Reason and Religion: Irremediably Incompatible Bedfellows?

Page 8 of 9 pages « First < 6 7 8 9 > Last » - Full Article

Perhaps to test the apprentice’s capacity to feel and sense bodymindingly, the Master holds a stick over her head and tells her: ‘If you say anything I’ll strike you on the head; if you don’t say anything I’ll strike you on the head’. A rather untenable situation, for sure. Now our apprentice can’t even remain silent with the assumption that she has chosen correctly. What is the young lady to do at this juncture? Meekly turn her other cheek? Or turn the tables completely: grab the stick from the Master——assuming she is nimble and quick enough, which she most likely is not——and hit him with it. But how dare she fly in the face of a tradition that commands complete, unquestioning obedience, respect, and veneration of the Master? She dares do what she did, because she broke the rules. By so doing, she might be able to think she won in her contest with the Master. As a consequence, she failed the test on two counts. First, her decision to grab the stick from the Master’s hand and hit him with it was likely yet another mind act. Second, she ‘won’, which is to assume there can be winners and losers. She was wrong, however, for there are neither winners nor are there losers; there is only process.

Granted, it might appear that during apprenticeship, superordination-subordination relations exist between Master and apprentice. That, however, is not a matter of social hierarchization in the ordinary Western sense. Rather, it is more akin to a complementary relationship between two individuals. In a complementary relationship, Master and apprentice merge into one. They are two, but they are one. They are one, yet they are two. At the same time they are neither two nor are they one. The apprentice pays respects to the Master in the most stringent way: never speaking until first having been addressed, never initiating interactive exchange. The Master maintains profound respect toward the apprentice: teaching by example, correcting by what might appear as verbal and physical abuse but actually it’s carried out in the manner of a loving parent. Each knows her/his place in the hierarchy, yet there is no Western dominating/dominated, superordinate/subordinate relationship, but rather, the roles are complementary in the sense that there is always a little of an apprentice in the Master and a little of a Master in the apprentice.

Confusing all this, for sure. Yet, it is the way. Unfortunately, to articulate complementarity within the context of its bodymind functioning with respect to human interdependent, interrelated, interaction? is inevitably to hierarchize it. To hierarchize it inevitably creates in the Western mind binary either/or rather than complementary images and concepts. Complementarity cannot be effectively articulated and understood if one doesn’t already sense it. It is living process. It is feeling process. It is a matter of bodymind’s natural doings. It is bodymind bodyminding bodymindingly. Still confusing. At best, I would hope at least a vague sense of complementarity may be forthcoming by the end of this essay. For now, best I continue my story about complementary interdependency, interrelatedness, and interaction instead of wasting energy trying to say it directly.

So, if our apprentice chooses to teach the Master a lesson, is she in the final analysis right or wrong? She is right, because she found her way out of the confines of the untenable situation. However, assuming she stepped out of the paradoxical conflict by an act of mind, she is wrong. So in a manner of speaking she is both right and wrong and she is neither right nor wrong. And the exasperation persists. Actually Hamlet was caught up in this sort of quandary. He speculated that nothing is either right or wrong, or more faithful to Shakespeare’s work, nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. In a way, therein we have the nonanswer answer to our problem. Logic and reason and thinking and then words, words, words, can convince us that we are right with the world; yet our enemies, by logic and reason and thinking and then words, words, words, can convince themselves that we have deceived ourselves and that they are right.

This has been another of the cantankerous dilemmas of Western societies. The grand Enlightenment project was supposed to put the West on the desired track. The track would end with social organization according to preconceived models, unlimited scientific and technological progress, the end of inequities between classes, and emancipation for all peoples. Economies would expand indefinitely, everybody would enjoy the good life, and scarcity and need would become virtually nonexistent.

