A Man of Certainty (or “I’ll Know It When I See It”)
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This essay follows the same line-of-thought as my previous post on “mystical rationalism.”
Not too long ago I read an editorial piece that presented the results of a survey in which it was reported that 37% of the adult population of the United States refers to itself as “spiritual but not religious.” The overall thrust of the article was that traditional faiths are experiencing an unprecedented decline in participation. Based on my own cultural observations, this wasn’t at all surprising.
Around the same time, I read atheist Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, in which he summarily dismisses all forms of religious belief as self-deception. Although he goes much farther in his disparagement than I would ever embrace as a practitioner of the esoteric arts, many of his observations struck a sympathetic chord in my own thinking about empty-headed abstractions of all kinds. Where Dawkins obviously (even gleefully) subscribes to the opinion of entrepreneur David Gannon, who allegedly ridiculed the gullible customers of rival P.T. Barnum with “There’s a sucker born every minute,” my own instincts lie more with the words that Shakespeare put into the mouth of Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I’m not an incorrigible doubter of all things obscure, and in ambiguous circumstances I tend to side with the suckers.
But I draw the line at any anthropomorphic view of deity, seeing it as nothing more than “God created in the image of Man” for the purpose of making the purely conjectural seem more concrete and approachable for the masses. The pious men who wrote the Bible were convinced that they knew what the Divine Personage would have told them (other than the echoes in their own heads that they duly documented) if it had a mouth to speak and felt the urge to communicate its expectations and demands. (The 18th-Century Deists had an opinion on that one, and the consensus was “No way did the Creator stick around to monitor our folly.”) The stern “Big Guy in the Sky” theory doesn’t gain much traction with any thoughtful scholar of metaphysical matters who has probed its probability with a critical eye; evidence to the contrary comes across more as the self-beguilement (or, in particularly phobic cases, the self-mortification) of a guilty conscience than as incontrovertible truth.
More recently I read a quote from an interview given by psychologist Carl Gustav Jung,* in which he was asked if he believed in God; his answer was “I don’t believe, I know.” Although we might reasonably expect an eminent psychoanalyst to champion scientific rationalism in the same way as Einstein, Jung seems to have been an apologist for orthodox devotion, if only in the sense that he posited an acceptance of supreme spiritual authority — whether god or angel — as essential to psychic well-being (perhaps as a moral compass) in the average person. He might not sing its praises so insistently today (or he might do so more urgently than ever) but he apparently felt that such unquestioning certainty is a hedge against neurosis.
My own delving into the subject brought me to the ideas of Baruch Spinoza, who proposed the existence of an immanent (i.e. indwelling), infinite consciousness that permeates all matter to a greater or lesser degree of motility, exalted in the human being and latent but still present in every manifest thing whether sentient organism or inanimate plant or stone. While he chose to maintain his belief in an “anthropocentric” human experience of this consciousness as “God,” he saw its underlying influence as distributed throughout phenomenal reality as a formative principle. This premise underlies what is now known as pantheism and, more precisely, animism.
As a “Spinozan sympathizer,” my exploration led me to the conclusion that if I’m ever asked whether I’m a “man of faith,” my immediate and unequivocal response will be “No, I’m a man of certainty,” but unlike Jung it would be an unshakable confidence in a subliminal, all-pervading mode of spiritual awareness that acts as the medium through which our quest for self-realization communicates with subconscious and unconscious thought-forms. There are a lot of names for this ephemeral state of existence (Astral Plane, World of Formation, Mind of God, Akashic Record, Plato’s Soul of the World, etc.) but in all cases the assumption is of an innate sense of seamless, shared “being-ness” that bolsters our comprehension of the Universe at a more fundamental level than the blissful “We Are All One” assertions of psychic “energists” aiming to sell their services. Given the doubtful provenance of what is being offered by that crowd, the expression “I don’t know what it is but I’ll know it when I see it” would seem to apply to any appeal to the tarot or other form of divination.
* Full Disclosure: I’m not yet widely read in Jung, so my observations about his viewpoint come from Jungian tarot writer Sallie Nichols, who quotes him liberally.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on December 1, 2023.
