Always Here

Heschel: “It takes three things to attain a sense of significant being: God, a soul, and a moment. And the three are always here. Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.”

A sign is something that, by definition, points beyond itself. A curved arrow on a sign alongside the road indicates that the road ahead is going to curve, just as a stop sign points to an action required of a driver approaching an intersection. Fever is a sign of infection, and rising interest rates are often a sign of inflation. But what does it mean to speak of our existence as significant? Does it makes sense to think of a human being as pointing beyond itself, whose value is not self-contained but only discovered in an act of self-transcendence?

It may seems as if I’m splitting hairs here, but “meaning” and “significance” are not mere synonyms. If my life is meaningful, then it has value and importance to me. But if my life is significant, then somehow its value is no longer mine or about me but about my place within a larger system of reference. Meaning is “for me” while significance is “from me”; one is a confirmation of relevance, whereas the other is a consecration of existence.

The difference in these two words that are often used interchangeably helps to illuminate the threshold between ego and soul. The shift from personal to spiritual awareness requires a detachment from “me” and “mine,” often described metaphorically as a death followed by an outward leap of full release into a greater reality. So much of religion – all of it, Nietzsche would say – is arranged around the ego and its anxious need for security, identity and immortality. Everything is personal, and even ultimate reality is personified. The final goal is “my” salvation, the rescue of “my” soul from sin and death – a soul that is “mine” and belongs to “me.”

While in professional ministry I was chronically frustrated over the egoism of contemporary Christianity – and it isn’t merely a modern problem but has deep roots in historical Christian orthodoxy. People go to church or leave a church based on its adequacy to their needs as religious consumers. They are looking for convenient services, a fellowship of like-minded believers, and a promise of everlasting life in heaven.

Were they to come across a saying of Jesus on the necessity of dying to find real life or giving up everything for the sake of the New Reality he called God’s kingdom, a flash of insight might cross their faces. But just as quickly it would vanish and their egos would grab onto the “so that” – the reward, the prize, the payoff. What’s in it for me?

In choosing significance over meaning, Heschel is intentionally moving beyond morality and the mythological god, beyond ego and tribal orthodoxy. Heschel’s God is clearly something other than a supernatural ego, demanding worship and jealous for glory. For him, religion is not about rescue but presence, not meaning but mystery, not dogmatic certainty but wonder, gratitude and responsibility.

The very formation of ego generates the delusion that I have a body and a soul. As the center of my personal identity, ego also divides time into past and future, what happened to bring me here and what’s coming next. As is the case in all forms of dualism, the opposing pieces are inevitably distorted and misunderstood. Even more tragic, however, is that the division of consciousness between an outside (body) and an inside (soul), a before (past) and an after (future), distracts us from the only reality there is – here and now.

God is a word that points beyond itself, beyond language, and beyond the mind to the present mystery of being. Soul is a deep center of awareness that connects us to God as the ground of our being. And this moment – right now, before we try to grasp it and make it meaningful – is our jumping-off point, where we must let go and give ourselves over to the wonder of being alive.

An Apology for What’s Next

Nietzsche: “When the highest and strongest drives, breaking passionately out, carry the individual far above and beyond the average and lowlands of the herd conscience, the self-confidence of the community goes to pieces, its faith in itself, its spine as it were, is broken: consequently it is precisely these drives which are most branded and calumniated.”

Nietzsche’s distrust of the social system is well known. As he saw it, our current cultural achievement as a species is merely a staging area for the next great breakthrough. What’s on the far side is creative freedom and a full understanding of our place in the universe. Where we are now, however, is caught in the collapsing frame of late-modern consciousness, what he elsewhere called “the twilight of the gods.”

Traditional society has several distinctive features. It is hierarchically arranged, with tribal authorities at the center and top of the social order who are regarded as enjoying a privileged connection to god. It is managed by an intricate network of customs (Nietzsche’s “morality”) that work to pull otherwise spontaneous, creative and potentially deviant behavior into conformity with the group. It is based in a system of stories (a mythology) that tie contemporary life to the sacred past and clarify a divine purpose for the future of the faithful.

