By Frank Mosca Ph.D.
If words like God, spirituality, and other such terms
are to have value, then it seems useful to explore what they could mean for
anyone seeking to be in touch with themselves in a way that acknowledges that
there is something more fundamental than the world as we see it and experience
it in our ordinary lives. And how do we see it and experience it? Well,
undoubtedly in the simplest sense, we find that what we call the world
immediately exceeds our ability to manipulate it to our wills. Nature is both
mute and eloquent in manifesting its abundance but resisting our probes and
inquiries on how to coax secrets from her. Countless generations have
painstakingly accumulated a trove of tools and techniques to create environments
with more apparent control over the vast array of variables that face us in this
universe, but the tiny beachhead of knowledge we have constructed is but a
fractal flicker in an infinitely layered and nested necklace of material reality
that recedes away from us macrocosmically and microcosmically. The more we
comprehend and stretch our comprehension, the greater the horizons recede in
almost mocking orders of magnitude.
The point of this observation is to note that while one may argue the
presence of the divine as some do in the “footprints” of this vast and
florid abundance of being, still, precisely because we understand that we will
never embrace its impossible span, we also know that our search for meaning and
transcendence cannot reside in a drive to make understanding
the universe the vessel in which our meaning resides. At the same time,
we as humans have posited a dimension of experience that escapes the definitions
that have become the canon of scientistic ideology. That dimension has had many
names but simply stated it is Consciousness. This is a fundamental quality of
being inherent and inextricably woven into the fabric of evolving reality along
with Gravity and all the other basic forces that we have identified as the
primary building blocks of reality. Contemporary works by Penrose as in The
Emperor’s New Mind or Barrow and Tipler’s The Anthropic Cosmological
Principle, or Chalmers' The Conscious Mind testify to the support that
highly developed scientific minds have given to this notion albeit as an
articulate but minority voice. That is the dimension that is invoked and has
been the center of human hopes and aspirations. That experience was the purview
of religion as it arose from its shamanistic roots in the caves and on the
savannah and sought to develop a technology of rituals aimed at evoking that
dimension to somehow control material reality. The mantle of seeking effective
technological control has passed from the shamans of religion to the shamans of
science. But that basic experience or at least the seeking of it, and the
accompanying confusion in that search as to whether control of the world or the
affirmation of the spirit is its true goal, still lives in the complex of
religious traditions; however the paths and mechanisms evolved in those
traditions have not proven sufficiently robust for many seekers of meaning. So it is with our age. For many of us we see only the Scylla
and Charybdis of religion and science in all its many socio cultural variants.
Something is missing and often is extremely difficult to articulate with any
satisfaction.
What I offer in this brief article is a perspective that some might find
congenial to their search. It holds, at least in my opinion, the promise of
clarifying the nature of the search, not in either/or terms so much but rather
in understanding that once the proper perspective is achieved, then both facets
of the search assume their appropriate status for us. It derives from my
experience with an approach to life called the Option Method. I will briefly
capsulize it here. It is an existential approach rooted in the notion that
the ground of being is freedom and that a correlate of freedom is happiness. Why
happiness? Well, if we were merely meat machines then whatever we would call
good feelings, happiness, joy etc. would merely be an artifact of evolving
neurology, not to be particularly valued over other states of being. We would
have no say in whether such states were present within us because our ontology
would be totally scripted by genes and memes and happy or unhappy would be
accidents of the throw of the dice of the laws of physics as we made our way
through this world until our now six score plus years wore down to inevitable
machine failure and we terminate.
However, it is taken as a fundamental given by me in this discussion that
we are indeed not meat machines, our minds are not mere epiphenomena of
neurological processes and that we are the sole arbiters of our emotional
experience. Here’s how I put it
in my Joybuilding Workbook:
Try this on for size: the truth about you and the world/ the “ABC’s” of happiness and unhappiness:
A/ There
is just you and the world (includes all other people and things)
B/ You
don’t control the world. (The attempt to control the world has been the focus
of much of human history and all of human technology. Despite advances, our
control is tenuous at best. This is actually as we will see, the main source of
dread and unhappiness.)
C/ You
do control the attitude that you construct toward whatever the world presents to
you each moment of your existence.
