When I was preparing for first Holy Communion some time in the mid-1960s, the nun who taught the catechism classes talked about sin. "Your soul," she explained, "is like this beautiful white shining cloth; every time you sin, the cloth is stained. It gets dirtier and darker, with large black patches spreading all over it. You can take it in to be cleaned by going to Confession and expressing contrition for all your sins; the priest will absolve you, and the act of taking the Eucharist during Holy Communion will make your soul spotless and shining white once again."
So here, at the age of six or seven, I was confronted by the Cartesian dualist notion of the soul as being something separate from the physical world, something that belonged with God and Heaven and all things Heavenly such as angels in an immaterial realm. But I did not feel this soul. What the nun was describing was something entirely abstract; something that I couldn't understand, that clicked not with my personal experience of life thus far.
In other words, I was being told to believe something without understanding it. Such is religion. Just accept what you are told.
But what about gnosis – the idea of a personal revelation? Of a journey, of a process of spiritual understanding?
It was only in adulthood that I began to grasp the notion of consciousness. Now this is something I did feel, since earliest childhood. The awareness of being aware. I remember, one Tuesday sometime in the early or mid-1980s, reading a pop-psychology feature article in the London Evening Standard about consciousness on my way home from work. It had made an impression on me. [I'd love to find it in some archive somewhere!] Discussing it with friends that evening over a few beers, I noted that some of them (Andy Ł, Jack Cz) immediately got the concept, whilst others wanted to breeze on past to other more tangible subjects of conversation. But that article made me equate the notion of 'soul' and 'consciousness' or 'awareness' as synonyms and a concept with which I could personally and deeply relate.
Over the decades, this has evolved in my thinking, particularly when I first stumbled upon the concept of qualia, as discrete units of conscious experience. Yes, this is crucial. The primacy of first-person, subjective conscious experience as being the foundation, the absolute core of all philosophical and theological inquiry into the nature of reality. Forget for a moment atoms in spacetime. It is your perception, your understanding of atoms in spacetime that's fundamental. Consciousness is fundamental. Consciousness pervades the Universe, gives it existence, structure and purpose. Consciousness is the soul, that same soul that gets soiled by sin. What sin? Anything that's on your conscience. Embarrassing moments in your life that you'd rather had not happened. Events brought up in life reviews often mentioned by people who have had near-death experiences. Events which could be said to be associated with karma. That's how I see sin; things you'd wish in retrospect never to have done or said.
So what about Jesus, whose resurrection from the dead we commemorate today? Below: the Sermon on the Mount, as imagined by Google Imagen 3.0.
Jesus on the one hand is a historical figure whose authenticity cannot be doubted. Upon the foundations of that historical figure, however, has come to be built a narrative that I find questionable. A theology based on acceptance rather than personal gnosis. "Here you go," says the Church. "Here are all the things you must believe." "Yes, but I have issues with some of them. My way is individual." "Heretic! Who are you to question the infallibility of the Church!"
The Gospels, the four key books of the New Testament, were most probably written between AD 66 and 110, putting their composition within the lifetimes of eyewitnesses to the events of Jesus's life. The remaining 22 books (the 27th and last being the Apocalypse or Revelation of St John) are the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles (13 of which were attributed to St Paul), which make up the bulk of the New Testament (21 books in total). It was only at the Council of Rome in AD 382 that the final canon of the New Testament was agreed upon by the Church. Out with the gnostic gospels and other apocrypha. Three and half centuries after the time of Christ.
Ultimately belief is a highly personal thing. For me, as a child, curious, sensitive and believing in a meaning and purpose to life (my life and the universe in general), the notions taught by the Catholic Church did not square with my personal observations and experience. Yes, I believed in life everlasting (not bodily life, but some form of survival of consciousness. My personal experience of anomalous qualia memories of a time, from a place outside of my biological life, suggest that this is very real, far more real, far more tangible, than that of a historical figure described in the pages of the New Testament.
Jesus – son of God? Are we all not children of God? [I roundly reject assigning sex to God. The Cosmic Purpose is not of physical matter, hence has no chromosomes determining gender.] Did Jesus rise from the dead on the third day after crucifixion? This is something I can accept metaphysically rather than literally.
Do I believe in God? I most certainly do. I believe in an overarching Divinity that provides purpose and a teleology to life and to the entire Cosmos. Though this Divinity is ineffable, something that we are incapable of understanding (like cats cannot understand electricity, though are aware of its presence when a light is switched on in a dark room). Those who deny the existence of God because of three centuries of rationalism are (in my mind) just as wrong as those who define God too rigidly on the basis of ancient religious texts. But ultimately, I hold to this intuition that all who seek God shall find God in their own way; and if that way is as a part of a religious community, then so be it.
Do I believe in life after death? I believe in the survival of consciousness after death. But what happens thereafter is mere surmise. My personal experience speaks to me of fleeting glimpses, consistent, familiar, pleasant, yet ephemeral, that pop into my stream of consciousness now and then, sometimes triggered by a moment, sometimes entirely spontaneously, hinting of past lives lived. Samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth? Evolving spiritually with each successive lifetime? Or ultimate unity with the One Consciousness, dissolving into God, fundamental and universal, as biological life slips away?
This time last year:
April, a treacherous month
This time four years ago:
Pandemic, then drought
This time five years ago:
Lent 2019, a summing up
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment