Calvin: “This whole Santa Clause thing just doesn’t make any sense. Why all the secrecy? Why all the mystery? If the guy exists, why doesn’t he ever show himself and prove it? And if he doesn’t exist, what’s the meaning of all this?”
Hobbes: “I dunno… isn’t this a religious holiday?”
Calvin: “Yeah, but actually, I’ve got the same questions about God.”
—From Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes collection, Yukon Ho!
I’m neither a theologian nor an academic, but do have a passing knowledge of a number of spiritual traditions and am intrigued with how the idea of Human Entanglement might be used to view them in a different, maybe even clearer, light.
For any religion, there are traditions and texts and dogma and buildings and rituals and all sorts of things. The question is, are they based on something real, something spiritual? Or are religions just human constructs useful for social organization? Built on superstitions?
The thought in this section of the book is that there is something real happening, but that it defies common sense. People experience it from time to time, both in a positive, joyous, sort of way, where something good happens just when needed, or in a negative, guilty, way, where something bad happens that we know is connected to something inside. What to make of those experiences?
I suspect the whole history of religion has to do with humans being aware of the sorts of experiences I described in Part I, and then trying to come up with an explanation of what it was all about. The experiences can easily make one feel as if someone is watching over you, which naturally leads to ideas of God or some god-like force.
This book, of course, is me coming up with my own ideas of what it’s all about. I’ve tried to focus on just the phenomenon of those experiences, calling it Reflection on an individual basis and Human Entanglement in the whole. I’ve enjoyed the mental exercise of seeing how the idea correlates with spiritual teachings and seeing how it might let us strip away the more human constructs in religion (which do have value as social constructs) and look at just the underlying core phenomenon.
Animism
Animism is a belief system that sees no distinction between the physical and spiritual world. It isn’t a formal set of beliefs, but rather what anthropologists have observed as a common world view among indigenous peoples. These weren’t any kind of logically produced beliefs, but simply what must have appeared as intuitively obvious to those in the early days of human societies.
That world view is similar to what Reflection implies, that the inner self and external reality are synchronously connected. I suspect the “primitive” world view of Animism was then the basis of more formal religions developed by peoples as they formed more complex societies.
It’s interesting that there are two different philosophical takes on Animism. One is that it is pure superstition that people with more rational minds have put behind them. The other is that it is an awareness of the pure spiritual connection that is gradually being lost as our rational and scientific views dominate our current thinking.
Reflection implies the latter and provides a way for each of us to explore that connection in our own lives, and then maybe decide which view makes more sense.
Animism goes further than believing it’s just people’s souls that connect the physical and spiritual worlds. It also assumes all creatures, and, all things, are connected in the same way. This might appear to go beyond what’s been suggested so far in this book, but the next chapter has a section on gambling that talks about our connection with the inanimate.
Religion and Psychology
The vocabularies of religion and psychology can be seen as describing Reflection at different levels. Religion gives us the words to talk about God and the larger oneness of everything implied by Human Entanglement, but religion is semantically weak for digging into the grimy ways we relate to our day-to-day realities.
Psychology, on the other hand, gives us the words to talk about the day-to-day effects of Reflection, down to details of slips of the tongue and nervous habits, but is semantically weak when dealing with the full 100-100 reality of Entanglement.
Some religions, such as Hinduism, do have terms for dealing with the details of Reflection, and some psychologists, such as Jung, have wrestled with the larger web of acausal connections between us all, calling it Synchronicity.
Both religion and psychology have similar goals, which in terms of Reflection can be described as trying to bring the inner and outer selves more in harmony.
In religion, the inner self is God working through us, and the seekers of the spiritual path try to listen to and understand God’s will. They reach a point of understanding that their works are not their own, but God’s.
In psychology the inner self is the subconscious mind, which psychotherapy attempts to bring into the conscious mind, the outer self. Therapy also aims to help people find what they really want, or need in life, and help them move in a direction that will satisfy those needs.
Reflection does not run counter to other ways of searching for truth. Whether you look for truth in fundamental religion, psychology or new age philosophy, Reflection is simply a tool for gaining clearer insights. Many of the ideas of Reflection overlap perfectly with ideas from these other disciplines, only the means of expression are different. To be sure there are some real differences, such as with the strong cause-and-effect component of psychology, but there are far more similarities.
The following sections point out some of the more obvious connections between Reflection and religion.
Free Will vs. Destiny
This classic debate comes from only seeing one side of Reflection at a time. One is either aware of reality reflecting inner self, or inner self reflecting reality. The debate disappears when you realize both are happening at the same time, that neither is causing the other, and both are moving synchronously together.
God
If one chooses to believe in God, then we can think of Reflection as the manifestation of God, it is how we know God exists. This provides a single idea of God—God of the Jews, God of the Christians, and Allah of Islam.
For all the reasons Reflection is difficult to come to grips with, this idea of God is difficult to come to grips with. Further, the difficulties with understanding God this way are the same as the difficulties most people have with more conventional ideas of God.
This God is difficult to approach because this God is about our inner-most selves and our connection to all around us. Because this is a place we would rather avoid, the spiritual quest is difficult and the way is cloudy. Further, because our leaders on the spiritual path are all ordinary people like ourselves, with common sense to reconcile and self images to protect, they obscure the path as often as they illuminate it.
This God is both fearsome and benevolent, providing not what we want, but filling our innermost needs. The filling of needs makes God seem perfectly benevolent when our needs are in harmony with our wants, but when our wants are out of harmony with our needs then this is a terrible, fearsome God—perfectly aware of the lies we tell ourselves and revealing them to all through our reality. This God is a God we can all know and understand, each on a personal level, but because of the disharmony between our wants and needs it is a God we would rather try to deny.
This idea of God immediately answers the major question most people raise when questioning the existence of God.
[Author note: this chapter goes on to talk about why bad things happen to good people and explore a variety of religious, spiritual traditions in light of Human Entanglement.]