Now how about it? I bet you accept A and B (though you sure do try to
have as much control of the world as you can), but have trouble with C.
Right?
Well it is right there in “C” that the problem
arises. If “C” is not true then the ball game is over as it pertains to your
ability to live your joy each moment. Might as well pack up your bags and move
back in with your parents, because someone else is calling the shots on your
ability to experience happiness. So
if A is true and C is not true then B is the arena where you have to try to find
your happiness. That would require you to control the world and all the
consequences and outcomes in the world in order for your happiness and joy to be
assured. Not too likely.
Which
brings us to C: while it may not seem true right now, you may come to a
different conclusion as you do your Joywork [the word I give to the effort we
make to free ourselves to affirm our happiness].
That’s what this whole book and your Joywork is helping you to change
your mind about. Yes, I know unhappiness in whatever form just seems to rise up
in response to the world. Well, if it didn’t feel natural to feel unhappy,
then who would ever bother to feel it? Would you? How to explain this? Belief.
Yes, that’s right, belief. Just as I mentioned a moment ago. That’s how I
will explain it to you.
Okay, the point here is that since we are free, what
we seek as the prime fruit of being in that state is happiness. We are of course
completely free not to be happy, but to refer to the preceding paragraph, we are
unhappy because we believe we have to be not because of innate necessity.
Therefore belief in the necessity of unhappiness is unhappiness; belief that we
can be made to feel unhappy against our wills is what we call evil whether it is
being done to us or we originate it in others. Facing a world where we believe
that is the case breeds either cynicism as an armor against unhappiness or
depression or despair as the hopeless state of what I call “the unbearable
wrongness of being” seems to loom ahead in our destiny. The Option Method is
designed to deconstruct this illusory belief path and open us up to what I would
term as the divine marriage of being, freedom and happiness as the prime truth
of what we are. I am not focused here on the intimate details of how this is
achieved through the Method, but rather on how this basic understanding of
ourselves as creatures of freedom and happiness can build a glorious framework
for the concepts of God and Spirituality in our lives.
However, it should be made clear that the Option
Method places no requirement for anyone to have some specific belief about a God
or no God. No, of course you are quite free to come to your own sense of what
anything like this could mean to you. So
you are certainly free to take what follows, literally, metaphorically or to
find no relevance in it for you at all. Your happiness does not depend on your
allegiance to any vision of the divine or lack of it. At the same time, it is
both fun and licit to speculate as I mentioned earlier about what the notion of
God could mean since it has been with us from the dawn of human self-reflection,
as far as we can tell.
Humans have turned to God as the ultimate resource for meaning in their
lives. Meaning is simply another word for happiness. Life has meaning to the
degree that it offers hope of happiness. Now, okay, okay. What does
“meaning” mean? First we are talking about it exclusively from the
point of view of happiness. Please keep that in mind. If you look at the
world in terms of “B” [using the above “ABC’s” perspective]
then meaning comes exclusively from controlling the world. People and
institutions are the most likely source of meaning in that understanding. In any
event, when you say “something has meaning for me or gives my life meaning,”
aren’t you saying that you are acknowledging that whatever “It”
is that supposedly gives the meaning, you
are the one giving yourself permission to feel good feelings about it?
Still in doubt? Then let me ask you: can something give meaning to your
life against your will? Sounds
ridiculous, right? So of course not. What meaning is, is always the same---a
permission from you to feel some kind
of good or positive feeling about yourself or the world based on your understanding gained through the comprehension of whatever it
is that you define as the something
that “gives meaning to my life!” So where does the meaning come from really?
Why from you, of course. When you switch from the logic of “B” to an
understanding of the world from the “C’ perspective the truth of what is
going on becomes clear. It is tantamount to saying that “I give meaning to the
things that give me meaning!” Yes and in mathematics 1+0=1! Adding more zeros will not change the outcome. Do you see?
If the buck stops with you in terms of whether something means anything
or not, then you are the meaning giver.
The world may be filled with a wonder of things that “catch your
eye,” so to speak and to which you give meaning. But nothing in the world can
have meaning for you without your decision that it does. Therefore, life has
meaning because you, the meaning giver give it meaning by affirming
(from its root meaning to make firm or real) the truth about your happiness in
each moment that you live it!