So at the dusk of the modern era (late nineteenth century) when Nietzsche and others began to realize that mythology – not only other people’s stories, but our own as well – is a human production, the whole thing started to collapse.

If myths of revelation are actually fictional constructions, then we need to ask about the particular historical contexts that shape the storytellers’ worldview and way of life. Flipping the sacred stories of mythology on their head in this way – as coming “up” out of the human situation rather than “down” out of heaven – urged new questions about perspective, hidden agendas, and ulterior motivations of those who made up the stories in the first place, and of those who have a stake in telling them now.

Nietzsche was especially ruthless in his criticism whenever he spotted or got a whiff of moralism. He cautioned that we should always inquire into whose position in society is served as we stand together, with hands on our hearts, reciting the creed that supports the story that describes the world that humans built.

Instead of simply sweeping morality into the cultural junk bin, however, Nietzsche offers an explanation of its origins and why we (the tribe) protect it so fiercely. If we understand that mythology orients the tribe under the sovereignty of god, and that morality orients the ego under the rule of the tribe, then specific moral disciplines are how the ego manages the body – or better, how the tribe manages the body through the ego.

When you pull back on a particular urge out of fear of being caught, the “herd conscience” is controlling your behavior. For a long time such prohibitions were believed to come ultimately from god, and you don’t want to mess with god. So you do what is “right.” But why is that right? Or what’s the “wrong” that is being ruled out by your obedience?

Nietzsche’s reference to our “highest and strongest drives, breaking passionately out” reveals his deep respect for the body and our animal nature. For millions of years the survival intelligence of instinct has been marvelously successful – at least as it concerns you and me – in keeping our ancestors alive, reproducing, and adapting to or overcoming the challenges of their environment. As society grew more complex and unstable, it became increasingly important to bring the body’s animal nature under control. The vital drives of instinct, which had served the advancement of human evolution so faithfully and for so long, needed to be domesticated and trained for life in the tribal role play.

I’ll take just three of what I regard as the more obvious of such survival drives to illustrate what I think Nietzsche is saying. If we soften our definition of selfishness to mean the driving desire to take what is needed to stay alive, then beneath all the social cooperation of this planet’s ecosystems, this impulse for survival is most basic. At least for long enough to make copies of your genes, which segues to the sex drive as second on my list. Any prehistoric individual who lacked one or the other of these first two drives either didn’t live long enough to reproduce, or didn’t care enough to try. Either way, the outcome was a genetic dead-end.

At a more distant third place, I would put aggression on the short list of “highest and strongest drives.” I don’t mean by this the urge to pick fights and make trouble, but rather the internal uprising of emotional energy that motivates the individual to confront a challenge(r) or persist in the determination to overcome an obstacle in the way of fulfillment. Higher organisms strive, struggle and compete to stay alive and protect their interests.

Tribal morality is uneasy with these behavioral impulses of the body. For the sake of propriety and the social order, it discourages selfishness (“Share your toys!”), regulates sexuality (“Wait till you’re married in this type of partnership”), and sublimates aggression (“Try to win, but play fair!”). And in a religiously moralistic society, as Nietzsche saw in late-modern Christianity, even the urges beneath these behaviors are “branded and calumniated” (falsely accused) as sinful.

But what happens when you try to repress the “will to power” of our animal instinct? Answer: It will get frustrated, amplified and perverted on its way back to the surface. Immorality is rarely due to a lack or ineffective use of social controls, but is rather the predictable outcome of an oppressive and puritanical morality. As the self-confidence of the community goes to pieces, it works harder and turns the screw tighter on individual freedom, which only serves to further aggravate the frustration and exacerbate the problem. And so it goes.

Is there any way through it? The implied message of Nietzsche is that our future as a species will be determined by the degree to which we can relax into our bodies, listen to our deeper drives, and learn to trust the natural intelligence of our animal instinct. This also entails that we rediscover a very ancient talent which has fallen asleep under the trance of tribal morality – if it hasn’t already expired by asphyxiation: to live with respect for the body and its living ground.

If we could (re)learn this, there just may be time enough for the creative emergence of genuine freedom and community – on the far side of our present challenge.

