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Overview
Psychedelic Christianity discusses what we should hope and believe about the ultimate goal of living and uses psychedelic experience and Christianity as its guiding stars. The book reconciles three seemingly inconsistent claims: that we have already attained the ultimate goal; that there is more than one ultimate goal; that there is and always will be another ultimate goal coming. Psychedelic Christianity also argues that Jesus taught that worldly politics will never lead to the kingdom of heaven.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781785357480 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hunt, John Publishing |
| Publication date: | 07/27/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 88 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
What's the point?
In one of Woody Allen's films there is a flashback scene of the protagonist as a schoolboy announcing to his parents one day that he isn't going to go to school any more. "What's the point?" he asks. "We are all going to die anyway." (I'm quoting from memory, so the actual quote may be slightly different.) And Allen has said that he believes that there is no eternal life, that life is meaningless, and that the only purpose in his art of writing and making movies, the only purpose of anything in life, is to distract us momentarily from the bleak fact that there is no point to anything.
The fictional character Obermann, in Senancour's epistolary novel of the same name, said, "Man is perishable. ... That may be, but let us perish resisting, and if annihilation must be our portion, let us not make it a just one." And Unamuno, who quotes Obermann approvingly, said that if we die utterly then humanism is a cruel joke. But suppose we don't die utterly. Suppose we die but are resurrected and have life everlasting. We can still imagine a schoolboy refusing to do his homework and asking, "What's the point since we all have everlasting life anyway?" One can grant that we all want to be something and not nothing and also recognize that just realizing that we can't go out of existence, while a joyous relief from anxiety about being sucked away into nothingness, is not enough to assure us that everything is fundamentally all right. We can still ask, "What is the point, the goal, the purpose? What is it all for?" Schelling remarked, "Being infinite is for itself not a perfection. It is rather the marker of that which is imperfect. The perfected is precisely the in itself full, concluded, finished." (p. 7, The Ages of the World) But when it is concluded, finished, is there nothing beyond that boundary? If there is something, what is it? If there isn't anything, aren't we back to anxiety about eventual nothingness? How can there be everlasting life and an end or goal or state of perfection that is the point of it all?
Is there an ultimate goal? If not, how can that be all right? If so, what is it? Could it be that there are different ultimate goals for different people? I don't mean just people having different beliefs about what the ultimate goal is. I mean: could it be that there really are different ultimate goals for different people, no matter what people may believe about that? We need to think about that word "ultimate." In one sense, it just means "the last." Might it turn out that each person's ultimate goal is just whatever goal he or she had last before dying, the goal of taking a deep breath, or the goal of saying "Help me!" for instance? We have many different goals throughout life. Whether a person's ultimate goal is just the last one she or he has before dying would depend, for one thing, on whether or not there is an afterlife. If, as I believe, there is, then the last one in life is not the last one of all.
But "ultimate" can also mean more than just the last item in a series. It can mean something that justifies in some sense everything that came before, or something like the supreme exemplar of a type of thing, as a resort might be claimed to be "the ultimate in luxury."
Could it be that the ultimate goal is simply to tell the truth? Jesus said, "And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:32) That suggests that being free is the ultimate goal. And Jesus talked about knowing the truth, not telling the truth. In an essay on truth, Unamuno distinguished two concepts of truth. One is the truth that may or may not be known, that is, the objective facts about how things are. The other is the faithful correspondence between a person's inner states or processes of believing and what he or she communicates to someone else. It is the distinction between knowing the truth, or hoping to discover it, and telling the truth. The opposite of knowing the truth is being ignorant. The opposite of telling the truth is lying. The outward evidence in both cases is the same: someone saying something false or otherwise acting as if something false is true. What distinguishes the two is an interior intent. This distinction is no great revelation, but it is often ignored when someone unfairly accuses someone else of lying who really just sincerely has a false belief and isn't guilty of being willfully ignorant. The interesting claim that Unamuno makes is that the moral concept of telling the truth is more fundamental than the non-moral concept of the truth as being correctly informed. The latter derives from the former. It's as if we want the world to give up its secrets and not mislead us just in the same way we want another person to tell us the truth and not lie to us. But does the world keep secrets from us and mislead us? It does inasmuch as the world includes people and sometimes non-human animals and even plants who do that. Surely it would be gross anthropomorphism to attribute deceitful intent to the inorganic parts of the world. And yet from our human, reactive side, we do resent the resistance of the inorganic parts of the world, too. I can be angry at a roof tile that falls on my head, and I can be angry in a similar way at an ignorant person who spreads misinformation. And that helps explain why we also unfairly accuse an ignorant person of deliberately telling a lie. Of course, I don't accuse someone of lying unless I know, or at least think I know, that what he or she says is false, in which case I am not being deceived. But I might have been deceived at first, before I discovered the truth; and anyway it is an insult to be lied to, even when the intent to deceive fails. Unamuno wrote:
"The only perfect homage that can be rendered to God is the homage of truth. The kingdom of God, whose advent is mechanically exhorted every day by millions of tongues defiled by lies, is none other than the kingdom of truth." ("What is Truth?" Selected Works of Unamuno, Vol. 5, p. 168)
"But how can you tell the truth if you don't know what the truth is?" someone might ask. The objection would be that truth as the objective facts about how things are is more fundamental after all. But I think Unamuno is right. The reply is that if you don't know what the truth is about some particular claim, then the truth you should tell is that you don't know; but that there are plenty of things you do know from the inside, and it is heavenly when you are willing to tell the truth about them. You know enough. Telling the truth, faithfully communicating your thoughts as they are, is sufficiently demanding. If we all lived up to it, we would be in the kingdom of heaven. Or, we are in the kingdom of heaven, but we lie to each other that we aren't. Why do we do that? Why do I do that? I think what Jesus was saying was that he was telling the truth, for those who had ears to hear it, about what really matters, the ultimate goal.