Now God has been used to foist a good deal of gray notions about
unhappiness upon humans as well. God has been the handmaiden of cultures in
attempting to constrain and intimidate people into being the way the culture
wanted its citizens to be. And by culture I mean the evolving will of the
generations of members of a society as evidenced in its myths, traditions,
customs, covenants and laws. We are not interested in any such usage of the
notion of God
What is the purpose of God then? Well
if we edit out the uses of God as punisher, destroyer and enforcer for the
unhappy religious visions of humans, [something so prominent in the current
events of our time] then the true shape of
the divine begins to emerge for what it really is.
What we turn to God for, what we want from the divine, what the prayers
and pleas of humans over the ages have amounted to has been a call for
permission to be happy. Despite the rise of fundamentalism, when God becomes
merely a figurehead for the minions who would enforce the edicts of culture,
then the affection of humans for God wanes. In our own age, many people find
little use for a God so employed and so are eventually quite alienated from any
such concept. However, when God becomes the God of Joy and Awe, then the notion
of God in our lives begins to hold the promise of a totally different reality.
What I would propose in accordance with what I learned through the
Method, is that for God to have any meaning whatsoever, God must be our
happiness. This is not hard to figure. If we think of God as the ultimate
meaning giver, then what is it we want from God? That’s right. Our happiness.
And if we take it from the point of view of
ourselves
as the meaning givers to our lives and all in the world, what is the meaning we
wish our lives to have? Why, you guessed it. Happiness, of course. Without
happiness, would anything else in existence have any meaning for you? All the
money in the world and no happiness? All the power in the world and no
happiness? I know, I know, from the perspective of the logic of “B” you may
still believe that those things in the world---wealth, power, sex, admiration,
etc.---are the things that have the power to render meaning, to
make you happy.
Hopefully for the sake of following the thesis being forwarded here you
might be willing to at least temporarily suspend those assumptions. For, no
matter what you try to replace your happiness with, you end up wanting what? Why
you guessed right again. Your happiness, of course. And that is precisely what
God is: our happiness. An Old Testament psalm calls God the one “who gives
joy.” The divine in us is lived and experienced as our happiness,
our joy, our elation, our felicity, our peace, our gratitude and awe. As my
teacher opened my eyes to see, God is the experience of our happiness lived in
us from moment to moment. What humans have always wanted God to be, that is the
source of endless joy, lo and behold, that is what God is! The divine lives in
us through our experience of our freedom and happiness. This is the substance,
the life, the breath of God being actualized in the moment to moment realization
of our joy. Joy, happiness is the pneuma, the
life breath of God. Your happiness is literally God’s breath, the divine
respiration, the compassionate metabolism of joy.
It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that our living our lives in the
light of our freedom and happiness is fulfilling the will of the divine. We know
that our love is a gift of spontaneity and freedom, unconditioned by any cause.
So too, the divine love is the same. What we offer in loving is the fullness of
our wish for the happiness of the beloved. When we see those we love living and
experiencing their joy, then their joy becomes our joy. How could that be any
less with God? Surely God’s joy is our joy. As we live it, we not only have
the fullness of all we could ever want, but we can revel in the knowledge that
through our joy we are fulfilling the grandest design of the divine for us, in
us.
That brings us to the notion around which this article is built: God and
Spirituality. We have defined God as happiness, the one who gives joy. The
primary quality of the divine is freedom because it is out of that understanding
of the divine that we can legitimately describe creation as an act of love.
Without freedom, we have the spectacle of some kind of unmoved mover who
accidentally belched in the void and hasn’t a clue that in doing so it set in
motion the evolution of the universe[s] as we know it. We value what we call
love precisely because it is an outcome of freedom that thrives best and is
fully nurtured by our happiness. So the spiritual we can take in general
terms to be the more intimate experience of the self; that which touches upon,
relates to, or manifests in a more singular way the deeper characteristics of
meaning of a person. The spiritual is the tabernacle of our deepest values. Our
experience of our freedom and happiness constitute both the fundamental dynamics
of the self and the creative, generative matrix out of which comes the living
moment to moment performance of the truth of ourselves. So the ongoing
experience of being spiritual is a continuing sense of consonance with that
generative matrix within ourselves.