Giving Up Security

Watts: “To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this center and soul of our being which we call ‘I’. For this we think to be the real [self] – the thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings, and the knower of our knowledge. We do not actually understand that there is no security until we realize that this ‘I’ does not exist.”

Insecurity is a fact of existence. When this fact breaks into our consciousness it can take us over as a feeling that nothing is certain, nothing matters, and that there’s no point in going on. Of my three conversation partners, Watts is the one who examines the psychology of insecurity to help me understand its causes and consequences.

At any given moment I can feel secure or insecure. But what is this “I” that feels one way or the other? Western psychology began as a study of the soul (psyche), but at some point it made the fateful mistake of identifying soul as the center of our individual personality, later called ego. (It’s probably more accurate to say that ego had assumed this position much earlier in history, and that modern psychology made it scientifically acceptable.) Now, what had earlier been only intimations of immortality, coming up from that spiritual center of awareness where my existence opens up to the larger mystery of reality, became a personal belief: “I (ego) am immortal.”

But ego and soul are not the same, or merely two names for the same thing. Soul (along with body) is primary, whereas ego is secondary. I am body and soul, I don’t have these. Body is my animal nature; it is informed by an intelligence called instinct, and both its internal urgencies and peripheral sense receptors resonate to the greater rhythm of Life. Soul is my spiritual nature and is informed by an intelligence called wisdom. While the drives and reflexes of body are dedicated to my survival, the insights and intuitions of soul cultivate a sense of participation in a mystery that transcends my individual needs and concerns.

The irony here is that this “I” (ego) which has assumed possession rights over body and soul, is really nothing but a social construct – something put together and given shape through countless interactions with others. As I learned the skills of language and internalized the worldview of my tribe, I gradually took on multiple facets of identity.

I belong to this group. I work hard for these things. I prefer this sort of company. I don’t trust those people. I believe in this god. All these lines of attachment correspond to facets (faces, masks or roles) of my identity. As long as the many facets fit and hold together, I have an illusion of solidity. I like that illusion. It helps me feel secure.

When I take a closer look, however, it becomes obvious that this illusion of security is not secure at all. Every one of those lines of identity is very tenuous and fragile; it’s the cumulative effect of their considerable number that gives the illusion of permanence. Just watch how annoyed, disturbed and panic-stricken (the predictable progression) I become when just one of them gets stretched out of shape. And if it should snap – watch out!

Yet every line that attaches to the social landscape of my tribe and forms a corresponding facet of my ego identity is only a construct – put together, made up, a role-play, a pretense … and inherently unreal. When I learn to hold these more loosely, I discover something rather unexpected. Life is moving and changing. Nothing is certain, maybe nothing really matters. And that’s perfectly okay.

So is there a point to going on?

As a young man, I believed that one day I would accomplish something worthwhile and lasting. I would leave a mark and make my life count. Now I’m beginning to understand that my most important work is to wake up from this trance and move deeper into life.

New motto: Be real, live fully, love well.

Breakpoint for Religion

Heschel: “You can affect a person only if you reach his [or her] inner life, the level where every human being is insecure and feels his [or her] incompleteness, the level of awareness that lies beyond articulation.

“The soul is discovered in response, in acts of transcending the self, in the awareness of ends that surpass one’s interest and needs.”

Insecurity has two very different meanings. For Watts and Heschel (and I assume Nietzsche would concur), it describes the fact of our existence – that our survival is not guaranteed, nor are the conditions always favorable for our personal happiness and fulfillment. That’s just the way it is. The grand adventure of life and its evolutionary course in time is inherently precarious, fraught with challenges, and dependent on environmental conditions all along the way. Some environments are hospitable to living things, and some aren’t. The fact that every living organism is to an important degree at the mercy of factors outside its control makes its existence “insecure.”

Watts, especially, uses the term “insecurity” to refer to a feeling that can overwhelm the human organism. When you feel insecure, you are anxious to the point of panic over the otherwise natural limits on your ability to control what’s going on. This anxious feeling may then motivate you to take control – keeping others at a safe distance, for instance, or imposing your will on them. You might take out a stack of insurance policies against any and all possible risks.

