What Is the Future of Belief?
I equate the future of belief with the future of God. Modern belief in a deity is much diluted, which requires some blunt talk. All too easily discussions of God descend into polite murmurs over tea and cookies about matters that have no bearing on the practicalities of everyday life. For countless people, personal belief is both embarrassing and shaky. I’ve been advocating for the spiritual path, on the other hand, as something vital and urgent. The future of the planet depends upon raising our consciousness. Since God is intimately tied into who we are and what life means, there is no separate future for God and for the individual. You and I will make decisions that determine if God has a viable tomorrow.
The main issue is a shift away from God as an external force to God as an inner experience, from religion to spirituality. We are not talking about a return to mysticism. Modern life rests upon two things: information and personal satisfaction. There are no concrete facts, however, to support that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, that the angel Gabriel dictated the Koran, or that Moses actually existed. That basically leaves personal satisfaction, and here spirituality finds its entry point.
People crave meaning and value in their lives. If an inner experience of God can fulfill this craving, it will supplant the old ways of approaching the divine. An external God sitting above the clouds, as represented in popular religion, faces bleak prospects. Behind every pulpit an invisible clock is ticking, counting off the hours as thousands of people flee from churches and temples. In almost every developed country religious attendance has waned to no more than 20 percent of the population, and in many places, such as Scandinavia, the figure is less than 10 percent. God is no longer personally satisfying. Religions emphasizing sin, guilt, and punishment are not likely to attract people who want to pursue fulfillment without being stigmatized (one example being the Catholic Church’s condemnation of Eastern meditation as a way to experience the divine, which is viewed as heretical).
I am convinced that a shift inward is necessary. We must free ourselves from the burden of religious dogma, but at the same time we can’t give in to materialism. Even when espoused by a voice as sympathetic as Leonard’s, mechanistic determinism offers no personal satisfaction, except for a certain grim appreciation of the courage required to face a universe that is cold and void. Spirituality can do better. However, skeptics have a right to ask for specifics, and there are certainly pitfalls that must be avoided.
A visitor once came calling on a famous spiritual teacher. He was motioned to sit on the floor in a cool, empty room. Across from him the teacher, dressed in white, sat silently while an attendant poured tea. It was difficult for the visitor to wait; he was obviously agitated.
Once the attendant had left, the visitor burst out, saying, “Sir, I hear that you are revered and wise. But I have met many others just like you, and frankly, it has taken me a long time to convince myself that I should even tell you my problem. You are likely to fail me, as everyone else has.”
The teacher looked unperturbed. “What is this problem of yours?”
The visitor sighed. “I am sixty years old, and ever since childhood I’ve been drawn toward God. While earning a living and raising a family, I also undertook an intense quest. I’ve prayed, meditated, and gone on retreats. I’ve read every scripture. I have passed months in the company of so-called holy men.”
“And what did your quest reveal? Did you not find God?”
The man shook his head mournfully. “I’ve had countless experiences that seemed right. I’ve had visions. I’ve been filled with the light. Every golden bell and Buddha you can imagine has appeared to me. But it has all turned to dust. I feel empty and depressed, abandoned by God. It’s as if I’ve experienced nothing.”
“Of course,” the spiritual teacher murmured.
The man looked startled. “You mean there is no God?”
“I mean that the mind can project whatever you ask it to. If you are looking for golden Buddhas, they will appear. So will all the gods, or the God. Each path leads to a goal that is known in advance. But is that really God? God is about freedom. You have ardently pursued all these disciplines, yet you have not arrived at your destination.” Then the teacher smiled enigmatically. “Now let me ask you one question: can you discipline yourself to be free?”
This exchange, which happens to be true, casts radical doubt upon conventional paths to God. But it also points to another way, sometimes called “the pathless path.” On the pathless path there is no fixed goal and no prescribed process to follow. Looking at yourself intimately, from moment to moment, you peel away the unreal aspects of yourself, until only the real is left. Many things are unreal, as viewed by the wisdom traditions of the world. Ignorance is unreal, especially ignorance about who you really are. The ego and its urgent needs are unreal. Since these needs form the foundation of most people’s lives, you can see that deep transformation is called for.