I would also posit that the living performance of our spirituality in
each moment can be captured by a number of states of experience: Compassion,
Gratitude, Presence Spontaneous Action and Joy.
There are other additional characteristics but for the purposes of this writing
I wish to focus on these five because collectively and synergistically they
together form what I call the Attitude; that is an ongoing stance and
momentum that inclines us in the direction of more consistently affirming our
happiness and joy in each moment.
Compassion: In the employment of the Option Method by people
there is initially often a period when the person has had a wonderful experience
of liberation by virtue of understanding that some aspect of their unhappiness
is not necessary and they have permission to feel good and do in fact feel those
good feelings. Such moments though are usually followed by a return to the well
worn patterns of unhappiness. The person then may typically feel as if they are
a failure because they have not maintained their good feelings. They do not
recognize that the judgment about themselves is what now stands in the way of
successfully using the Method to continue to clear away beliefs in unhappiness.
It is at that point that I introduce the concept of Compassion. What I mean by
this is a sense of loving concern that takes the emotional form of tenderness
towards ourselves for having done the best we know to do even when that means a
failure to achieve goals or to be consonant with what we normally hold as values
important to us. The judgment dissolves and with it the block to continuing to
allow ourselves to open up to our happiness. Humor, especially when focused non
judgmentally upon oneself can be a wonderful lubricant to loosen the encrusted
bolts that bind us to prisons we make with our beliefs in unhappiness.
Gratitude: What immediately floods in following Compassion is the
powerful healing state of Gratitude; that sense of warmth and tenderness
introduced by Compassion increases many fold as we realize that we were the ones
who allowed ourselves to feel good even in the face of recent deficits in our
hopes and dreams, even in the face of an entire life filled with such
existential potholes on the paths we hoped would lead us to certain levels of
attainment in our relations with others and with the world at large. Many times
we feel this in our body as a gentle or intense wave of physical relief and
growing emotional élan, like a sudden cooling breeze by the shore on a stifling
day that sweeps across your body turning every pore into a receptacle for ease
and elation.
Presence: As Gratitude becomes more a tradition and enduring place
we come to inhabit with greater regularity, we
enter into a state I call “Presence” which is the experience of a quiet ease
and confidence in being with oneself and with others. Issues as problems having
to do with any threat to our happiness do not exist; issues as having to do with
the practical workings of the world around us are related to with as much
intelligence as we can bring to bear without any compulsion or sense of
necessity. Having had the privilege of having dogs and cats as companions for so
many years gives me a wonderful model of Presence. Their states of restfulness
are not merely neutral down times; anyone who has been with their pets over the
years comes to treasure those times of the day when your companion is present to
you. This is what Martin Buber describes , at one point in his classic work I
And Thou, in his own experience with a cat, a sense of canniness and
unexpected recognition that invites and celebrates being with in the profound
and wordless fashion of I and Thou.
Spontaneous Action: Out of the depths of the silent pond of
Presence often emerges the unpredictable surge I call Spontaneous Action. So
many times when we are strangled with our fears and anxieties, every decision
can be an agony of doubt and distress about possible outcomes and undesirable
effects. In the quiet comfort that Presence provides we can be in touch with our
freedom in ways that are stifled by our normal belief systems. We can make
decisions and act on them with a seamless ease and comfort that surprises and
delights us. Letting go of the fearful observer that we often put in place to
monitor all our behaviors is further a manifestation of the degree to which we
have opened ourselves up to trust in who we are, how we are free to proceed with
our life without dread. There are no claims to infallibility here, merely of a
loving confidence that we cannot be bad for ourselves even when our actions in
the world fall short of getting us what we want.
Presence can be a cradle for Spontaneous Action to
birth many initiatives consonant with our values. Out of our happiness in
loving, we could also know, should we choose to, the joy of the divine in
feeding the hungry, in comforting the dying, in teaching those who hunger for
knowledge; we could know the joy of the divine in loving the happiness that is
resident in all humans, in all creation, even when those humans and that
creation do not seem to comprehend or reflect that knowing. This is no
imperative, just the abundance of playfulness that could be a miracle for
ourselves and our fellow humans. No constraining orthodoxy or crushing models of
“authenticity” are extant here. Rather what I call the Great Democracy of
Being is reflected in the fluid dynamics of the Attitude alive in us.