With Heschel, insecure describes our human condition. As creatures, we are dependent on conditions of reality over which we have little authority or control. Take, for example, our need for oxygen. We can’t make oxygen, yet we need it to survive. The metabolic process that supports life in our cells, tissues and organs makes us dependent on the supply of oxygen from outside ourselves. If it isn’t there, we will die. This may sound as if we are characterizing life as internally vulnerable and weak – and in a way that is important to admit, life is (we might say) naturally deficient. None of us is “complete,” self-sufficient, or fully adequate to sustain life entirely on our own.

At the developmental level of ego where the focus shifts from  survival to identity, human existence continues to be insecure. We need belonging and recognition, but the social reality that might provide or withhold these is also outside our control. Humans that have been deliberately (or experimentally) deprived of social interaction not only end up relationally stunted as a consequence, but also fail to mature and die far earlier than normal.

Heschel refers to our “inner life” as that place where our insecurity and incompleteness are most acutely felt, which makes it sound as if the soul is something less than the transcendental center of immortality that popular religion makes it out to be. I admit, it is tempting to put the spiritual life of the soul at a level high above the temporal conditions of body and ego. While these are dependent and conditioned, soul is independent and without conditions. While they are susceptible to the complications of life in time, soul is utterly detached and immune.

Here’s the beautiful paradox: It is at the point of our deepest need, where we are absolutely dependent on what is beyond us – that is, where our insecurity is most evident and inescapable – that we are also connected to a larger reality. Our Western system of values regards dependency as weakness, as a flaw or breakdown in our intended design as self-standing and fully liberated beings. And while it does represent a limitation against our absolute freedom, need is where our presumption of self-reliance must be dropped in order to open up and receive what is needed. Dependency is where our own incompleteness may be painfully obvious, but it’s also where the larger web of life is providentially present to us.

True enough, I can simply “take” what I need and fail to respond in faith, wonder and gratitude. In all my self-preoccupation I may never become aware of my place in the grandeur of being. I need air, I need love. What’s in it for me? The rest be damned. But then, tangled up in my own insecurities and failing to respond, soul goes undiscovered.

The revolution begins tomorrow. I’ll feel better then.

Faith For Today

Heschel: “Faith in the sense of being involved in the mystery of God and [humanity] is not the same as acceptance of definitive formulations of articles of belief. Even [one] who merely strives for faith in the living God is on the threshold of faith. The test is honesty and stillness.

“Our error is in the failure to understand that creed without faith is like a body without a heart. Just as faith may become blind, cruel, and fierce, creed may become shoddy, sterile, and deaf. Let us insist that alienation from dogma does not necessarily mean the loss of faith.”

I know that there are many more like me, for whom the traditional doctrines are not only uninteresting but irrelevant; not only unrelated to our daily lives but frequently offensive to our intelligence and ethical sensibilities. I know because I’ve met them, many thousands of them along the way. There are millions more all around the planet.

Doctrines – including the Big Ones, called dogmas – are derived from myths, sacred stories of gods and heroes, saviors and saints, revelations and miracles. The myths, in turn, are dramatic narratives that take place against a backdrop of cultural assumptions called a worldview. Such stories may explain how this world came into being or where it’s all going. As long as they are compatible with our mental model of the universe they can be said to make sense.

For millenniums religion was the official storyteller of culture. Ancient myths oriented human life in a universe conducted by hidden agencies whose intentions weren’t altogether apparent, and often required ritual supplication or appeasement in order to move in our favor. To the degree that human action was maintained in accordance with these hidden powers, the cultural order was preserved.

At some point, the objective of religious observance shifted from world maintenance to individual salvation – gaining escape from time and the body and living forever with God, who had by this time withdrawn from the world (escaped his own body) into a separate realm of pure spirit.

This “recession of God” from the world coincided with a growing human fascination over the composition and mechanics of the universe – giving birth to science. Without a fall-back explanation that invoked supernatural agencies making and moving the universe, science began telling very different stories. It also had its priests (researchers) and storytellers (theorists), its rituals (the experimental method) and temples (laboratories).

