What drives spirituality? For me?
I am curious. I am hungry. I want to know. I want to understand. I thirst for knowledge and I crave truth. I thrive on reality and I suffocate in pretense. Scientists, mystics, artists; monks; psychoanalysts and patients in psychotherapy; all share one goal: to encounter reality as it really is. Unvarnished. The language of religious mystics and “scientific” atheists is almost identical when you read them: give me reality, as it is. Strip away the gloss. Take away all the illusions. Sure, they do define the illusions rather differently, and see different shades of varnish! But their quest is the same. It is a distinctly human quest.
Contrary to the imaginings of Marx or Freud, believers generally do not only stick with their beliefs or participate in their rituals mainly for comfort, but rather out of hunger to know and, then to express what they have experienced. Given an explicit choice between uncomfortable truth and comfortable falsehood, most people, believers and nonbelievers alike, would, like the main character in the Matrix movie, choose the unpleasant truth.
In psychology, we consider one fundamental basis for mental health to be grounding in reality, proven by the capacity to appraise reality accurately and thus adapt to it effectively.
We all want what’s real, even if we “can’t handle the truth” all the time in the moment and frequently use our psychological defenses to hide some of it from ourselves. Give me the Truth. The Truth will set you free. It is not just the truth about the world. It is also the truth about myself. Find the real self, said the ancient Hindu Vedas, the western psychoanalysts like DW Winnicott, the contemporary Christian mystics like Thomas Merton. Take away the illusions not just about life, and the world, but about myself and others.
So we start there. With the search for what is real, and the hunger to encounter what is true.
This blog is written while trying a life of
faith and a vocation of science, not to persuade anyone (or even justify
myself, I hope), but to share my thoughts, to connect with others. My main aim
is to offer, for those who are interested in a view of the spiritual path, my
reflections on the path as someone who is not a spiritual expert, but
nonetheless the view of someone who straddles the academy and the church pew. I reject an anti-intellectual viewpoint and embrace
insights from science. I also reject fundamentalism and embrace a mystical
faith, by which I mean that the only faith is a living faith, rooted in a
direct encounter with God (the mystery, the divine, the “beyond words”, the
ground of all that is), and not mainly the embrace of certain propositions
although I take faith assertions and beliefs very seriously. To me this way is
the inevitable result of trying to really follow the masters (for me, Jesus),
and of approaching religion by its own criteria.
My journey includes encounter with many varieties of
religious faith and experience (Catholicism, evangelical and pentacostal,
Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, secular humanist). My training as a psychologist
and a scientist provides a particular perspective on questions of faith, self-awareness,
cognition, and reason. But I do not represent anyone's views but my own.
A thought-system is not what I am ultimately interested in. Religious faith is not a thought-system. It is a way of life. Faith is not something believed in--rather it is lived as a way of life, a way of seeing, or it is nothing.
Now,
I leave this page with a word of encouragement for those seeking faith. I take
to heart this paraphrase of Iain Matthew[1] as
he summarized St John of the Cross’s logic of where to look for God: do not
cling to grief or to the past, nor dread or anticipate the future, but enter
the present whole-hearted. For God is not in the past, nor in the future, but
eternally here and now. From the greatest spiritual Master in the West, John of
the Cross:
To come to savour all
Seek to find savour in nothing;
To come to possess all,
Seek possession in nothing,
To come to be all,
Seek in all to be nothing....
To come to what you know not
You must go by way where you know not
To come to what you are not
You must go by a way where you are not.
[1] Iain Matthew, The Impact of God: Soundings from Saint John of the Cross (Hodder Christian Paperbacks,
1995).
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