Getting there sounds forbidding, I know. Having said farewell to organized religion, is it any better to be faced with your own pain and suffering? Can anyone really give up the ego’s endless desires? The saving grace of the spiritual path is that it comes naturally. Although life is full of suffering and the ego demands to be satisfied, those things are not as substantial as they seem. If you walk through a garden rank with weeds and withered flowers, they look real enough. But looks are deceiving—the deeper reality is the garden’s rich soil and the renewal of life, which cannot be stopped. In our case, the nurturing soil is the soul, and the renewal of life happens within. You don’t have to tell your body to renew itself; it does so naturally. You don’t have to force your mind to have new perceptions; billions of bits of sensory data flood the mind every day. The process of renewal guides life on every level. To me, a viable future for the spirit centers on discovering that the creative and evolutionary impetus in Nature is the same force that resides at the heart of who we are.
I’ve often thought that everyone would lead a spiritual life if they simply watched young children closely. Children don’t resist their inner development. It doesn’t frighten them that life may stop at three years old or five or ten; when it’s time to give up paper dolls and learn to read, this new stage emerges spontaneously. How do three-year-olds prepare to be four? They don’t. Each child does what he or she does, just allowing whatever comes next to unfold naturally. This is a secret that Nature has mastered—how to allow the new to emerge, not by destroying the old, but by welling up from the inside, invisibly and silently, until the new has flowered of its own accord.
On the pathless path a similar process takes place. New qualities arise in your awareness, not by warring against your old self but by encouraging natural growth from within. Modern people may be baffled as they look back at the age of faith, but the fact that we live in a different age doesn’t mean that spiritual awakening is invalid. Quite the opposite, in fact. Cleared of the undergrowth of dogma and superstition, the spiritual path has become much easier to walk. The best way to fulfill your aspirations is by waking up, and instead of choosing to renounce the world in God’s name, choosing to embrace it in your own. However, to make such a radical shift possible, we must explore what it means to wake up.
The process of waking up centers on transcending, as we’ve discussed. Beyond our everyday waking state we find a deeper level of inner silence. This is not a search for peace and quiet; rather, we are transcending the maelstrom of everyday thoughts to find the source of the mind. Practically speaking, there are many levels of transcendence. The most profound is deep meditation, which is known to alter brain structure and lead to lasting transformation. At the shallow end there is the exhilaration that fans feel at a football game, or that serious shoppers find when they snap up a bargain. These two poles seem to have nothing in common, but there is a hidden bond. Whenever you experience any quality of pure consciousness, however fleeting, you have transcended.
Pure consciousness isn’t a way of thinking or a point of view. It’s the unseen potential from which everything springs. The qualities of pure consciousness seem subtle at first, but they grow more powerful as you proceed farther on your path. Here are the chief qualities described in the great wisdom traditions.
TEN QUALITIES OF PURE CONSCIOUSNESS
1. Pure consciousness is silent and peaceful. When you experience this quality, you are free of inner conflict, anger, and fear.
2. Pure consciousness is self-sufficient, or centered within itself. When you experience this quality, the need for distraction vanishes. You are comfortable simply being here. The mind is not restless in its quest for stimulation.
3. Pure consciousness is fully awake. This quality is experienced as mental alertness and freshness. The mind is no longer dull or fatigued.
4. Pure consciousness contains infinite potential; it is open to any outcome. When you experience this quality, you are no longer bound by fixed habits and beliefs. The horizon seems open, the future full of possibilities. The greater your experience of pure potential, the more creative you become.
5. Pure consciousness is self-organizing. It effortlessly coordinates all aspects of existence. You are experiencing this quality when things fall into place of their own accord. There is less struggle to force different parts of life to harmonize, because you are more in tune with the natural harmony that runs through everything.