For a while, the older mental model would have to be periodically modified to accommodate the new discoveries. But eventually the three-story floor plan had to be abandoned. Then the division in history between an age of revelation and “these last days” had to be scrapped. And now the dualism of God and world, soul and body, “us” (the saved) and “them” (the lost) is becoming meaningless – except when a raving prophet or raging politician succeeds in agitating the insecurity of our freedom. Strangely, but perhaps not surprisingly, we can be suddenly willing to throw our support behind “whatever it takes” to feel secure again.

How is a person of today supposed to “hold faith” in a religion whose worldview is obsolete? If a god “up there” has relinquished the earth to human industry and its toxic by-products; if a soul “in here” has pulled attention and care away from our bodies and the physical environment; and if a preoccupation with a life after this one has justified our indifference to the pressing concerns of today – what are we to do?

When a cultural worldview, its mythology, and the dogmatic beliefs that have anchored it in our minds and hearts no longer “work” to orient us meaningfully in the universe, are we forced to believe it anyway (fundamentalism) or else scrap the whole business?

Heschel reminds us that faith – an existential stance of basic trust in life – is not reducible to the orthodoxy of any generation. Our task is to find creative and relevant ways of cultivating faith for today. We live in the same mystery as did those before us. There has always been, and will forever be, a holy presence at the heart of reality.

What Would Nietzsche Do?

Nietzsche: “That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.”

Given that Nietzsche titled his book Beyond Good and Evil, we can assume a higher importance in his mind for what he connects to this phrase. But … love? Really? Nietzsche? Didn’t he espouse the obliteration of all values, despise the Jews and inspire Hitler’s holocaust campaign against humanity?

Surprising answer to all three parts: No. In fact, it was his sister who took charge of his estate and collected his papers after he died; she began spinning his reputation in a direction that agreed with her husband’s antisemitism. (Nietzsche actually condemns it in different published works.)

“Good and evil” in Nietzsche’s thought refers to morality. These are not things in the universe, but values ascribed or attached to things – or rather, to the actions of things (specifically people). While metaphysical realism holds the separate and absolute existence of good and evil (personified in gods and devils), a thorough-going constructivism regards them as values (not entities or supernatural forces) that humans project onto reality. It’s an important part of “world-building” whereby we construct a secure and meaningful habitation in which to live.

In order to get along together, we early on assigned value to certain kinds of social behavior – proper and deviant, right and wrong – and then invented superhuman realities (“good” and “evil”) to anchor them down with authority. Morality, then, is about how human behavior conforms to the standards of right and wrong, as these are customized in a given society (recall that mores are customs).

There’s no indication in Nietzsche’s writings that he preferred social chaos to civil order. His aspiration was for a humanity not tethered to moral standards of good and evil. For the rest of us tribe-bound, people-pleasing and self-interested egos, all this talk of “overcoming morality,” the “death of God,”  and living “beyond good and evil” sounds a lot like mustering for a planetary free-for-all. Did he really believe that living without values would be a good thing? Therein lies the paradox.

No, it would not be “good,” for that just pulls us back into the problem. And what’s the problem? That we can’t live creatively and spontaneously so long as we are measuring our actions against the conventional standards of our tribe (however large). Wanting to do “good” is already qualifying human freedom by appealing (read: submitting) to the judgment of someone else – be it the social majority, a dictator, or the mythological god.

Imagine living with such present mindfulness, with such profound awareness of what’s really going on right now, and fully grounded in the “one life” of which you are a part, that your action flows spontaneously and unselfconsciously to the critical point of creative transformation. Thinking as the universe, you know immediately what is needed in the moment and, without pausing to consider what it will cost you or how you could benefit personally from the outcome, you are like a catalyst of transforming change – and simply make it happen. Who did that? Was it an ego, an extension of the tribe or an agent of another will?

No, it wasn’t an “I” (ego). It was The One – Life itself, the creative will that moves the evolutionary process. You weren’t “commanded,” taken over by a higher power or alien force. You (but not ego you) are the will-to-power, the moving energy of creative change. Your actions cannot be validated or disqualified by any standard of right and wrong, for you are a breaking wave of energy on the ocean of reality. You are, in that very moment, beyond good and evil.

