WHERE NATURE AND SPIRIT MEET
In a time in which we have been cut loose from the moorings that provide stability, and much is in chaos, we can turn to nature to find tranquility and stability.
At this stage of life, I am as deeply invested in the state of society and the world as ever. I am gripped by concern about the fate of democracy and the future of the planet. For me, it could not be otherwise.
But as I enter my final years, I have also become more reflective and contemplative. I conclude that my life rests upon more funded experience, and reflection on life's meaning feels apt. Humanist that I am, I have long believed that life's meaning and purpose are not given; it is an understanding that we create through experience and reflection. In earlier years, this quest was propelled with greater urgency, even anxiety. Now it is more tranquil, more studied. This endeavor has opened up through the constraints imposed by the pandemic. Staying at home and being more isolated has caused me to focus with greater concentration on smaller things and extract from them the riches they offer.
But more significant is the fact that I am now, for the most part, in retirement. I found my work as a humanist leader most fulfilling. I never saw work as primarily a means to make money. As I have written elsewhere, I was much influenced in my younger years by the thought of the humanist philosopher and psychologist, Erich Fromm. For Fromm, work is the way in which we shape the world outside ourselves. And as we do, we dialectically mold our own characters. In the most basic sense, we are what we do. I have striven to live my life outwards, so to speak. My efforts have brought great returns. A life so lived has been a vehicle to build meaning and purpose, to mold my character, and to live in accordance with values I hold with the greatest significance.
Though most of my professional goals and activities were self-created and directed, I was continuously working. Now, in retirement, I find myself freed from extrinsic demands and constraints and meeting externally imposed deadlines. Though I have much to do, I have entered a new territory and I find the absence of constraint extremely liberating. This new reality has changed my disposition and, as mentioned, enabled more ease and more time for reflection.
In my academic career I studied philosophy, and my contemplative moments are often philosophically imbued. So, I now wish to share some personal philosophical insights.
My worldview emerges from my philosophical foundations. I am a philosophical naturalist. As such, I believe that nature is all that there is and there is nothing outside of nature.
Naturalism has often counter-posed itself to the metaphysical foundations of religion, primarily the Western monotheistic religions. This conflict came into stark tension in the early Enlightenment with the emergence of science in the seventeenth century and was pursued with great sophistication and political altercation in the eighteenth century. But the origins of naturalism and its philosophical foundations are ancient. They were given expression by pre-Socratic thinkers, and the tension between naturalism and non-naturalism was a central motif in Plato's philosophy. It was the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who opined that all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, and he may well have been correct.
St Augustine's in his massive City of God established this dichotomy as a mainstay of Christianity that has immeasurably informed Western thought. It has remained a divide throughout the course of Western civilization and continues into the current moment.
I am a naturalist but I am not a philosophical materialist. While I concur that matter is the primary substrate of reality, and all things, including thoughts and ideas, do not exist independently from the material world from which they ultimately originate, I conclude that materialism is too reductionist. We humans, through the attributes of the mind, among them thought and creative imagination, play a mediating and active role in giving shape to the world as we understand it. As such, ideas have real influence in creating the world we inhabit. Ideas have motivating power. As the humanist philosopher John Dewey had written, “The aims and ideals that move us are generated through imagination. But they are not made out of imaginary stuff."
As a naturalist, I do not believe in spirit, except metaphorically, and I deny the existence of independent spiritual beings; realities which the religions assert as primary. I deny that there exist entities that stand outside of nature and are thoroughly non-natural. Such putative spiritual beings are without bodies, they are incorporeal. Angels are spiritual beings as are ghosts. And God is the supreme spiritual being. They are, again, outside of nature; they are, in Latin, supra-naturam, i.e supernatural. As implied, I reject belief in the supernatural. Philosophically, I base what I believe on evidence. And while I humbly affirm that there is very much that we finite mortals do not know, nor can know, I find no compelling evidence for realities beyond the natural world and nature's laws.
