WHY I AM NOT QUITE A SECULAR HUMANIST

A very personal meditation on nature and the elevation of the spirit. It's a rediscovered essay that takes me away from dreaded thoughts of politics and war.

The great historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin, didn't believe that reality was harmonious. He denied that all aspects of reality, all truths, cohered together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. This was true for values also. Liberty and equality, justice and mercy, love and fairness, spontaneity and free-spiritedness, knowledge, and happiness, can genuinely conflict with each other, and no one value is, per se, more important than another. Each value is authentic and one cannot be subsumed under the other. Reality is not a seamless monolith; it is disjointed, and it will forever be that way. Nor is this a function of ignorance or misunderstanding. That's just the way it is. It is not as though with greater knowledge and the passage of time, all will be unified into a neat package. Reality is many and not one. Philosophically, this position is known as pluralism.

What is true for the way reality is constituted, I find is for me personal. When I survey my inner beliefs and dispositions, I find that I am not unified either. All my life I have striven to create a unified self. I have wanted my beliefs and my yearnings to cohere neatly with each other. Such unity I identify with personal elegance, with coherence, with a beauty of the soul. I long to be whole.

But such a yearning has always eluded me. I philosophically believe one thing, but by virtue of my imagination, and my emotions, I seek something else, and these two dynamics - what I believe and what I aspire to - don't fit neatly together.

Let me put substance on the divided self. Philosophically, I am a naturalist. What this means is that I believe that nature is all that there is, and there is nothing outside of or above nature. My naturalism, I assert, is validated by reason, by science, and common sense. It is firmly grounded and it has served me very well. Naturalism doesn't disavow the power or importance of non-material phenomena such as ideas. But it does aver that ideas are natural and grow out of our natural conditions. What this means is that ideas are not independent and free-standing. Again, they are not outside of nature. Plato believed that they were. And traditional expositors of the historical religions would have no trouble with the concept. After all, ideas are made up of the same non-material stuff as a soul, spirit, angels, ghosts, and God dwells in the same ballpark. But, a naturalist such as myself doesn't believe it. Nature, with all its grandeur, is all there is and it is enough.

Or, at least it should be. This is where my problem asserts itself. Perhaps it's my disposition or temperament, but I have always been fascinated with what we might call the pull of the transcendent. I have an imaginative nature, I am curious, and I guess one could conclude that I am dreamy. This is one place where my less-than-practical disposition leads. I should be at peace with an unalloyed naturalism, but I am not. I herein need to be emphatically clear. This disposition doesn't pull me so far as to affirm or even yearn for anything by way of a supernatural Being that stands at the center of the traditional religions. The idea of a personal God, I find very unappealing and, in my view, creates more problems than it solves.

But my yearning has inspired in me a fascination with mysticism and mystical ideas. This interest goes far back. In college and in years afterward, I was into Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts, a popularizer of Eastern religion. I did readings in Buddhism, Zen, Daoism, and Hinduism.

There is nothing in the fabric of naturalism that disallows mysticism because we are dealing with perceptions of reality and not entities that necessarily exist outside of the natural realm or defy natural phenomena. But what this inclination has implied for me is a dissatisfaction with an arid secularism, with a pragmatic view of life that is strictly anthropocentric and measures human experiences primarily, if not exclusively, through the lens of the fulfillment of human needs. Such a view, much touted by humanism, strikes me as too one-dimensional. Reality, I believe, is multi-tiered and reaches more deeply than an unadorned, unalloyed secular take on life. The philosopher, William James, who took religion seriously, although he could never enable himself to believe, spoke of a “more” in the universe. I think I know what he meant.

Before I explicate where this yearning takes me, I need to state, that it is not as strange as some may assume. The history of humankind reveals that from earliest times, men and women have been drawn to ways of probing alternative states of consciousness. We usually inhabit what we might call a normal state of consciousness. It's the state we live in day by day. As a Darwinian, I conclude that the attribute of normal consciousness has a great deal of adaptive and survival value. But as mentioned, throughout history, human beings have had this strange impulse to want to alter their consciousness and experience and engage in different ways of perceiving reality. Among the most common methods have been the employment of alcohol, drugs, hypnosis, meditation, aesthetic rapture, frenzied rituals, and very many others.

Among the most common altered states is mysticism, which has a long and deeply rooted religious pedigree. What is mysticism? In its full-blown state, it is an experience of total ego transcendence and unification with the object of one's attention. We all sense that we are an independent self, separate from others. But a bit of reflection tells us that we are not. Our self is not contained within a bag of skin we identify with our bodies. It was William James, again, who noted that the self extends beyond our physical bodies to include the people and objects in our lives that we have mentally and emotionally internalized. The people and things I love in a very meaningful way comprise my self. Karl Marx had once noted that the self is an “ensemble of our social relations.” Who we are in great measure is the composite of the endowments we receive from others. So, the self is porous and much wider than our common experience tells us.

We sense that I am here and you are there and there is a measurable distance that separates us. But from another perspective, we are all temporary, transient, protean phenomena ambling around within the infinite matrix of reality. There is a Hindu adage in Sanskrit “tat tvam asi” - “Thou are that.” Our individual souls, as it were, are dissoluble constituents of a greater reality, as salt mixed in water will dissolve and become one with the liquid.

