A smart person, one who perhaps had her mind filled with religious ideas as a child but who recognizes that genuine mysteries exist with respect to the origins of the universe, can experience real pain if she opts for an easy mysticism. By the same token, if she refuses to opt for that easy mysticism and announces that she doesn't know ultimate answers and can't know ultimate answers, then she falls prey to the coldness and sadness that come with suspecting that the universe is taking no interest in her.
Pain is waiting for her in either case, whether she tries to maintain a mysticism that she can see right through or if she sheds that easy mysticism but then doesn't know how to handle the resultant meaninglessness. As it happens, natural psychology provides a complete, satisfying, and uplifting response to this conundrum, one based on the idea of living the paradigm shift from seeking meaning to making meaning.
If, however, she happens not to land on this good idea, she can spend a lifetime mired simultaneously in both unhappy camps, drawn to one mystical or spiritual enthusiasm after another—one year a Catholic, then a Buddhist, then a pagan, then a Taoist, then something with no name but with New Age trappings, and so on—while at the same time paralyzed by the thought that the universe has no meaning. She is at once an unhappy seeker who is burdened by an uncomfortable truth—a truth that could be transformed into something motivational and comforting if only she knew the conversion process.
Here is a beautiful report that will stand as our single example of the arduous journey from an easy mysticism to an acceptance of genuine mystery and the tasks a smart person faces in making value-based meaning. Jennifer explained:
My husband and I were both raised in fundamentalist Christian homes and communities. We attended a private bible college, where I was the full-ride presidential scholar for my class and we both held leadership positions. My husband became a youth pastor after his graduation, and we were married as soon as I graduated. I was barely twenty-one and a pastor's wife. The church was a fairly large one, and the youth group numbered around three hundred senior high students. We took these kids on trips and retreats nationally and internationally. For a Christian couple, we were everything respectable, attractive, and vibrant.
Last August around this time, we began researching some of those questions Christians often seek to avoid. After about six months of wrestling with the tar baby of doubt, we had to admit that we were atheists. This was quite a shock to us, and we did seriously consider living a lie and continuing with the ministry. Leaving was just so daunting. However, our sense of integrity simply couldn't handle such a life. So, in January we came out as atheists and sacrificed everything. Our entire lives were based on Christianity—family, friends, financial security, and worldview. We were shunned and berated, slandered and condescendingly pitied, all by people who had claimed to love and support us only weeks before. It was more agonizing than we had anticipated. I suppose our ignorance gave us courage, and I now appreciate our naïveté.
At the time, it was relatively easy to go on with our imaginations full of our epic martyrdom. We had a solid sense of the strength and veracity we possessed, even when most of those we had known and loved became spiteful and cold. Yet, the months wore on, the excitement died down, and loneliness grew up in its place. By spring, we were exhausted. My husband was listless and empty, and I was filled with a directionless anger. With the loss of our worldview, we had sacrificed the only way we knew of creating meaning. Our immediate families and a few friends had chosen to stick by us, but there was still a gaping void.
This would have been a perfect time for us to discover natural psychology. Instead, we muddled along for a while in near despair. At some point, we decided that enough was enough and that we needed to regain our internal locus of control by actively participating in our own story. We had been attending a local atheist meet-up group, and I began to lead a secondary discussion group for them. While reading on the Internet, I came across a woman who had recently escaped the cult-like movement, and I reached out to her and began helping her with the writing process of a book. We didn't yet possess the vocabulary of natural psychology, but what was beginning to happen was that my husband and I had started making new meaning investments.
At this point in the story, my husband began a conversation with a man attending our atheist group for the first time. He was comfortable in his atheism but still attended church and was an active member of the community there. He invited us to meet his wife so that the two of them could hear our story in greater depth. We gladly went and learned that his wife was paralyzed with fear at the idea of losing the internal and external comforts of Christianity. Because of this anxiety, she balked at the prospect of seeking answers to questions that she didn't want to ask. This cognitive dissonance was agonizing to watch and seemed unbearable for her.
It was at this point, looking for resources that might help her find some peace and comfort, that I encountered Natural Psychology: The New Psychology of Meaning. Before giving it to her, I read it myself. It was a great encouragement to me and inspired me to keep doing what I had already begun and more. I still fall victim to the idea that an action must have lasting, broad significance to be meaningful—likely a remnant of my theistic perspective.
One of the new ways that I help remind myself that I can invest meaning right here, right now is by painting. For example, I painted a canvas I dubbed January Waning in honor of the waning moon that presided over the first phase of our public apostasy. I made meaning by creating that painting, and the painting maintains meaning in what it says to me in an ongoing way about the end of our old lives and the beginning of our new lives of promise.
In this new life, I create meaning through acts of encouragement and support for others who are leaving their religion or struggling with the social issues of atheism. When my new friend was feeling guilty about “forcing” us to sit with her as she cried on a Friday night rather than going out and having fun, I told her that there was no place I would rather be. It was true. I explained to her that part of our ability to stabilize and thrive was exactly what we were doing at their house—creating meaning through the support and encouragement of others who are experiencing what we went through. And I again explained the idea of a meaning investment.