That means that everyone has always immediate and unmediated access to their
happiness in each and every instant of their lives.
Here is a true wonder for us to contemplate if we are inclined to do so.
And let me add, that part of the wonder of being present and living our
happiness is that there is never anything that has to constrain whatever we
could come to know. There is no such thing as “dangerous” knowledge, because
there is nothing we could come to know that can compel us to be a way we do not
want to be against our will. The happier we are, the clearer we are about the
joy of knowing and the closer we move to the divine sense that knowing is being.
To know our happiness is to be our happiness.
So our openness to all that is, is without limit, since knowing is never
a danger, but a potential door to joy, understood through the divine sense of
knowing one’s happiness. This is the only legitimate instance where knowing is
being for all of us because it is the only absolutely unambiguous case where
what we know, our happiness, is completely within our control. All other knowing
is conditional knowing, pertaining to the phenomenal and not the noumenal core
of being.
Joy: Finally we come to Joy and in joy we close the loop begun
with Compassion. Joy is the reflexive act of recognition that indeed we are
happy. It is a particular form of attention to our success in affirming the
truth of happiness in which we literally rejoice in the achievement of that
state. This recognition then becomes a platform for the amplification of our
good feelings. They reverberate like the waves of a tuning fork reinforcing one
another and as it were strengthening the force of the vibration. It fuels the
growth and maintenance of the Attitude and fosters its expansion into the still
dim and unlit corners of our self experience. It can open the inner doors of our
minds to the beatific vision of Awe that is the core of our sense of
union with the divine, a union that maintains what Dostoyevsky calls the
“mystery of the individual” while at the same time uniting us with all of
creation in the realm that the mystic/physicist David Bohm terms the
“implicate order.”
And so Spirituality is the manifesting of the
Attitude in all its dimensions. It is the fulfillment of our purpose in existing
which is to be happy. All other roles in life are essentially our playing in the
world. There is never any guarantee that any particular role will be granted to
us or that acting in that role we will live up to the demands and standards of
any particular cultural paradigm that might be extant at the time of our
historical existence. Thus our true purpose can only be what we can actually
fulfill and that is fulfilled every time we affirm our happiness in any given
moment. For any instant is not in time, but rather time is in that instant. Our
relationship with God is nurtured then by our spiritual evolving of the
Attitude. It is following that deep innate prompting to manifest the trinity of
the self: Being, Freedom, Happiness---all different facets of the same
underlying reality. Moving in concert with that fundamental rhythm is a
resonance with the divine. It is a plucking on the ontological strings whose
melody is the creative symphony of evolving life. Listen to it in every breath
and movement of your body and in every crack, crevice and living surface of
nature and rejoice in the light of God’s truth: you living your Joy now!
And
now in the spirit of my Workbook I offer some questions and experiential
exercises that might hopefully have the effect of turning an intellectual
enterprise into a possible source of actual self creation:
·
Do you
know that God is your happiness; that the divine lives through your affirmation
of your happiness? What God feels like
is you being happy!
·
Do you
have any reservations about living the joy of the divine in you?
What would hold you back from rejoicing in such a notion?
·
1. Use
the notion that God is your happiness to explore increasing the intensity and
quality of your love for others. 2. Be in touch with the wonder and awe of the
rhythms of nature by going to some special place and feeling the joy of solitude
while being in the full presence of all the manifestations of nature around you.
Joy resonates in each blade of grass, in each bird’s cry, in every swirl of
the tides and movement of the wind, in all the starry brilliance of the night
sky. 3. Open yourself up to all of this and feel the joy of loving even more
those who in turn love their happiness.
·
Take some
time to contemplate the wonder of humor. Laughter is one of the more
self-evident manifestations of living your joy. Give yourself over to more of it
and expand the “happy nut” aspect
of yourself. Without a fear of ever being “foolish” you may find that the comedic
in you is also the divine, that all that is, is the harmonic echo of the
laughter of God resonating in our hearts as we live our joy. Find the comic
lovingly every day and record what you experience so you can enjoy it over and
over again*.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Barrow,
J. &Tipler, F. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. NY. Oxford.
Bohm,
D. Wholeness and The Implicate
Order. London. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
* My novel The God-Speak has some interesting discussions of a similar character.