The Burial of Reality by a Child’s Party Game
In Father's Day memory of all of our elders before us: the "Godly" re-identified
Introduction
As was once a much more the common in the USA, I was raised as a Catholic, consistently attended church on Sundays and holy days with my parents and siblings, spent several years at a Catholic elementary school that was taught by actual nuns – and was thus fairly well exposed to the basics of both Catholic and Christian theology (dogmatics). Being an obliging kid, I obediently memorized the Catholic catechism of the time, listened to the reading of the gospel and the priest’s sermon during services, and strived to make consistent sense of it all. The still-confusing apparent importance of the reported events of the life of Jesus Christ aside, the biggest (sic) topic that grabbed my attempted sense-making attention during my docile youth was el numero uno; i.e., “God”. I was more or less instructed by my religious seniors that “God” was a remote, unknowable, unseeable, somewhat inscrutable, capricious, autonomous, all-powerful and all-knowing being. “Man”, on the other hand, was a separate and lower class of being entirely subordinate to “God”.
Given that early instruction, I’ve kept a vigilant look-out for signs of this reported dominant being ever since. While this sustained vigilance has proved generally helpful (i.e, transferrable), and I’ve occasionally seen and experienced some unexpectedly strange, normally unexplainable things, I’ve personally encountered no clear evidence of the existence of a wholly independently-operating ‘super mono-being’ as described by my seniors. Instead, I’ve gradually come to believe that my elders themselves were bequeathed – by their own elders -- with a critically and subtly distorted theological description of reality, and have therefore mischaracterized and misunderstood the nature of what they refer to as “God”.
It is very easy to see how this misunderstanding may have developed and spread.
The Chinese Whispers Machine
Chinese whispers (aka telephone game, Russian scandal, broken telephone, operator, grapevine, gossip, secret message, etc.), a popular children’s party game, demonstrates how difficult it is for humans to accurately transmit information to one another. For those unfamiliar with (or have forgotten about) the game, Wikipedia describes it thusly:
Players form a line or circle, and the first player comes up with a message and whispers it to the ear of the second person in the line. The second player repeats the message to the third player, and so on. When the last player is reached, they announce the message they just heard, to the entire group. The first person then compares the original message with the final version. Although the objective is to pass around the message without it becoming garbled along the way, part of the enjoyment is that, regardless, this usually ends up happening. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly from that of the first player, usually with amusing or humorous effect. Reasons for changes include anxiousness or impatience, erroneous corrections, and the difficult-to-understand mechanism of whispering.
Moving into the adult world, the religious scholar-essayist, D.T. Suzuki (b.1870-d.1966), observed that followers of the close observers of the human condition like Christ and Buddha gradually overlaid the original insights of these men with derivative understanding and impressions of the subject matter, essentially playing a religious game of Chinese whispers.
Speaking of Christianity in this regard, Suzuki remarks:1
To state it much more concretely, how much Christianity, for instance, as we have it today, is the teaching of Christ himself? – and how much of it is the contribution of Paul, John, Peter, Augustine, and even Aristotle? The magnificent Christian dogmatics is the work of Christian faith as has been experienced successively by its leaders; it is not the work of one person, even of Christ. For dogmatics is not necessarily always concerned with historical facts which are rather secondary in importance compared with the religious truth of Christianity: the latter is what ought to be rather than what is or what was…
Christianity is therefore constituted not only with the teaching of Jesus himself but with all the dogmatical and speculative interpretations concerning the personality of Jesus and his doctrine that have accumulated ever since the death of the founder. In other words, Christ did not found the religious system known by his name, but he was made its founder by his followers. If he were still among them, it is highly improbable that he would sanction all the theories, beliefs, and practices which are now imposed upon self-styled Christians. If he were asked whether their learned dogmatics were his religion, he might not know how to answer. He would in all likelihood profess complete ignorance of all the philosophical subtleties of Christian theology of the present day.
Suzuki later applies the same critique to his own native religion, Buddhism:
In a word, what constituted the life and spirit of Buddhism is nothing else than the inner life and spirit of the Buddha himself; Buddhism is the structure erected around the inmost consciousness of its founder. The style and material of the outer structure may vary as history moves forward, but the inner meaning of Buddhahood which supports the whole edifice remains the same and ever living. While on earth the Buddha tried to make it intelligible in accordance with the capacities of his immediate followers; that is to say, the latter did their best to comprehend the deeper significance of the various discourses of their master, in which he pointed the way to final deliverance. As we are told, the Buddha discoursed “with one voice”, but this was interpreted and understood by his devotees in as manifold manners as possible. This was inevitable, for we have each our own inner experience which is to be explained in terms of our own creation, naturally varying in depth and breadth. In most cases these so-called individual experiences, however, may not be so deep and forceful as to demand absolutely original phraseology, but may remain satisfied with new interpretations of the old terms – once brought into use by an ancient original spiritual leader. And this is the way every great historical religion grows enriched in its contents or ideas. In some cases this enrichment may mean the overgrowth of superstructures ending in a complete burial of the original spirit [emphasis added].