But this denial for me is not the last word. Perhaps it is ultimately a matter of temperament. In my denial, I nevertheless reach for something beyond the wholly secular. Though we apply ourselves to the pursuit of happiness, while we continually strive to solve our problems and move beyond our frustrations, and apply our capabilities to this pursuit, I see our lives as not exclusively invested in practical aims. Nature, in its grandeur, awe, and all-encompassing reality, makes claims on us. These claims lift us beyond ourselves and as we make this spiritual ascent we touch the realm of the sublime. We are more than our biological and material natures, more than a congeries of chemical and electrical forces shaped by the processes of natural selection. It was William Wordsworth who famously wrote:
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.”
I agree with Wordsworth's lamentation that places our existence in nature but seeks to situate our deepest meaning in a realm of understanding that is not reducible to nature, and is unqualified or unadorned. We exist not only in nature but in an in-between realm apprehended by our imaginative capacities.
Contemplation of nature imbues me with apprehension. It can take several forms.
Nature mysticism
The full-blown expression of this deeper state of being is nature mysticism. What is it? Mysticism is not to be identified with the mysterious. No less a personage than Albert Einstein had written:
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”
While mysticism may include elements of the mysterious, mystery is not its defining dynamic. Mysticism, most fundamentally, is a felt sense of unification of the self with an object or objects initially perceived as outside of or other than the self. Our everyday awareness tells us that as individual persons we are entities separate from our surroundings. I am me, you are you, and there is space that separates us. There is me and there is not me. But this apparent consciousness is assuredly limited and false. We are organic components of the world around us. The membrane separating us from the outside world is porous. It is false, a product of crude perception. Each time we inhale, we are taking in untold billions of atoms that passed through the lungs of Martha Washington and Leonardo da Vinci. Our skin is porous and there is a continuous interchange between “our selves” and the perceived environment around us.
We are natural beings embedded in the matter, energy, and flux of nature. In Hindu Sanskrit, there is the observation tat tvam asi, “thou art that.” As the particles of salt dissolve in water, so we are inextricable components of the matrix of reality. The astronomer Carl Sagan notably observed that we are made of “star stuff.” We come from the stars, and the elements that comprise us are found in stellar objects that comprise the material universe. Despite initial appearances, we and nature are ultimately one.
Mysticism partakes in the realization of this unity. Such unity between “self” and “other” can be with any object of contemplation. Connection is fundamental. It can be with ideas, with mathematical postulates in their absoluteness, with our historical lineage, the genealogy of humankind, and theologically, most notably, with God.
The religions, Eastern and Western, are rich with mystical traditions. We find it at the heart of Hinduism and Buddhism. Mysticism is found in Islam in numerous philosophical schools and especially in Sufism; in Judaism, the Kabbalah, most notably; and in the thought of Christian adepts, Meister Ekhart and St. Theresa of Avila, among the most renowned. In the latter are testimonies of her unity with God, rendered with rapturous passion. In the Western faiths, mysticism has been a minor tradition, and its practitioners are outliers and more than a little suspect. To seek, proclaim, and celebrate unity with the divine is heresy, and mystics needed to be cautious.
Less theological, and arguably more at hand, is nature mysticism. It has had numerous devotees. It has found expression in the sentiments of poets and among lovers of the woods and wilderness. It embellishes the hearts of astronomers and provides a vehicle for spiritual experiences for naturalists and humanists such as myself, whose intellectual convictions disallow the affirmations of theistic believers. We find nature mysticism in the writings of the Transcendentalist thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spent many occasions sauntering through New England forests communing with their plants and trees. Contemporaries will find it in the writings of feminist poets such as Barbara Deming and Marge Piercy, among many others.
Perhaps the paradigmatic experience of nature mysticism is to stand alone on a clear moonless night gazing at the sky and beholding thousands of stars at incomprehensible distances within an infinite universe (an experience tragically almost gone in our age of near-omnipresent light pollution) and arriving at the realization we are part of it all.
