We Are Supernatural

We Are Supernatural October 27, 2016

Photo by the Author
Photo by the Author

I recently listened to the cultural critic Slavoj Žižek explain that a radical (“to the root”) understanding of Christianity leads to atheism, and I like his suggestion. He says that with the death of God on the cross, “the Big Other”—meaning the transcendent God—really is annihilated, leaving only us. With God’s death, we’re left with…

…a species of animal running about pretty much alone and conflicted on a teeny rock (Earth) hurtling through the vast darkness of outer space, and

…each of us as deeply limited, finite beings who will surely die.

This state of affairs may sound bleak, but it isn’t. The death of the Almighty of which Žižek speaks is, on some level, the liberating realization. One might argue that such a suggestion robs the universe of the Supernatural, of the Sacred, but that’s not the case. We are supernatural, and before we brook any cries of “material reductionism”, consider:

When children watch a thin stream of water, maybe from a broken sprinkler head, carefully meander its way along the cracks of a sidewalk, over the curb, and down toward the storm drain, and they continually block its path with twigs and pebbles only to see it break through again, the joy they feel and express is the emergence of the Supernatural in the world. They are, after all—like the water, the cement, and the asphalt—a collection of molecules, cleverly woven into cells and tissues, but woven in a way, and interacting in a way, with light and air and gravity and electrical impulses, that an experiencing Subject appears in the universe and finds Itself at play. This is supernatural. The emergence from a world of motion and transfer and causation into a world of friendship and laughter and promises is the appearance of the Supernatural in the material world.

Yesterday I buried a dead snake who was my pet. I hadn’t buried an animal in some years. I was alone looking at the hole, holding the snake for the last time, beholding its now-white eyes. How could it be that air, soil, water, light, cells, not to mention atomic and subatomic particles weave, dance, and vibrate into existence a little world within the cosmos that experiences itself? The human subject pausing from the mundane vicissitudes of waking existence to reflect even briefly upon meaning, mortality, or beauty—whether a snake, a butterfly, or a star—is, at that moment, supernatural reality.

Laughter, like tears, has a psychological, biological, and ultimately chemical basis, but the subjective experience of laughing is not merely an experience of oneself laughing; it’s the experience of the Universe laughing, just as the experience of oneself writing poetry is the experience of the Universe writing itself. When any given person experiences herself or himself as the Universe-experiencing-Itself, the Supernatural becomes self-aware. This is most immediately experienced by sitting in silence and reflecting on the reality that your own ears and mind hearing the world around you is the Universe listening to itself; you become the microphone of the Universe. And experience of the Supernatural becomes vastly deeper in relation to other sentient beings, experiencing the reality that they, too, are the Universe experiencing Itself, and that in being fully open to one another, we have the most special chance to peer into the void of self-consciousness as such.

I guess Žižek is right: the end of the Big Other spells the beginning of the Living God—the suprapersonal and supernatural Reality in which we have our being in the most direct and concrete way.


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