The Burial of An Ancient Human Attitude
Ironically, even the term, “religion”, itself has been subjected to the Chinese whispers machine. From Wikipedia:
The term religion comes from both Old French and Anglo-Norman (1200s AD) and means respect for sense of right, moral obligation, sanctity, what is sacred, reverence for the gods. It is ultimately derived from the Latin word religiō. According to Roman philosopher Cicero, religiō comes from relegere: re (meaning "again") + lego (meaning "read"), where lego is in the sense of "go over", "choose", or "consider carefully"…
In classic antiquity, religiō broadly meant conscientiousness, sense of right, moral obligation, or duty to anything. In the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin root religiō was understood as an individual virtue of worship in mundane contexts; never as doctrine, practice, or actual source of knowledge. In general, religiō referred to broad social obligations towards anything including family, neighbors, rulers, and even towards God. Religiō was most often used by the ancient Romans not in the context of a relation towards gods [or God], but as a range of general emotions which arose from heightened attention in any mundane context such as hesitation, caution, anxiety, or fear, as well as feelings of being bound, restricted, or inhibited. The term was also closely related to other terms like scrupulus (which meant "very precisely"), and some Roman authors related the term superstitio (which meant too much fear or anxiety or shame) to religiō at times. When religiō came into English around the 1200s as religion, it took the meaning of "life bound by monastic vows" or monastic orders. The compartmentalized concept of religion, where religious and worldly things were separated, was not used before the 1500s. The concept of religion was first used in the 1500s to distinguish the domain of the church and the domain of civil authorities; the Peace of Augsburg marks such instance, which has been described by Christian Reus-Smit as "the first step on the road toward a European system of sovereign states.
So, originally the concepts underlying the word, “religion”, referred to an individual person’s sustained maintenance of a heightened, studiously conscientious and responsive internal and external attitude towards all of the aspects and responsibilities of their everyday life. Eventually, however, “religion” came to instead refer to the business of applying this same careful and worshipful attitude only with regard to the ‘God stuff’ part of living, and not towards the more prevalent secular, too.
The Apparent Burial of the Original Meaning of “God”
In the mundane world of human decision-making and action-taking, those who are demonstrably and consistently effective at such actions (e.g., many parents, tradesmen, engineers, farmers, health workers, scientists, etc.) consistently come to believe that to be effective, they must – to the greatest extent possible -- base their decision-making and action-taking on all that is real or existent within a system, as opposed to that which is only imaginary, nonexistent, or nonactual. Basing decisions and actions on the imaginary, nonexistent, or nonactual usually results only in ramifying ineffectiveness and error.
Reality is the sum or aggregate of all that is real or existent within a system, as opposed to that which is only imaginary, nonexistent or nonactual. The term is also used to refer to the ontological status of things, indicating their existence. In physical terms, reality is the totality of a system, known and unknown. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality
Interestingly, this generally more cautious, serious human attitude towards each and every element of everyday life (including attention to the unknown) is explicit in a pre-Christian, pre-Cicero Old Testament passage (Exodus 20, King James Version) that also warns of the perils and ramifying consequences of acting heedlessly: to wit,
And God spake all these words, saying,
I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
And here in this very old text (6th-5th century BCE), I think, are pretty clear clues of what our Western/Middle Eastern forebears were – in modern terms -- actually talking and thinking about when they employed the term, “God” (in the Hebraic monotheistic tradition) or “gods” (in the Roman polytheistic tradition).
Reality’s “totality of a system, known and unknown” – that pretty much encompasses everything, just like the definition of an omnipotent and omnipresent supernatural being(s) does. By substituting this modern definition of “reality” for “God” in the above passage from Exodus, yields a quite topical and comprehensible translation of Exodus 20:
And reality showed [spake],
I am reality, the determinant of all that happens and is, which has [for example] brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Though shalt have no imaginary realities before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any nonactual likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that which is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow thyself to these false realities, nor think or act as if they are true: for I am the reality and determinant of all that happens and am a jealous reality, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that refuse reality; and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that embrace reality, and act in accord with reality. Thou shalt not take the name of reality in vain; for reality will not hold him guiltless that taketh its name in vain.
Note that this interpretative translation of the old term, “God”, conserves the somewhat inscrutable, capricious, autonomous, all-powerful and all-knowing attributes accorded to this being since at least the rise of Christianity – but returns religion to the non-compartmentalized (secular and non-secular both included) sense of meaning as described by Cicero. God as being “unseeable” (or “unknowable”) is no longer a complete given, moreover, as at least parts of reality are continuously seeable and knowable by those who strive to be as conscientious as possible in conducting the business of their everyday lives. And, “Man”, on the other hand, while still always subordinate to reality (whether he likes it or not) -- is not at all separate from same.
Zen Buddhism – Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki, 1956, William Barrett, editor.