It was recently told my writings would indicate I do not take the items of religion as realities. I was a tad taken back by that, but then I suppose one needs to define what one means by reality. I have no intention to wade into the sea of opinion and considered dissertation that constitutes the history of philosophy whose pendulum is always swinging a course from skepticism to empiricism, to realism, to idealism, and back again. Confessedly, like every -ism man concocts, they each have a contribution to make to the dialogue that is the world. They are all perspectives. Their truth is partial, dependant upon a coign of vantage. The whole picture that they try to paint escapes them if for no more complex reason than the totality which they attempt to confine is beyond our grasp. Yet, we are driven to grasp at it, understand it, define it. Whether one like it or not, we are seemingly constituted to look at physis, and hunger for some type of comforting, completing idea, some type of meta-physis.
Read more: Comments on RealityWhat is this hunger, this need, this compulsion, this pulsing for completion? I am of a mind to call it psyche. Furthermore—if not in fact—at least in feel it is eternal and everlasting. It is, as it were, a concentration and inspissation of every possibility awaiting expiration, a nothingness and an everything slumbering. It breathes out potentials, and out of them realities. I am not conjuring either a physics or a metaphysics. If anything, I am making note of the psyche, the soul, the spirit within, espying the world within and without, and opining that as it is within, so is it always. Psyche, which for the moment may be taken as coextensive with soul or spirit[i], is the groundwork of reality.
Psyche, as sheer hunger, need, compulsion, propulsion, has made the world. It is in the world, but not of the world. It is affected by its spinning out of the world, but it is in itself, of itself, always pure compulsion. The internality of that compulsion has of itself and in itself an, as it were, systolic and diastolic movement that is of itself and in itself the dynamic of the compulsion. In that purity of compulsion it is propulsion. It expresses itself. Our reality of things visible and invisible is that expression. It is here there exists the platform upon which we have set out our envisioning of a creating deity. A theologian might be wont to say it is here that God implants in man the groundwork for receiving, for being able to receive, the revelation of himself as the Triune God.
Psyche, as expression, has a voice. The very interplay of things visible and invisible is its voice, its natural voice. It is a creative dialogue. It is in that sense an economy, a regulation of management. As far as it is an economy of living powers, it is an eco-system. But it is a system always in evolution. The power to judge, to differentiate upon the basis of pleasure or pain, good or bad, mine or yours is part of that evolution. It predates the coming of man, but in man it pivots. It becomes not simply critical but self-critical. It creates a crisis. Judgment becomes conscience excavating the soul, digging into the soul, digging out of the soul notions of justice and mercy, heaven and hell. Here are set out the myths of a golden age that ruptures, of a primal fault-line at the basis of humanity. The differentiation that is rooted in the very pulsing of psyche, which is expressed in every tension that causes the cosmos to pound, evolves to a place wherein trust can become faith and hope, affection and bonding can transpose to love.
This new depth of judgment is not a power humanity has learned well to wield. It finds man striving to understand the tensions within himself, and to reconcile them. It discloses man to himself as caught in an awkwardness, a naïve angst of trying against the folly of self-centeredness to move out of the centre, to acknowledge the different, the other, and to accept the other as integral to self.
In this internal dialogue which seeks to formulate and perpetuate man, man needs to heed the voice of psyche. It is there to continuously create him, re-create him, and propel him into wholeness. Psyche speaks to man of his needs, and directs him in the paths of righteousness. It does so in its own language of dreams, visions, symbols. Theses words of the psyche, of the soul, are expressions of that primordial pulsing and hunger to be. They express the reality that has caused the reality of all things visible and invisible. Where are these symbol-wrapped and vision-bearing words of psyche writ out for all to see and hear? They are in the rites, creeds, doctrines and spiritual disciplines that mark the core and the edges of our existence. These are not non-realities. These are the living expressions of the very, and in a sense, the only reality upon which all items “being” stand.
We are simple creatures of a complex nature, more simian than sapient. We naively take the world of our experiences as concrete when it is in fact no more than a working construct created out of our sense data. If physics is to be believed, reality is a mass of pulses and waves spinning about. It is we who decide what is substantial and the how of that substantiality. We decide this amassment of pulses and whirls is a piece of wood, and hard, and red, and fragrant. To another species it might be as invisible as is ultra-violet light to us. The world we trust as reality is merely reality “for us.” We make it up out of what we are. What we are at root is psyche, a pulsing propulsion seeking to self-express.
We are soul, spirit, creating self and world, and trying ever—whether we obey it or not—to reflect the image of wholeness and creativity set in us as the very essence and grace of us. It is not really the case we bear the imago Dei, the image of the holy and creating God, we are the image. That is our reality. That is reality—whether we are observant of it and obedient to it or not.
Religion with its rites, doctrines and disciplines exists to bring us to the remembrance of that. Religion is psyche, soul and spirit speaking. Its words are not to be taken literally but spiritually. They are expressions of self, of creativity, of the power to be, indeed, of the Power that allows “to be.” In that they are not so much true as truth. In that they are beyond the rationalizations of the mind they are ever creating. We cannot understand them because we stand in them, in their creating dynamic. By living in them, by simply allowing them to be the space within which life has its depth and breadth, we thrive and grow into wholeness, graciousness, wisdom. They are, in a sense, elemental particles giving nourishment, direction and meaning to the pulsing out of psyche, soul, spirit. Thus, when I speak of items sacramental and sacred as symbols I speak of them as embodiments of a primal reality more real than our ever-transient reality they seek to forward into wholeness, into holiness, into the Holy.
[i] Cf.: “My soul magnifies the Lord…,” December 2021.