6. Pure consciousness is spontaneous. Timetables, boundaries, and rules don’t apply; nor are they needed. Breaking free of old constraints, whatever they may be, makes you feel safer about expressing who you are and what you want without constraints. This is the state of absolute freedom, which you experience whenever you feel liberated.
7. Pure consciousness is dynamic. Although not in motion, it provides energy for all the activity in the universe. You experience this quality when you feel that you can fully embrace life. You have the energy and the will to do great things.
8. Pure consciousness is blissful. This is the root of happiness and its highest expression. Any surge of happiness, whatever the cause, is a taste of bliss. An orgasm is blissful, but so is compassion. Every experience of love can also be traced back to its origins in bliss.
9. Pure consciousness is knowing. It contains the answers to all questions and, more crucially, the practical knowledge needed for unfolding the universe, the human body, and the mind. Any experience of intuition, insight, or truth taps into this quality.
10. Pure consciousness is whole. It is all-encompassing. Therefore, despite the infinite diversity of the physical world, at a deeper level only one process is occurring: wholeness is moving like a single ocean that holds every wave. You experience this quality when your life makes sense and you feel a part of Nature; you are at home simply by being alive.
As you can see, I haven’t used any religious terms, yet this is divinity, stripped of the demands of faith and obedience. At this point you cannot be expected simply to accept that these ten qualities are, in essence, divine. However, you can use this idea as a working hypothesis. In that sense you are the experimenter and the experiment. If you are transcending everyday reality, these ten qualities will grow in your life. You will notice more fulfillment and creativity. Your sense of being secure will grow as you come to know who you really are.
Now we can say with certainty what kind of action the spiritual path calls for. You don’t have to brace yourself to become “spiritual” in quotation marks. The only requirement is that you measure your activity, inner and outer, by one criterion: does it develop the qualities of pure consciousness? In spirituality there is room for deeply religious people and room for worldly people (including scientists). Doing good works and being of service aren’t a guarantee that you are transcending, yet they are landmarks on a recognized spiritual path, and countless seekers do find that service increases their sense of bliss, peace, centeredness, and self-sufficiency. Another recognized path is deep contemplation; yet another is mindfulness—becoming aware that your thoughts are just thoughts, coming and going like clouds against the eternal sky of consciousness. The spiritual experiment is yours to set up as you wish.
I’m not suggesting that you take on a regimen and cling tightly to it. Consciousness does the work for you here, just as genes do the work for an embryo as it develops. The difference is that spiritual growth requires choice. As you come to know what pure consciousness is, you orient your mind toward it. To avoid sounding too mystical, let me share with you a parable from the Upanishads of ancient India.
A coachman is driving a team of horses, using his whip to goad them faster and faster. It’s a sunny day; he feels exhilarated, as if he owns the world. From the inside of the coach a faint voice says, “Stop.” In his excitement the coachman ignores the voice; he’s not even sure he heard anything. Again the same softly spoken command comes from inside the coach: “Stop.”
This time the coachman knows that he has heard the command, which makes him angry, so he flogs the horses to race even faster. But the voice from inside the coach continues to repeat its command, never raising its voice, until the coachman remembers something. His passenger is the owner of the coach! The coachman pulls on the reins, and slowly, slowly the horses come to a halt.
In the parable the horses are the five senses and the mind, constantly being whipped onward by the ego. The ego feels that it controls everything. But the owner of the coach is the soul, whose soft voice waits patiently to be heard. When it is, the ego relents. It gives up false ownership. The mind slows down its frantic activity, and in time it learns to stop. Stopping isn’t an end unto itself; it’s the basis for knowing who you really are: a soul with all its divine attributes. Those attributes are the qualities of pure consciousness.
I believe every home should have a nook devoted to divinity—a shrine of roses, or an altar of scented lavender. A shard of crystal would do, or a small bronze Buddha placed where the sun can warm it. We need daily reminders if the divine is to have a future. Reminders of what? The voice from inside the coach.
