Buddhist<\/a> thought anticipated anything especially relevant to contemporary science, in any particular given field.<\/p>\nThat said, I do think there are some connecting points to evolutionary thought, Buddhist spiritual disciplines, and what I see as our emergent liberal spirituality. Really important connections, that speak to our spiritual style, how we might best consciously engage our interior lives, and to something more, a pearl of great price. I want to explore that here, today. However, I suggest rather than Darwin, it is Thomas Huxley who provides the nexus point for this enterprise.<\/p>\n
My introduction to Huxley as anything more than a name associated closely with Charles Darwin or as Aldous Huxley\u2019s grandfather, comes through the controversial contemporary Western Buddhist Stephen Batchelor, author of the seminal study Buddhism Without Beliefs. I consider this book, in fact the entirety of Batchelor\u2019s work of enormous importance for contemporary liberal spirituality. I personally embrace a considerable part of his perspective on my own spiritual way.<\/p>\n
Batchelor makes much of the term \u201cagnostic,\u201d which Thomas Huxley coined in the late nineteenth century. In an essay titled \u201cthe Agnostic Buddhist\u201d Batchelor writes how Huxley coined agnostic \u201cas a joke. Huxley belonged to a small philosophical circle in London in which he increasingly felt out of place. While everybody else in the group could readily identify themselves as a Christian or a Rationalist or a Schopenhaurian, or whatever, he felt perplexed that no such term seemed applicable to him. So he decided to call himself an \u2018agnostic\u2019 in order that he too could \u2018have a tail like all the other foxes.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Agnostic means without knowledge, or not knowing. However, not in the sense we commonly find today, \u201cI don\u2019t know and I don\u2019t particularly care.\u201d Rather Huxley\u2019s agnosticism had a lot of heart about it. \u201cHuxley even described his view as \u2018the agnostic faith,\u2019 thus giving it the kind of seriousness that one might otherwise expect only amongst religious people.\u201d He followed this way with great passion.<\/p>\n
As Batchelor explained, Huxley \u201csaw agnosticism as demanding as any moral, philosophical, or religious creed.\u201d Well, maybe not creed. Actually he seemed to have much the same reservations about formal creeds contemporary Unitarian Universalists usually feel. Because, Huxley wasn\u2019t seeking pat answers. For him agnosticism was first and foremost, a method. The method he had in mind is broadly the same as which underpins scientific inquiry. And for him this method led to a naturalistic, and what we might call today a humanistic spirituality.<\/p>\n
Not knowing allows us to see things in new light, to discern much about the human heart. And Huxley\u2019s rigorous observations within the spirit of not knowing led to some basic principles. And these are principles that can inform us, and take us deep into the ways of wisdom.<\/p>\n
Actually whether God exists was not a primary concern although he saw no reason to postulate a deity. Huxley\u2019s real challenge for most of us cut much closer to the bone. He challenged how we see ourselves. He was adamant that human beings did not exist outside the flow of events and their intimate interrelatedness. He wrote, \u201cIn the whole universe there is nothing permanent, no eternal substance either of mind or of matter.\u201d He felt any idea of an abiding self, an eternal individual \u201cpersonality is a metaphysical fancy; and in very truth not only we, but all things in the worlds without end of the cosmic phantasmagoria, are such stuff as dreams are made of.\u201d As we go forward I will suggest understanding this viscerally becomes a key to authentic wisdom.<\/p>\n
Unitarian Universalist theologian and minister Forrest Church observed the work of religion flows out of our knowledge we are alive and that we are going to die. I would add to that religion, spirituality addresses the hurt, fear and anxiety that seems to haunt the human condition. I find much of that hurt and fear in our lives arises out of a fundamental cognitive error. The error is that we are isolated beings.<\/p>\n
Certainly, as I look at myself honestly, relentlessly, in the spirit of not knowing, frankly I find it impossible to discern any part of me that isn\u2019t formed by conditions ranging from my genetic makeup to my ongoing encounters with events and people. I am this because of that. And the \u201cthat\u201d which makes \u201cthis,\u201d changes in a heartbeat. Who I am changes sometimes slightly, sometimes dramatically with the very next addition of experience.<\/p>\n
There are all sorts of reasons why we see ourselves as separate from each other. To me it seems obvious it is an unfortunate side effect of our amazing ability to divide the universe, to find the information that allows us to survive. And there certainly is a truth that in any given moment, we are in fact separate. You are you and I am I, at least in the moment. And at the very same time there is a larger sense in which we are totally wrapped up together in a very real web of mutuality. The intuition of the spiritual enterprise is that we can reconcile these apparent contradictions, our separateness in the moment, and our essential connectedness. This is sometimes called the nondual perspective<\/p>\n