One doesn't need to travel to the East to find this perspective on reality. Much can be found in Western thought as well. Judaism of the Kabala, and an entire of cohort of Christian Medieval adepts, engaged in mystical thought and experience. St. Theresa of Avila was probably the most well-known, whose mystical raptures with God paralleled orgasmic bliss in the realm of the carnal.

Closer to our modern tradition, one can look to the famed British poet of the late 18th century, William Blake, who expressed a mystical sensibility in his verse and drawings. It was Blake who famously said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.” I love that quote! Our senses through which we perceive the world are in the widest sense limiting factors. Without the filter, the screen of our senses, we would behold the Infinite unencumbered and know ourselves to be inextricable components of the Infinite. Aldous Huxley used the phrase “The Doors of Perception” as the title for his book recounting his tripping on mescaline (a must-read in the Sixties), and that fertile observation gave its name to a noted 1960s rock group.

But Blake's mysticism overlapped with Hindu insights as expressed in this pithy quatrain:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

No object, us included, is independently free-standing, what Buddhists call “dependent origination.” The particular implies the whole, and the whole the particular.

Mysticism bespeaks personal events wherein this metaphysical presumption is experienced and the lasting effects for the experiencer confirm insights that can be compelling. The self fades away and one experiences oneself as unified, merged, with the greater whole. The individual self vanishes, as does the flux of time. What is experienced is a sense of timelessness, an “eternal now.”

This is not so strange or exotic. Years back I was taken by a book by a Czech psychologist with an unpronounceable name, entitled “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.” The writer's thesis involved something we have probably all experienced. He observed and analyzed those experiences in which we are so absorbed in our work, so intently focused, that time seems to effortlessly pass. What may be four hours we experience as minutes. We become absorbed and lost in the task and to that extent, the self fades away also. The author discovered that this experience of “flow” most readily occurs when we are engaged in tasks that are not too simple, yet not so difficult that they engender frustration; tasks wherein we need to stretch our capabilities but not too far. These experiences of “flow” are usually felt as pleasurable.

But my most favored form of mysticism, and perhaps the one most readily accessible to humanists, is so-called “nature mysticism.” Here the object is not God, nor gods, just impersonal Nature. No supernaturalism is required. Poets and philosophers have often described this phenomenon. Emerson, Thoreau, and their fellow New England Transcendentalists were always walking through the woods and communing with the awesome majesty that Nature provided.

The metaphysical notion is that we are natural beings, not outside of Nature. We are part of this larger, grander, whole, and at times we can experientially, not only know it as a function of intellection but feel our unity with the natural reality that envelopes us and of which we are a part. Sometimes Emerson seems a bit over the top. In his essay “Nature” he writes, "The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.” Emerson held that there is an impersonal spirit that flows through all things, all nature, us and the trees, the animals, the vegetable. In the right moment, we can sense that connection, that wider unity.

The groundwork was laid a generation earlier in the creations of the romantic poet, William Wordsworth, perhaps the paradigmatic figure. For the romantics, intuition was an organ of knowledge. With our intuitive sense, we could perceive a reality immanent in Nature and thereby grasp a connection with it. The human mind and the natural world are at a deeper level linked together and by placing ourselves in Nature we can sense that linkage, that connection. The experience can be sublime and elevating. Here are my favorite lines from one of Wordsworth's most famous poems, Tintern Abbey, in which he touches upon that epistemic relation between the human mind and Nature.

For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. 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; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

There is solace in anchoring ourselves in Nature.

And so, what is my point? The pandemic had cut us off from wider experiences. We were forced to stay closer to home. With the narrowing of my experiences, I compensated by focusing on those things in my immediate presence more intensely. I had given much of my attention to my backyard, and the forest which comprises two-thirds of it – the trees, the grass, and now with the emergence of spring, plants and flowers. I still do.

That attention has brought an appreciation for detail. I remain inspired by an observation of Darwin, who wrote that he garnered more facts that led to his discovery of evolution from strolls in his garden than from years exploring the farther reaches of the planet in his voyage on the Beagle. 

There is much to see in our backyard we too often miss.

With that attention has come care. In the spring after my beloved wife died, I had a garden planted in her memory. My yard is very shady and I have been impressed that there are plants that flourish without much sunlight – hydrangea, astilbes, hosta, ferns, hucheras, and various grasses. By its side, I have a lovely stone fountain. Linda loved fountains.

Each morning, I take a very brief walk to survey my garden to see how it is doing and observe how the grass grows more verdant, thicker, and richer. It's quite amazing. Each day, there is notable growth. In a few days, I won't be able to see the buildings on the rise behind my forest. The trees and shrubs will grow so thick that the forest will become impenetrable.

The hostas grow large and wide, the ferns multiply and spread underground and then rise up to the sky as they unfurl their leaves. Perhaps in a few short weeks, the hydrangea will create large red flowers that will turn to blue, and the astilbes will send up their beautiful frilly blossoms of red, pink, and white.

With attention has come care, and with care, I have advanced a step further. The trees, the flowers, the plants, and the grass are living things seeking after life. And so am I. With attentive care has also come a sense of identification. I feel close to the living things in my garden. When they flourish I feel joy and experience relative peace. If they were to die, I would be saddened and even diminished.

Is this the unity that mystics describe? No, it isn't. But it is perhaps a first step that extends in that direction and toward the farther reaches of human experience. It is an abiding and reverential awareness that I and the natural world are one. We share attributes and strivings in common that join us together in a way that edifies the spirit, and if I may employ the term, sanctifies life.