I can still taste the lingering shadows of meaninglessness, anger, and sadness that hang about the edges of my mind. Yet, they are no longer dominant. I hadn't even realized the progress I had made until this new friend, tearful and terrified, cried, “I wish I was more like you!” To be envied rather than pitied is quite a unique thing to hear from a Christian these days. She is right, though: I don't want her double life and her internal struggles. There is great freedom in choosing integrity over the veneer of acquiescence. I could have been a pastor's wife still, with abundant praise and respect from friends, family, and community as well as with the financial security it provided. I would sacrifice it all again. My husband and I have nominated ourselves as the heroes of our lives, and I am content.
If you believe in a religion or if you enjoy spiritual enthusiasms, then Jennifer's journey may not strike you as worth emulating. You may well disagree with natural psychology's contention that human beings are not privy to ultimate answers. What I hope you'll consider, however, is the following: the extent to which natural psychology actually honors mystery. Your choice isn't between mysticism and nothingness. Rather, it is the choice between mysticism and genuine mystery.
It's a common prejudice that a naturalistic worldview, one based on the ideas of science and empiricism and a rejection of the lures of language and fantasy, ruins life's mysteriousness. The following is one typical expression of how a naturalistic worldview is bound to rob life of mystery. Sam Keen, writing about the contributions to philosophy of the theologian Gabriel Marcel, explained in Gabriel Marcel: Makers of Contemporary Theology:
For Marcel, the results of a naturalistic way of thinking are disastrous for human dignity. As the capacity to love, to admire, and to hope dries up, the functional man loses the ability, and even the desire, to transcend his situation of alienation and captivity. His world loses its mysterious character, it becomes “purely natural,” and all things are explained by reference to the categories of cause and effect. With the eclipse of mystery goes the atrophy of the sense of wonder. One may perhaps question and investigate a purely natural and functionalized world, but one may not stand in admiring awe with a sense of gratitude before a mechanism that will one day be completely understood.
Well, but it will never be understood, nor can it be understood. That is a completely ungrounded fear—if, in fact, that is the fear . . .
Man, in this view, is incapable of looking around him and acknowledging without wincing or worse, without falling down in despair, that he doesn't know anything about ultimate reality. In this view, man is simply too small for such acknowledgments. He fears that he might stop hoping or caring if he learned that the universe was perhaps indifferent to him. Could he feel gratitude for his existence or awe in the face of a starry sky if he suspected that he was neither designed nor loved? He thinks not. Therefore he opts for mysticism.
Built into this rationale for mysticism is the idea that man would fall apart if he acknowledged that life was just this: just this translating as “empty, cold, impersonal, and purposeless.” But that isn't the right acknowledgment. The choices aren't between a false but soothing mysticism and an acceptance of an indifferent universe. Rather, the choice is between an easy mysticism and genuine mystery. This is a very different choice! It is one that a smart person can embrace and applaud—and even grow excited about. He never again has to bang his head against the brick wall of mystery. He can just let it be mysterious.
The mystic has made a poor choice, one that a smart person with a mystical bent will never really feel completely comfortable embracing. The mystic, instead of acknowledging that she has absolutely no clue as to what created the universe or how the universe operates, prefers to act like she understands—and, more than that, that the answer is simple and straightforward. If she has a scientific bent, she turns metaphors from physics into proofs of the existence of gods or of a cosmic consciousness. If she has no scientific bent, she simply opts for whatever occult system or language she is born into or that speaks to her.
Natural psychology, on the other hand, lets mystery be genuinely mysterious and not transparent, simple, or obvious. It never says, “It's all a great mystery, but really it isn't. Here's the answer in my latest DVD.” It never anthropomorphizes the universe and says, “The universe wants this,” or “The universe demands that.” When it calls a mystery unsolvable, it means it. We're sure to learn more about the material universe. We'll learn more about how the brain operates, how matter works, and what fills up empty space. But even if we evolve into a smarter, wiser species in possession of a truckload of new scientific knowledge, we will still have no access to ultimate answers.
When a smart person finally admits that some mysteries can't be solved, she can relax and rejoice. When you honor what you know to be true, that nobody knows the ultimate answers, that there is a difference between what is not yet known and what can't be known, that guesses don't really count, and that easy answers like sitting on a mat or walking in nature may soothe you but answer nothing, then you can leave mysticism behind. Then you are ready for the answer: that you are obliged to take charge of the project of your life.
If she could tolerate the truth that the mysteries of the universe are unsolvable, the chronic mystic could get on with her life. A smart person can opt to accept that truth, sleep better, and rest easier, and feel no diminishment in her sense of dignity. Why should she lose her sense of dignity because certain questions can't be answered? What else does dignity mean but actively living by your principles and your purposes whatever life throws at you? A smart person can say, “I accept the reality of mystery; now, let me decide how I will live.”
Natural psychology asserts that you will experience less emotional distress and twist yourself into fewer knots if you engage in value-based meaning-making and stand up in a dignified way for your values and your principles, come what the universe may. Human dignity has always been about, and will always be about, trying to do the next right thing in the real world that we inhabit. This is hard and confusing work, but it is no mystery why we undertake it. If we don't, we create our own distress and we fail ourselves.