I won’t cramp the soul by attempting to define it. That’s part of the experiment, to find out for yourself. But I can’t resist sharing a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, written from the soul’s point of view:
This entire universe is pervaded by Me, the unmanifest Brahman.
All beings depend on Me. I am the origin, the seed of all beings.
There is nothing, animate or inanimate, that is not pervaded by Me. I am found in all of creation. I am inside and outside all that exists.
In the end, the spiritual path does one simple thing: it makes those timeless words come true for you. Belief becomes knowledge that can be trusted, and on that basis God can once again be revered.
Auguste Comte, one of the most influential French philosophers of the first half of the nineteenth century, wrote extensively on the nature of knowledge, what it means, and how we obtain it. Alas, Comte chose an unfortunate example to illustrate his philosophy, based on what he considered an infallible scientific fact: “On the subject of stars … we shall not at all be able to determine their chemical composition or even their density.… I regard any notion concerning the true mean temperature of the various stars as forever denied to us.” Just fourteen years later Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen discovered that we could indeed determine the properties of stars by analyzing the light they emit, and today we use that method, spectroscopy, to measure chemical abundances, temperatures, density, and many other properties of distant planets, stars, and galaxies. Some of the astronomical objects we study in this manner are over ten billion light-years away.
According to the dictionary, the difference between knowledge and belief is that belief implies confidence, while knowing implies certainty. Though there are issues of consistency, and philosophers may debate the issue, it is possible to achieve certainty of sorts in mathematics—you apply the rules and derive the consequences, an exercise in pure logic. But in our everyday lives, and even in science, that distinction between what we “know” and what we merely “believe” is difficult, or even impossible, to make. We might think that we can distinguish between believing we won’t get sick from the raw halibut at our local sushi bar, and knowing that tomorrow the sun will rise in the east. But can we really? We base what we think we know—the beliefs we feel certain about, or which we at least don’t question—partly on empirical evidence. We have seen or heard about the sun rising on every other day of our lives, and even before our birth, so we “know” it will rise again tomorrow. In 1812 astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace employed probability theory to examine the degree of certainty that is justified in that prediction, based solely on the fact that the sun had risen every day for the past five thousand years (the approximate age of the Earth according to biblical accounts). He came up with odds of 1,826,214:1 in favor. But empirical evidence is not all we use to form our beliefs, and Laplace pointed out that people probably have a much higher confidence that the sun will rise than his calculation indicates because they know that the laws of nature—technically, gravity and celestial mechanics—call for it to do so. Ironically, today’s theories of physics tell us the sun probably won’t forever continue to rise or even to exist. As I said earlier, in roughly seven billion years the sun will grow 250 times larger (and 2,700 times more luminous) than today, ballooning out to fill the entire sky, and then probably swallowing up the Earth. Billions of years later it will burn out and shrink and turn into a kind of stellar corpse called a white dwarf. In a sense all that we say we “know”—except perhaps mathematical truths—is just belief, and so the question of the future of theological belief is tied to how and why we believe things in ordinary life, and even in science.
Bertrand Russell wrote that “believing seems the most mental thing we do.” It is also one of the most complex and varied things we do. Not only do observation, theoretical understanding, our needs, desires, and biases, our emotions and mood, and our existing framework of beliefs all interact in a complex manner to affect the way we form beliefs; but we might not even be aware of what our beliefs are, because while we may consciously think we believe one thing, on a deeper unconscious level we may believe and sometimes act on the opposite belief. For example, consider an experiment concerning what psychologists call the illusion of control, the unconscious belief that we are the masters of our own fate even when we consciously know we aren’t. In the study, employees at an insurance agency and a manufacturing company on Long Island who donated $1 for an office lottery were either allowed to choose their own lottery ticket, or else given one at random by the seller. Then the morning of the drawing the sellers approached each buyer individually and said that someone else “wanted to get into the lottery, but since I’m not selling tickets anymore, he asked me if I’d find out how much you’d sell your ticket for. It makes no difference to me, but how much should I tell him?” Though it is doubtful that many of the subjects consciously believed they had any skill in picking the winner of a random drawing, they seemed to believe it nonetheless: those who had been randomly assigned a lottery ticket agreed to sell it back for an average price of $1.96, while those who had chosen their own ticket demanded on average $8.67. Our inner weighing of evidence is not a careful mathematical calculation resulting in a probabilistic estimate of truth, but more like a whirlpool blending of the objective and the personal. The result is a set of beliefs—both conscious and unconscious—that guide us in interpreting all the events of our lives.