But the full-blown mystical event goes beyond the knowledge that we and nature are one. It is to actually experience that unity in an ineffable moment. It is to transcend the limits of the ego, become one with the object of contemplation that is encompassing and greater than oneself, and to enter a timeless present as we stand within an eternal now. It is to have a feeling of being in touch with the unqualified absolute and engage in an experience that is uniquely compelling. The British poet William Blake touched upon this experience when he wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”
A spiritual turn
William James, the pre-eminent philosopher and psychologist, wrote about mysticism. Many of his fellow Victorian intellectuals had become agnostics, but James was somewhat of an outlier. He took religion seriously. In his magnum opus, The Varieties of Religious Experience, he drew his conclusions from the experiences and reports of religious people. The ubiquity of their experiences, including mystical experiences, led James to speculate that maybe there was something objective to them. But he always had his doubts.
What respect James brought to religion, whatever fascination religion inspired, did not make him a believer, nor a religious practitioner. He remained on the outside looking in. Sigmund Freud, unlike James, imbued no positive value to religion. For Freud, religion was childish and pathology writ large. It was a collective neurosis, riddled with superstition and obsession. It was a phenomenon humanity needed to outgrow if the future held any promise. Yet, Freud conceded that on the individual level certain persons engaged “oceanic experiences,” which he described as “...a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.” It is an adequate definition of the mystical encounter. Yet, despite acknowledging the legitimacy of such experiences, Freud confesses that he himself never had such an experience.
When it comes to mysticism, I find myself in a similar position as James and Freud. The possibility of mystical experience, replete with ego-transcendence, union with nature, the timeless moment, it ineffability, and its uniquely compelling character, is in accordance with my ontological and naturalistic convictions. In fact, its possibility as a heightened, peak experience greatly intrigues me. I have spent time reading about mysticism and often ponder what the mystical moment would be like. Such yearnings have drawn me to wilderness areas. As a child, I was in love with astronomy and the wonder of the nighttime sky. I still am. I am uplifted by natural beauty and revel in the awe of unpopulated, expansive, terrain.
I spend whatever time I can outdoors, most often in my own backyard that I have come to love. My property is large and behind a wooden fence in the back is a forest that harbors trees more than 180 feet tall. They hang over the rear of my yard's open space ensuring that it is mostly in the shade. Mine is a primeval forest with some trees, oak, maple, and birch, more than two hundred years old. The forest is dense and majestic. Raccoons, hedgehogs, skunks, hawks, and families of deer make it their home. I have embellished my property with a perennial garden and it is festooned with colorful flowers.
Immersing myself in nature has become a coveted preoccupation at this stage of life. I read, work, and think in proximity to the woods. It provides solace and much more.
As much as mysticism and nature mysticism are a source of interest and enchantment, mysticism remains for me a source of cognitive reflection. I stand at the gate. Like William James and Sigmund Freud, I confess I have never had such an experience.
What I do have is a halfway mysticism. It is a deeper appreciation of my place and organic relation to the natural world. I feel a close bond with the trees of the forest. I am responsive to the world around me, and so are they. I do not believe that floral life is sentient, but plants and trees do respond, though often imperceptibly, to their ambient stimuli. There is a wonder in this. I admire the birds that go about their business and live their lives in accordance with their natures. I love the intricacy of my plants and flowers. I care for them, and even worry about them when they seem to be having a bad day.
I have no illusions that nature is wholly benign. There is much pain and suffering in the competitive struggle to survive. But there is much beauty and splendor. Nature reveals astounding complexity and a passive intelligence wrought through the pressures of evolution and natural selection over the eons.There is an aesthetic in nature that is captivating.
All this, I find, is a profound and meaningful source of spiritual inspiration. Here I need to clarify my terms. As noted earlier, I do not believe in the spiritual as normatively defined by the historical religions. My employment of the term “spiritual” is metaphorical, but no less real,in that it has a real motivational and inspiring effect. Such metaphorical use of the term is commonplace. We speak of “the spirit of American history” or “the spirit of the ages.” What is meant is a non-material, generalized description of the matter so described.
When I contemplate my relation to nature, my mind rises to meet the natural world halfway. It is this encounter between myself and the natural world wherein I find the space from which spiritual edification emerges. Again, I think Wordsworth captures this reality:
“Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive;”
Half create and half perceive.
In a world that seems to have lost its moorings, it is good to know that I can turn to a source of meaning in which I can anchor myself and replenish my soul. Through the frustrations and vicissitudes of life, in nature I have a kinship that endures.