This is love, according to Nietzsche the proto-Nazi nihilist. Ah, and I suppose that’s the point. All along we’ve been judging his vision by how it would work out for the rest of us. Not very well – at least, not as long as we’re hunkering down (or trapped and blinded) in the moral kingdom of good and evil.

Love, for Nietzsche, is not an affection, a feeling, an attachment or even a passion. It is doing the creative thing, not because it has to be done – it’s not an obligation, either –  but because this is the moment. If we are alive, we must live now.

Step into the current and see where it takes you.

Two Small, Really Big Words

Watts: “If we want to keep the old language, still using such terms as ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’, the spiritual must mean ‘the indefinable’, that which, because it is living, must ever escape the framework of any fixed form. Matter is spirit named.”

Question: Why would we want to keep the “old language”? If it’s increasingly irrelevant to our contemporary experience and worldview, what motivation is there for holding on to the traditional dualism of spiritual versus material, soul versus body, God versus world? No doubt, thinking in terms of simple oppositions (this versus that, either/or) makes things much simpler than trying to feel our way through countless shades of gray.

I have been giving my support all along to the critique of a major structural piece in our Western worldview called metaphysical realism. If you have been following the conversation so far, you might have thought to yourself along the way, “I don’t ever remember standing up to confess belief in metaphysical realism. I’m not sure I believe it, either.” But here’s the thing: this particular piece of our collective worldview is so crucial to its structural integrity that its placement is not left to individual choice. Therefore it is technically not even a belief, but rather an assumption – more like the mental container that supports belief.

Assumptions aren’t “visible” like beliefs, they are not consciously held or verbally confessed.Typically we inherit them, imbibing them with our mother’s milk, or like picking up a box in order to carry the objects inside. They are sewn into the very fabric of our language and insinuate themselves into the neural networks of our brains.

In our inherited worldview the terms spirit and matter name two separate realities that come together in each of us, as the frequently conflicted marriage of soul and body. Expanding outward from this tense union, soul moves along one trajectory connecting us to God, while body moves along a second trajectory, into the world.

We have played out this dualism in our mythologies with dramatic flair:  spirit versus matter, God or the world, soul without body. Apocalyptic stories of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Jesus have kept many believers in an attitude of suspicion and detachment. God’s in control, they say. Everything happens for a reason. We need to wait patiently. In the meantime, this tangled knot of body-and-soul continues to unwind and lose its integrity. We’ve become lazy, irresponsible, self-involved and chronically ill.

Now take a second look at the basic assumption, that reality is dualistic. What if instead of accepting the primary terms as mutually exclusive of one another, we regarded them as poles of one continuum? Rather than trying to figure out how these opposites come together, we then have the challenge of figuring out how we have managed to tease them apart in the first place. What if spirit and matter, soul and body – even God and world – are two sides of the same reality? Instead of a duality, we live in a polarity; instead of managing oppositions (either/or), our real task is to live meaningfully with paradoxes (both/and).

Watts invites us to (re)consider reality as both spirit and matter, mystery and meaning, oneness and multiplicity, the nameless and what we can name. But before we proceed to break these polarities into dualities and take sides, try to appreciate spirit as the mystery in our meaning, the hidden ground of all things, the vital force in matter, the creative and elusive presence in which we live and move and have our being.

Obviously, to go there means that I have to surrender many convictions that have so far kept my world neat, tidy and predictable. There is security in a narrow mind.

From Having Answers to Having to Answer

Heschel: “How to save the inner [life] from oblivion – this is the challenge we face. To achieve our goal, we must learn how to activate the soul, how to answer the ultimate, how to relate ourselves to the spirit.”

The cultural atmosphere of the 1960s, as it relates to religion and spirituality, was galvanized by the rediscovery of Nietzsche’s announcement of God’s death – of the mythological god, that is. Major global conflicts, anxieties over communism, and the escalation of racial tensions at home left many utterly disillusioned over whether God was looking out for his favorite nation – or if he even really existed. Speaking through the madman of his parable more than a half-century earlier, Nietzsche realized that his message had been delivered to a generation not ready for it; the 60s were ripe.