For example, a parent’s suggestion to a teenager that he or she put on a jacket before going out in the cold can be construed as an attempt to exercise control, as a protective move arising from an exaggerated fear of sickness, or as an expression of love and concern. A computer analyzing only the parent’s words might make no inference, or might request more data. But the teenager on the receiving end will probably jump to some conclusion based upon his or her prior beliefs regarding the parent, and not give much thought to alternative possible interpretations. Like Comte, we assume we know.
Our brains, for good reason, tend to jump to conclusions based on past experience, rules of thumb, and an existing framework of beliefs. We wouldn’t get very far in life if before setting out to watch the beauty of the sun rising, we debated whether it was likely to do so. In fact, evolution favored those whose gut reactions guided their choices. When the earth starts trembling and you’re standing at the foot of a cliff, it’s better to run first and engage in making theories about what is happening later. If instinct hadn’t made a connection between cause and effect and catalyzed an immediate plan of action in response, our ancestors would have been devoured while still pondering that mysterious movement in the bushes. As William James remarked, “The intellect is built up of practical interests.”
Whatever the future of theological belief, people will always adhere to belief systems that gratify their emotional needs. None of us can function without having faith of one sort or another. Entrepreneurs start businesses on faith, immigrants with no concrete prospects move to a new country on faith, writers toil for long hours in the faith that people will want to read their words. There are atheists who put their faith in lucky numbers, and otherwise rational lawyers who eat tuna, a cheeseburger, or a Mayan sun salad each day that a trial continues because they think it’s their lucky meal. “You certainly wouldn’t want to learn that your heart surgeon or your 747 pilot always wears the same pair of underwear when it’s time to perform,” said an attorney critical of such practices, but there are no doubt surgeons and pilots who do just that. There was even a politician in Israel who was famous for always wearing his lucky underwear on election day. Physicist George Gamow told a story about Niels Bohr, who supposedly had a horseshoe nailed over the door of his country cottage. When asked how a famed scientist can have faith in a charm, Bohr replied that he didn’t believe in it, but “they say that it does bring luck even if you don’t believe.”
We call these superstitions, but they reflect a deep emotional need to justify believing that when we undertake a great challenge, we will succeed. William James wrote about imagining himself stuck in the Alps, in a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. “Being without similar experience,” he wrote, “I have no evidence of my ability to perform it successfully, but hope and confidence in myself make me sure I shall not miss my aim, and nerve my feet to execute what without those subjective emotions would perhaps have been impossible. But suppose, on the contrary … I feel that it would be sinful to act upon an assumption unverified by previous experience; why, then I shall hesitate so long that at last, exhausted and trembling, launching myself in a moment of despair, I miss my foothold and roll into the abyss.” James wrote that “every philosopher, or man of science either, whose initiative counts for anything in the evolution of thought, has taken his stand on a sort of dumb conviction that the truth must lie in one direction rather than another … and has borne his best fruit in trying to make it work.”