I too have had mystical experiences
Reading proof of Gods existence
In Thomas Aquinas as a teenager
I loved the idea that God is Being
and the intelligent designer of the universe
When Einstein talks about the how impressed he is by the laws of nature
I can respond to this Newton’s laws
Quantum Mechanics The Periodic Table
of Elements,etc.Is this Natural Mysticism?
I remember at that time feeling one with
God or Nature! Fantastic! Being envelops
everything,everywhere.
Joe, sorry to be so wordy... but these are some of my thoughts from the past decade.
There is general consensus that history began in ancient Sumer where the first kings issued — and had transcribed into written code — the first civil laws over four thousand years ago. With this development, literacy quickly replaced oral tradition, and the written word became imbued with magical powers formerly attributed to the living, lived-in world. But, as the written word began speaking, says David Abram . . . “the stones fell silent, the trees became mute, and other animals, dumb” (1996, 131).
Coincident with this transition to literacy, there emerged entirely novel ways of thinking, acting, and interacting within the world. Overwhelming evidence from the history of religions, anthropology, archeology, paleontology, and ethnography strongly reinforces the view that a qualitatively different set of perceptions arose with this transition. Human community itself was transformed from an egalitarian kinship-based, predominantly nomadic hunting-gathering mode of subsistence characterizing the Paleolithic and the autonomous villages of the early Neolithic, to more sedentary, hierarchically organized life-ways based primarily on intensive plant and animal domestication. And, as Richard Leaky noted,
Every biologist knows that when a basic change occurs in a species’ pattern of subsistence, other changes usually follow. (The Origin of Humankind, 55)
Collectively, these developments –- agriculture, urbanization and literacy –- had an incalculable impact on human perception and consciousness over ensuing millennia, producing entirely novel ways of constituting and manipulating the world. Consciousness, now reflectively detaching itself from the living environment, constituted reality differently after the birth of civilization than we had done previously, when we dwelt there profoundly participating the world. This cognitive change produced resounding reverberations for all generations to follow, entrenched, as humanity would become in new organizational hierarchies that appeared — the formal institutions of civil society. It was literacy, giving special prominence to the written logistic, that would provide the living structure and momentum to political institutions, world religions, and the burgeoning sciences.
This view of the world established and entrenched itself, memorializing our changed relationship with a reality in which we originally dwelt. The world-as-given was emptied of any intrinsic significance or value aside from that which these new humans and the logic of their written word attributed to it. It was first a linguistic and then an early scientific objectification of nature –- destroying the power (pouvoir) and thickness of a pre-objective present –- that led ineluctably to the de-animation of nature and the subsequent theoretical construction of transcendent religious powers, gods, goddesses, and other supernatural entities. All the major world religions have this transcendent construction at their core, whether we call it Allah, Brahman, God, or Yahweh. Even those polytheists, the ancient Romans and Greeks, fell victim to the same illusion, the only difference being that they had numerous deities, as did the Hindus before them. The philosophers for their part also sought out a true reality beyond the phenomenon in some “noumenal” realm, again reinforcing this fundamental assumption about some immutable “Being” which gives life or meaning to the world of “becoming.” It was this diremption — the forceful and artificial bifurcation of being and becoming, of sacred and profane — that is its legacy.
Like its first cousin, natural science (and its bastard brother, the human sciences), historical religions have lived off this fundamental dualism haunting human conception since the birth of history. Preliterate humanity on the other hand seemingly made no such distinctions, experiencing the world as living, having a power and motility shared with all sentient beings and even with what we would call inanimate nature. It is for this reason that pre-historic consciousness may be called participatory consciousness; tribal members actually could fuse with their totem animal, for example –- intertwining with their environment –- because from their perspective there was no substantive difference between them and the totem: they were essentially of one substance or consubstantial. We must not be confused here. It is not as if they thought like us, only with incorrect judgments; they did not think the way we do at all. It was qualitatively a different mode of perceiving and experiencing all together. They did not see things from a detached objective perspective; indeed, we cannot say that they saw any ‘things’ at all in the sense that we speak of things today in space. Rather they participated things. The way they experienced their world was different naturally from the way we configure the world.