Abraham Heschel was a path-breaking proponent of what he called “depth theology” – reconsidering the nature and meaning of God not from the high perch of religious myth and orthodoxy, but out of the deeper ground of the human spiritual experience. As other so-called “neo-orthodox” Christian theologians were working hard to repair the metaphysical realism that Nietzsche had torn down, Heschel was participating in a new wave of religious reflection. These thinkers were really, as I see it, moving Nietzsche’s program into the next step. If he had said “no” to (the mythological) god, they were exploring whether there was any validity to saying “yes” to God-beyond-god.

Heschel observed an emptiness in the inner life of his generation, a stagnancy and disorientation. Once we have let go of the mythological god – the one who created heaven and earth, freed the Hebrews from Egypt, spoke through the prophets and raised Jesus from the grave – are we all alone in a cold and indifferent universe? Some, like the existentialist writer Albert Camus, accepted this absurd condition as our true reality. But Heschel kept faith in God, not as one “up there” or “out there” – an ideal object to the possessive ego – but as a call to freedom and responsibility, coming directly to us from the heart of reality itself.

The mythological god is a character of story, a stage performer who plays to the detached and spectating ego. We read of supernatural acts accomplished in a time not our own, to people not our contemporaries. In our everyday lives we don’t encounter this god of word and deed; we don’t interact with a personality in the way we do with other humans. Put aside for the moment the question of whether miracles actually happened. The issue here is that they are described on the Bible page to a reader-observer: the ego. And in the choice whether or not to believe their veracity, ego is also judge. God is object – “my” object.

Heschel’s radical step was to turn the tables on religion. God is not my object, not one whose existence is to be decided on the basis of evidence, holy scripture, or wishful thinking. God does not exist as other things exist; God is not a thing.

Instead, God is an ultimate question addressed to the soul. In being addressed, the human senses an obligation to answer. This is not about what I believe or to what religion I belong. It is a challenge issued from beyond me; an invitation to authentic life, to sanctify this brief time I have by living fully in the moment. What are you doing with this moment? Where are you going with your life?

If I turn my attention to the emptiness within and listen – not look as an observer but listen in quiet receptivity – the question becomes easier to hear. What I do next is my true religion.

Letting Go of God

Nietzsche: “Why atheism today? It seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed in vigorous growth – but that it rejects the theistic answer with profound mistrust.”

Nietzsche is perhaps best known for his literary persona as the madman, who ran into the marketplace with his lantern looking for God. It’s in that parable that he makes the fateful statement that “God is dead, and we have killed him.” While understandable, it is also unfortunate that Nietzsche has gone down in history as an arch-atheist, an enemy of religion. The above quote makes it clear that he distinguished between theism and religion – the one needing to pass or be pushed into extinction, and the other innately present in human beings as an “instinct.”

Most of Western history has been dominated by a theistic model of religion, which is why Nietzsche’s three cheers for atheism has been heard by many Western readers as a categorical rejection of religion. But theism is only one model, and the evidence of cultural archeology shows convincingly, I think, that it wasn’t the first on the human scene. What I’m calling religion here is a more-or-less systematic way that Nietzsche’s “religious instinct” finds expression in the shared life of a community. The most primitive form of religion was likely some precursor of animism and magic, where natural forces and the rhythms of life were revered. This early religion had a primary correlation with the body and its mysteries.

But as familial clans of early humans diversified into more sophisticated societies, the focal point of human wonder and concern shifted increasingly to tribal dynamics of membership. This is the evolutionary stage where an individual’s identity, or ego, became paramount. Belonging (fitting in) and recognition (standing out) were powerful preoccupations – just as they still are in the developmental stage of adolescence. The theory is that this is also the point in the history of religion when the mythological god was “born” – that is, when god was generated out of the creative imagination and projected into narrative constructs called stories, or myths.

Theism is a belief system organized around the presumed existence of the mythological god. As a literary product of the “religious instinct,” the mythological god exists only in myths – and then only as a metaphor of “the other” who sees me and knows me, who demands my worship and obedience. As my ego-ideal, this god also awakens my deeper potential and attracts my higher nature. So far, so good. But what happens when the mythological god fails to stay ahead of me, developmentally speaking? He becomes oppressive and an obstacle to my evolutionary advancement. God is moralistic and I remain mired in guilt. God is aloof and I am disoriented. God is jealous for glory and I must be nothing.

