Consider the mole. Once, I was candy tripping (mixing LSD and MDMA). And I considered the mole. Specifically, it’s evolution. The ancestors of the moles lived above ground, but over the generations, they developed an instinct to burrow, and they burrowed, and burrowed, and burrowed some more, until they all but lost their eyesight1, and developed other adaptations to live underground, such as being able to breath in low oxygen, high carbon dioxide environments, and paws where the palms point outward, to facilitate digging.
The mole has forgotten the sun, and learned much of the dark and the tunnel, and this makes me think of both atheism and religion.
We live in a disenchanted world, it is asserted, where God is dead, and the spiritual is just delusion. A lot of rational argumentation goes into building up this worldview. In this view, we were once moles, and when people spoke of the spiritual, this was just knowledge of the tunnel and the dark. But we have left the tunnel, and are beginning to gain true eyesight and see things as they really are. We are coming to know the sunshine2 of empiricism and reason. But then I remember the Brother Lawrence, of whom it is said:
That in the winter, seeing a tree stripped of its leaves, and considering that within a little time, the leaves would be renewed, and after that the flowers and fruit appear, he received a high view of the Providence and Power of GOD, which has never since been effaced from his soul. That this view had perfectly set him loose from the world, and kindled in him such a love for GOD, that he could not tell whether it had increased in above forty years that he had lived since.
Having God burned into your soul because you saw a barren tree. The scientific worldview would say this is pure darkness, but I’m having a really hard time saying the Brother Lawrence is the one in the dark, and the rationalist atheist who never had a mystical experience is the one in the light. Because the rationalist atheist could easily just be a mole: they burrowed, and burrowed, and burrowed with their rational argumentation, until the eye of the heart with which you see God became vestigial, and talk of the sun became deep delusion.
But I can see the flip side, in which it is the mystic who has burrowed into a deep pit and gained knowledge of the dark even as the eyes of reason became vestigial, and the calm vision of naturalism faded away into nothing.
What is the light? Is there only one light? It was once asked of the inimitable Jōshū:
“During the day there is sunshine. During the night there is moonshine. What is god shine?”
Jōshū said, “Sunshine and moonshine”.
Of course it can be said that science and reason are the true sun, it’s a well-worn narrative and there is truth in it too. But even holding to that, we have the following shocking passage from this book on Gnosticism:
Imagine a world, a reality, that denies itself the vision of the night sky and affirms only the sunlight. Cut off from the vision of the stars, the inhabitants would experience only the sharp contrasts of the daylight world and thus only the mundane, which means primarily the physical. More disastrous, the stimulus to the imagination offered by the light of the stars would be absent. No one would be able to envision a world of boundless light to which the seeming perforations of the black veil appear to bear testimony.
Ours is a world of such denial. Since the Renaissance, our civilization has increasingly committed itself to a worldview based on the daylight world of physical data and on the rational theories that can be deduced from them. We are trapped in the harsh, sun-drenched world of daylight consciousness where we gather more and more facts that, paradoxically, still do not add up to greater happiness. We learn more and more about less and less. Robbed of the Gnostic vision of the night sky with its mysterious lights, we have a disturbingly incomplete understanding of the nonmaterial aspect of our experiences. We seem to be stranded in near-time and near-space, caught in a spiritual myopia of momentous proportion and consequences.
If science and reason are the sunshine, what is the moonshine? Does it really make sense to affirm only the sun? To assert the Moon lies? But you can only see the stars when there is no sun. And paradoxically, roam the night long enough, and the moon turns into the sun, and the sun into the moon. As the Bhagavad Gita says:
What is midnight-gloom, to unenlightened souls shines wakeful day
To his clear gaze; what seems as wakeful day
Is known for night, thick night of ignorance, To his true-seeing eyes. Such is the Saint!
Someone who does not engage with spirituality is unserious about the truth. A mole fleeing the sun. I had an interesting experience with The Real and Final Enlightenment: a very smart guy who is a professor of both law and philosophy read it, and it made no sense to him. I have written schizophrenic gibberish before, but with that, no one understands, and that was not the case with that post. There is an opportunity cost to reason, entire senses can be lost when engaging with it, just like the mole burrowing their way into blindness. And there is likewise an opportunity cost to mysticism, the possibility of losing the light of reason.
Sunshine. Moonshine. Pick both. Pick Godshine.
Moles technically have vision, but it is of very poor quality.
Hume once called reason the ‘‘calm sunshine of the mind.” Very poetic!
I like this. Chimes with what I'm reading in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind at the moment about nirvana not existing anywhere else - it's just a different, more empowered way of engaging with all the samsara within you and without you.
Agree that Godshine needs both sunshine and moonshine in it - order and chaos, fact and mystery, left and right brain. That's why attempts to "translate" religious language into secular language a la Habermas, while interesting, are never going to fully "explain away" all those ancient metaphors. The ambiguity is the entire point with religious language - the only way you can attempt to express truths that can't be expressed in words is to combine your words in novel, confusing, paradoxical ways.
That's not to say that updating belief with a little Bayes or cognitive science is a waste of time, but push the project too far and you're just dissecting butterflies. The point of faith isn't to know but to practise.