However, things didn’t quite go as planned. Problems arose, and culminated in our times. We have had the most devastating wars ever, ‘ethnic cleansing’——if I may use that absurd phrase that in our times politically corrects more abusive epithets——became common practice in some cultures, leading to the mass extermination. And, of course, we now have terrorism on a massive scale to contend with. There has been endemic political corruption, ecological destruction, personal and social alienation leading to increasing suicide rates, alcohol and drug abuse, indices of mental health problems, and increasing gaps between rich nations and poor, and upper classes and lower classes within nations. It all began in earnest with a utopian project that was supposed to be absolutely good for humankind. But it backfired. In many respects it was not good at all; it turned out bad.

But . . . wait a minute. Is it not true that longevity has increased and infant mortality is lower? Have many diseases not been virtually eradicated? Do not more people enjoy labor saving devises thanks to technological development than ever?

Well, yes. And also no. No, because very recently, conditions have actually become worse in some cultures, and we have hitherto unknown epidemics such as AIDS, that is actually lowering the life expectancy of many people in Africa. Obesity, especially in the U.S., has created heart problems and an epidemic of diabetes that threatens to lower life expectancy. Increased ultraviolet radiation brings on increased risks of skin cancer. I trust I need not belabor the point that the Enlightenment project was both good and bad, dependent on the mind of the beholder. And it was neither wholly good nor bad, from a third view. From this third view, one might assume that if it is neither wholly good nor bad, then there is room for improvement, for completion of the project by keeping what is good and chipping away at that which is bad in order to make it good——e.g. Jurgen Habermas’s grand project. Still, there is good and bad in virtually everything, according to the perspective.

Take a rather mundane example. Is Johnny good or bad? Many people who know him say he’s intolerable, a selfish, cruel, lying, stealing, cheating, and an inordinately self-indulgent brat. A few will say at heart he is an O.K. kid; he just has a mischievous streak in him. His father has meted out punishment so many times without success that he has given up on his upstart son. His mother, of course, thinks he’s a little angel, if everybody would give him a chance. In the final analysis, then, is Johnny good or bad? He is good, and he is bad, and he is both good and bad, and he is neither good nor bad, strictly speaking. His goodness or badness is undecidable, for the two terms are not really opposites: they are complementarities. In Johnny, in the good there is a little bad, and in the bad there is a little good. He is good and he is bad, yet he is neither good nor bad, but possibly something else, something different. Perhaps he is just an ugly kid and for that reason has certain feelings of rejection and his bad streak is only a manifestation of his resentment. So he is just ugly. Johnny the good, the bad, and the ugly. Now we have three terms to contend with. Perhaps he is big for his age and bully tactics come easily. Perhaps he is shy around girls and makes up for it with aggressiveness toward his male playmates. So we have Johnny the big, the bully, and the bashful. Perhaps his father’s beatings have created a child driven by violence. Now it’s Johnny the victim and the victimizer. The self-contradictory possibilities are virtually unlimited. Johnny’s goodness-badness complementarity is not properly qualifiable outside the consideration of virtually every aspect of his personal history and the myriad array of contexts that made it up.

If we think understanding Johnny is difficult, let’s go find a culture with which we are unfamiliar and try to comprehend it. Anthropological studies point toward complementary practices between cultures the world over. Some cultures have no obsession for tridimensionalizing the world, for seeing virtually everything in terms of depth, such as does the West by way of Euclidean straight lines that converge, like the two lines of the railroad track toward an infinitely distant point. Citizens of such cultures make little attempt to depict three dimensionality on a two-dimensional plane and call it art. Their painting is more of the cubist sort. In fact, Pablo Picasso’s influence from African art led to his development of cubism, a form of painting that spreads the front, the sides, and the back of a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional plane. Our converging three-dimensional Euclidean picture of the world is complementary with alternatives found in other cultures. It is not a matter of our picture being right and others’ pictures being wrong. No picture is necessarily either right or wrong, but thinking can often make it so. (Recall the cube in Figure 1, that is nothing more than a set of lines on a two-dimensional place, but it is rather automatically tridimensionalized by Western onlookers, inculcated as we are by Euclidean principles.) Once again, the stories are virtually countless.

Page 8 of 9 pages « First < 6 7 8 9 > Last » - Full Article

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below:


© Dharma Cafe'   |  RSS Site   |   Top of page