Obviously this theory of religion’s evolution leaves an open question: Is there a model of religion that might help us appreciate how the religious instinct finds expression at the level of soul? Unlike ego, soul is unconcerned over matters of identity. This spiritual dimension of human life is what opens us to the deeper ground of our being and the greater mystery of our place in the universe. What stands in the way of this expansion of awareness and experience of mystical communion with all things? Nietzsche’s answer is the ego; or rather, that co-dependent relationship of the ego and its mythological god.

If this god can die – if I can find the courage to let go of “my” god – then the possibility arises for the transformation of spirit into a form of religious life that is … Nietzsche called it “atheistic,” but perhaps the better term is “post-theistic.” Theism, along with the myths and the god who inhabits them, must be transcended. Maybe the first act of liberation is saying “no” to theism: The god of myth does not exist “up there” or “out there” separate from us. Only after we have sufficiently released this god – who has become largely irrelevant in our modern secular lives anyway – will we be able to catch a vision of the higher horizon that awaits.

Our Predicament

Watts: “We seem to be like flies caught in honey. Because life is sweet we do not want to give it up, and yet the more we become involved in it, the more we are trapped, limited, and frustrated. We love it and hate it at the same time. We fall in love with people and possessions only to be tortured by anxiety for them.”

The Buddha taught that life is suffering. Of course, life can be more than suffering; it can be bliss and peace (nirvana). But the vast majority of us are stuck on the wheel of discontent, craving, worry, disappointment and regret – turning endlessly, round and round. Because it’s so predictable, this spinning wheel of suffering gratifies our sick need for some kind of permanence in life. And so we don’t want to give it up. What’s the alternative – oblivion? No, thanks.

In my practice of transformational coaching it became very clear early on that much of conventional counseling is about adjustment. Something happens that knocks a person out of balance – a set-back, a loss, a recurring problem. The therapist goes to work and constructs a case history, makes a diagnosis (preferably one that insurance will cover), and takes the client through a treatment plan designed to restore balance. It’s called recovery: getting back to the way life was prior to the crisis.

The deeper problem, as I discovered, is that the client’s life-system wasn’t in balance before this latest crisis. It’s just that his or her wheel had been spinning fast enough to avoid getting stuck in one or another of the five modes of suffering. Then a life event bumped the wheel and it began to wobble. Naturally the individual’s focus of attention and effort began fixating on “the problem,” which shifted the remaining momentum into what was “wrong,” and life got stuck there.

Discontent, craving, worry, disappointment or regret are thick and sticky, and once you get stuck there it pulls you deeper in. Since fixated attention on any of these “problems” is inherently unproductive – only refocusing on a solution is productive – the entire system gets drained of energy and the client ends up in depression (discouragement, fatigue, despair). This is when medication might be recommended, a chemical adjustment to keep the client on the wheel.

As a keen student of the human experience and early “ego psychology,” the Buddha saw that all of this suffering is a consequence of one thing: attachment. The ego is all about identity (“I”). Identity is about identifying with something or other (“I belong to it” or “It belongs to me”). That something is inherently unstable and impermanent, which means that the ego will have to change as well. But change is the opposite of identity, so the ego suffers. If only we could live without attachments; or better yet, if we could live without having to attach ourselves to anything. Why do we do it?

Watts says it’s our insecurity that motivates us to reach out and cling to what’s external. This body is immersed in the flux of biological and physical change, so if ego is to find identity it will have to be out there. But that’s changing, too. What hope do I (ego) have? None at all; hence the wisdom of insecurity (Watts’ book title). Once you realize that everything is “insecure” – without a permanent foundation or immortal identity – the invitation is to live life in full embrace of this fact.

Liberation, then, is living in a way that is free of attachment – not merely this or that attachment, but free of the “attachment impulse” altogether. But isn’t that ego, this drive to identify myself with something else and find my identity in it? Isn’t the whole point to hold on and ride the wheel, as “successfully” as possible?

Maybe I should just stop caring, since care involves attachment. Or is it possible to care without becoming attached?