain of experience as distinct from ideation and formulation. As Alfred North Whitehead said back in 1926:
When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. There is no substitute for the direct perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in actuality. We want concrete fact with a highlight thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness. … We are too exclusively bookish in our scholastic routine. … In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them; in the traditional system [of education], children named the animals before they saw them. (Whitehead, 1926/1933, pp. 247–248)
We have confused knowledge with what can be expressed in words or numbers as against what can be felt and sensed. Thus Western religions have stressed the overwhelming importance of dogma and belief, that is, of correct ideas even beyond the importance of correct behavior. Salvation comes through faith rather than works, and, in this context, faith has meant not so much trust in life as assent to certain theological propositions. Contrariwise, such oriental “religions” as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism—in stressing the importance of immediate experience rather than intellectual concepts—are, oddly enough, more down-to-earth and (in the best sense) materialistic and empirical than even Western science. For what a man senses and feels in his very bones underlies how he thinks and behaves. The scientists know, theoretically, that organism and environment, man and nature, are all of a piece. But few of them feel it. Their theoretical view is not vividly experienced at the level expressed by such terms as “cosmic consciousness,” satori, or samadhi. For these are states of consciousness as total and overwhelming as falling in love; they are not opinions or beliefs, wishes or hopes. They are the direct, immediate, and concrete experience of the individual’s identity with the entire energy of the universe, of himself as an expression of the Ground of Being, set and centered in timeless, ultimate reality.
My position is not that of an anti-intellectual for, after all, my profession is the manipulation of words and the pursuit of scholarship in the field of comparative philosophy and religion. However, the intellectual life must, to have any substance, be based upon nonverbal and nonconceptual experience. If I talk all the time, I cannot hear what others have to say. Similarly, if I think (or talk to my self) all the time I have nothing to think about except thoughts. I know the map but not the territory; I have read the menu but not tasted the dinner.
We need to reach this level of experiencing in the sphere of religion, and the current fascination for the empirical religions of Asia, for encounter groups, sensitivity training, and for sundry experiments in the transformation of consciousness by both chemical and psychological methods shows the direction in which younger people are moving. If I may, again, be just slightly frivolous, I am predicting that we have in circulation a new, but actually very ancient religion called OM—a sound that Hindus and Buddhists have used to designate the total energy of the universe because it comprises the whole range of sound from the bottom of the throat to the lips, sometimes spelled Aum. This religion has neither members nor nonmembers, no hierarchy, no offices, no buildings, no organization, and, above all, no doctrines. It is strictly “do-it-yourself” religion, consisting entirely of meditation, music, and ritual—but not according to any prescribed formulas. To understand it, you must participate in it; there are no explanations.
In meditation, music, and ritual gesture we become free from the hypnotic tyranny of words and concepts and return to reality. I will not define reality. It cannot be defined, and yet all of you know what it is. It cannot be called material or physical, spiritual or mental, for all these are verbalizations and concepts. Reality is what the Hindus call nirvikalpa or “nonconceptual,” and it is apprehended in meditation because meditation (dhyana) is the silencing of the chatter of thoughts in the mind—an art that is assisted by the nonverbal adjuncts of music and ritual (mantra and mudra). It brings us into a state of awareness in which the notions of self and other, past and future, knower and known, mind and body, feeler and feeling, thinker and thought have simply disappeared.
Most civilized peoples have lost this awareness. We all had it as babies—in what Freud called the “oceanic” feeling in which the individual and the surrounding world were not distinguished. But the oceanic feeling of a baby is as different from mature samadhi as an acorn from an oak tree. The baby has not yet developed a rich intellectual, emotional, and kinesthetic life, and thus has not mastered the technique whereby his oceanic feeling can be expressed or realized. However, in the process of education and civilization, most people lose this original sense of existence and learn to identify themselves with the isolated personality John or Mary by confusion of the symbol with the event. To regain it, we must temporarily suspend the symbolizing process in meditation, even though in meditation itself we have no goal or purpose because we are then living completely in the present. Meditation, as generally practiced in Asia, is not a self-improvement exercise done with an eye to the future; it is being centered in the eternal now, and can be maintained not only while sitting in the lotus-posture but also in going about one’s ordinary affairs. To use Frederic Spiegelberg’s phrase, one might say that real meditation is “the religion of no-religion,” since “religion” ordinarily means symbolic action and such verbalization as prayer and the study of scriptures. But when Zen monks chant the sutras, they concentrate on the sound and pay no attention to the meaning.
If the human race is to continue in operation, such a new direction in religion is essential. It is absolutely urgent that we do not allow our preoccupation with symbols to distract our awareness from the real world. For what on earth is the value of money or status when water is poisonous, air foul, food tasteless, and habitation ugly? It is useless to plan for the future when you cannot live in the present, for you will never be able to enjoy the fulfillment of your plans. Furthermore, all our major quarrels and wars are concerned with such symbolic abstractions as ideologies, creeds, states, nations, races, monetary investments, contracts, and laws. I am not saying that all such abstractions should be abolished forthwith, but—on the principle that the Sabbath is made for man and not man for the Sabbath—they should be seen as strictly subordinate and instrumental to life itself, having only the same degree or reality as inches or lines of longitude. One has but to compare a political map or globe with a physical map (or with the new and glorious photograph of the earth from the moon) to realize that the former is ugly, unnatural, and absurd.
In sum, then, I am suggesting that in times to come the focus and center of religion must not be on a conceptual God. We must realize that the confusion of God with theological images is a far more dangerous idolatry than the ritual veneration of crucifixes and buddhas, which no sensible person ever believed to be the actual deity. The word “God,” if it is to be retained at all, must simply designate reality—the dimension of inconceivable, unutterable, and ineffable energy in which we not only “live and move and have our being,” but that is also the only presence that corresponds to the words “I am.” This as experience—not belief—is the only thing that can take us beyond the banality of life considered merely as a trip from the maternity ward to the crematorium.
1. You will see these connections clearly by reading Gooch and Laski (1967).
2. It is of interest that the younger generation in Japan use the word kurai (“dark,” “dank,” “gloomy”), in relation to certain forms of Buddhism, even though no conception of a monarchical God is involved. Nevertheless, it is used with reference to Buddhist sects that overstress the patriarchal authority of the priesthood and have strict adherence to traditional proprieties.
Gooch, G. P., & Laski, H. G. (1967). English democratic ideas in the seventeenth century (2nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1933). Science and the modern world. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1926.)
From Toward Century 21: Technology, Society, and Human Values, edited by C. S. Wallia, Copyright © 1970. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.