Without their faith, many theoretical physicists facing years sequestered in dank offices, working on complex calculations with no promise of success, might indeed have insufficient courage to leap across their abyss. For example, one of the central pursuits in fundamental physics today is the quest for an ultimate and elegant theory that unifies all four of the forces we have observed to operate in nature. One of the forces, gravity, is known to obey this simple equation, which was formulated by Einstein:
Einstein’s equation is of course not really as simple as it looks—it takes much study to be able to learn to apply it, and to understand what it means, and it is one of the most difficult equations in all of physics to solve. But it has a simple physical interpretation, and is a highly economical way of expressing a complex thought through mathematics, with the left side of the equation representing the structure of space-time, while the right side represents its matter-energy content. To a physicist, that makes it an elegant equation. Now have a look at the current theory of the other three forces, called the “standard model.” It doesn’t matter what the symbols here actually mean, for even an uninformed viewer will be able to see that this set of symbols is quite a bit messier and less elegant than the one above:
From W. N. Cottingham and D. A. Greenwood, An Introduction to the Standard Model of Particle Physics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), extracted by J. A. Shifflett, July 28, 2010. Copyright © 2007 W. N. Cottingham and D. A. Greenwood. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
To both the trained and the untrained eye, the standard model is ugly—more like a circuit diagram for some high-tech appliance than an expression of simple physical principles. Yet it works very well. Is there a more elegant theory of these forces yet to be discovered? Richard Feynman said, “People say to me, ‘Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?’ No, I’m not. I’m just looking to find out more about the world. If it turns out there is a simple, ultimate law which explains everything, so be it; that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it’s like an onion, with millions of layers, and we’re sick and tired of looking at layers, then that’s the way it is.” But despite Feynman’s skepticism, if you asked those working in the field, you’d have trouble finding one who doesn’t have faith that a more attractive theory does exist. Physicists take comfort in their faith that at its core, nature is simple and elegant. For them as for everyone else, belief based on feeling, desire, need, or intuition is a fundamental feature of the human mind.
Whenever we face difficulties, challenges, or uncertainties, it can be helpful to hold beliefs that stretch beyond that which we know without question to be true. Faith, as James put it, can be a great “working hypothesis.” This is as true for scientists as it is for anyone else. In fact, it’s important for scientists to formulate such working hypotheses (and then to be willing to jettison them if they aren’t borne out) because if we didn’t, we would never move forward in our knowledge of the universe. But working hypotheses like Deepak’s, which insist on the primacy of an immaterial world, or like the beliefs of those who deny evolution or embrace supernatural miracles, are at odds with our knowledge of the world, often in active conflict with the physical laws that govern it. Hence they are flawed.
I agree with Deepak that it would be nice if over time theological belief shifted away from God as an external force that created and rules the universe to God as an inner experience. But God the Ruler has a long history. The strong human desire to understand the universe, and to attribute causes to the events that transpire in our world, gave rise, in ancient times, to myths, beliefs synthetically constructed to explain situations people simply didn’t understand. The attraction of those myths was not so much in any objective truth they codified, but rather in their ability to provide comforting answers to the question “How did we get here and why?” Before the advent of science, God the Ruler was the answer. God the Ruler met other human longings, too—satisfying our need to believe that events happen for a purpose; that the world is just; that death is not the end, but a beginning.
Many predict the demise of this kingly and personal God as future science produces triumph after triumph. But science has already shown its prowess in the physical world—from demonstrating that the Earth is round to explaining how space is curved. We have seen evolution studied down to the molecular level, the universe explored almost back to the Big Bang, bacterial life synthesized, lambs cloned, surgery performed with lasers, people sent to the moon, robots sent to Mars, three-dimensional images of our brains, quantum teleportation … and still, the enthusiasm for religious explanations of the physical world remains strong.
The science of the future might produce a laser that teleports a synthetic lamb to Mars to feed robot astronauts, but there is no reason to think that that or any other spectacular feat would bolster the prestige of science at the expense of religious belief. If there’s one area in which we might find ourselves in agreement with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, it’s expressed in a letter he wrote to George W. Bush in 2006, saying that “whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty.”
Sure enough, a Gallup poll taken not long after Ahmadinejad wrote his letter showed that 94 percent of Americans believe in God, 82 percent say religion is at least fairly important to them, and 76 percent say the Bible is the actual or inspired word of God. If those numbers are down, they certainly haven’t fallen far. To believe is human, and belief in the traditional God seems to be alive and well, enjoying the likelihood of a long-lasting future.