Through his commitment to not knowing, Huxley found the nondual perspective. While he was writing before the discovery of genes, like the Buddha, he got the principle that we are all moments in the great rush of time and space, verbs rather than nouns, notes in a symphony.<\/p>\n
The spiritual enterprise as I see it, is to find how this is in fact our truth, yours and mine. And it is discovered when we open our hearts and minds, as we embrace a way of deep agnosticism, of truly not knowing. Susan Blackmore in her delightful book Consciousness: An Introduction reflects on these assertions and asks.<\/p>\n
\u201cHave these people really seen nonduality, directly, in their own experience? If they have, could we all see it? Might the psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists working on the problem of consciousness see nonduality directly for themselves? If so, it seems possible that they might bring together two apparently totally different disciplines: the third-person discipline of science and the first-person discipline of self-transformation. If they did so, might they then understand exactly what had happened in their own brains when all the illusions fell away and the distinction between first and third person was gone? This way the direct experience of nonduality might be integrated into a neuroscience that only knows, intellectually, that dualism must be false.\u201d<\/p>\n
Deep agnosticism, not turning away, remaining present, heals many wounds. As to what this really looks like there\u2019s a story from Blackmore\u2019s book. \u201cJohn Wren-Lewis was a physics professor with decidedly anti-mystical views when in 1983, at the age of sixty, he was poisoned while traveling on a bus in Thailand. A would-be thief gave him some sweets laced with what was probably a mixture of morphine and cocaine, and the next thing he knew was waking up in a dilapidated and dirty hospital.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt first he noticed nothing special, but gradually it dawned on him that it was as if he had emerged freshly made, completely with the memories that made up his personal self, from a radiant vast blackness beyond space and time. There was no sense at all of personal continuity. Moreover, the \u2018dazzling darkness\u2019 was still there. It seemed to be behind his head, continually re-creating his entire consciousness afresh, instant by instant, now! And now! And now! He even put his hand up to feel the back of his head only to find it perfectly normal. He felt only gratitude toward everything around him, all of which seemed perfectly right and as it should be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m very taken that Blackmore didn\u2019t chose an example from the traditional spiritual literature. This wasn\u2019t a thirty-year practitioner of an austere spiritual discipline. This was someone drugged and robbed. This experience is accessible to all of us because it is a natural part of how our brains naturally work. Meditation and other disciplines help, a lot. But in the last analysis all we need do, is let go of our certainties. As the lady said, \u201cIt\u2019s all in your head.\u201d We, if you will, evolved to be able to do this. Why I don\u2019t know. But that we can, that I\u2019ve experienced. As have endless others.<\/p>\n
By the bye, some sense of this experience never abandoned Wren-Lewis for the rest of his life. In his own words Wren-Lewis described the place of not knowing. \u201cI feel as if the back of my head has been sawn off so that it is no longer the sixty-year-old John who looks out at the world, but the shining dark infinite void that in some extraordinary way is also, \u2018I.\u2019\u201d Only don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
This is where not knowing takes us, each following our own trajectory, each with our own moments, and all joined. For me I found it sitting in a Buddhist monastery, eating a thin cabbage soup. For you, perhaps playing with a child. For another, perhaps listening to Mozart. Another, perhaps just noticing that is is possible for this moment only, to not have that drink. For another, well, who knows? The secret is only not knowing. As the master Dizang said, \u201cNot knowing is most intimate.\u201d<\/p>\n
I suggest a deep agnosticism; truly engaging not knowing is the universal solvent. It will release us from our hurt and fears by showing us, not in some abstract cognitive therapy sort of way, but in the deepest, most visceral way, who we really are.<\/p>\n
Open, wide as the sky. And at the very same time intimate, more intimate than any word can ever convey. And the way to this wisdom is simple. Just don\u2019t know. Only don\u2019t know. That\u2019s all it takes.<\/p>\n
Amen.<\/p>\n
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