Of course, not all religious believers call the ultimate goal "the kingdom of heaven." Hindus call it "moksha"; Buddhists, "nirvana." And not everyone is a religious believer. For a secular humanist, as I once considered myself to be, the ultimate goal is human well-being in the only life each of us has. The Epicureans call it "ataraxia," or not being disturbed, that is, a state of equanimity. The Stoics think it is the absence of unhealthy passions, and that it is the same thing as virtue. If there is an ultimate goal, these might be just different ways of trying to conceive of it or to say what it is. We all should tell the truth about what we think when we try to say whether there is an ultimate goal and if so, what it is.
I can see a reason for hoping there is no ultimate goal. That is that once the goal is achieved, if it was really the ultimate goal, then everything would be over and done. I suppose I could still do things, but none of them could be justified as necessary to reach the ultimate goal. This would be a reason for thinking that there can be goals that not only are not ultimate but that don't even contribute in any way to the ultimate goal. Should we say that until the ultimate goal is achieved, no other goal should be pursued except as a means to the ultimate goal; but once the ultimate goal has been attained, there can be other goals to be pursued simply for their own sake? This raises the question whether I hope there is just one ultimate goal, because if there can be more than one goal, each of which is to be pursued simply for its own sake, isn't that another way of saying that there are more ultimate goals than one? But doesn't "ultimate" imply uniqueness? Yes, but it could be that the uniqueness is only relative to the other non-ultimate goals which are to be pursued as a means to achieving it. We would pursue an ultimate goal by achieving subordinate goals which are necessary conditions for the achievement of that ultimate goal, which itself would not be a means to achieving any other goal but would be purely an end in itself. Once we have attained the ultimate goal, we then find that a new goal presents itself, and there would be various and sundry subordinate steps to be taken, each of which would be a means to reaching that new ultimate goal. But it would have to be that the attainment of the previous ultimate goal (ultimate in relation to the means required to achieve it) would not have been in its turn simply a first step towards the second ultimate goal we were supposing; because if it were, then the first one wouldn't have been an ultimate goal in its own right. In other words, if there are many ultimate goals, they must be equally and independently ultimate, with no other final goal that justifies each of them. Relative to each other, they would be neither ultimate nor subordinate, but each of them would be ultimate in relation to the subordinate goals that were the means of achieving it. But since we are supposing there is no other ultimate goal that would render any of them subordinate, each of them would be ultimate not only relative to the prior subordinate goals required to achieve it but also absolutely ultimate. Thus, we don't have to suppose that attaining the ultimate goal would mean that there is nothing more to do, because a new ultimate goal could be revealed that does not in any way render the ultimate goal already attained a mere means to the new ultimate goal, even though the past is always contained in the present. Thus an artist creates more than one work of art, two parents have more than one child, God creates each of us, and it is possible to have more than one peak psychedelic experience.
If I've already achieved the goal, then there is no point in seeking it. If I have a new goal, I can seek that. What do I hope about whether or not there is an ultimate goal and what do I hope about what it might be? Is the goal to be free of suffering? If I am suffering intensely, the answer will seem to be Yes. But to be freed of suffering is too negative a goal, implying that it would be best of all if I had never been born in the first place, since that is the only sure guarantee of never suffering. I know I don't want that to be true, and I don't know of any good reason to believe it is. But please, dear God, don't put me to the test! I want there to be something that is worth suffering for, without making the suffering itself the goal. I want the goal to involve cessation of any suffering that was necessary to achieve it but also to have a joyful, positive content that then makes any suffering on the way to it simply irrelevant. That is, I want it to be so that it would have been just fine if I had achieved it without going through any suffering but also just fine that in fact I had to go through suffering to attain it.
Eternity, timelessness, is not what I want. I want the right amount of stability and predictability, but I also want absolutely fresh newness, as on the day of Creation, with solids that look like they have just gelled from liquid, and liquids that look like shining solids, and everything breathing and squirming with life; and that requires what Bergson called "la durée," duration, our lived time of constant new creation, for even if something is repeated, the repetition is not the original. Now, you could say that if it is always the present containing the past and generating a genuinely new world, then that is what is eternally happening. Always = eternally. The eternity that scares me is the eternity of absolute stillness, of nothing new, of everything being over and done with and just there, frozen, motionless, stale and suffocating. That is what Bergson identifies as the mistake of conceiving of time as the same thing as space.
I want to be able to change without the change ever being that I no longer exist. And I want the change to be enjoyable, or if not enjoyable, then leading to some further change that redeems it. And when I say "change," I mean something that has never occurred before in just that way. I'm not ruling out recognizable patterns and repetitions. In fact, I want those too! And I want it all ultimately to be humanly meaningful, neither entirely comprehensible (because that would mean it was over and done) nor intellectually repugnant (because that would mean I don't know what I mean), but morally and emotionally satisfying, and sensually and intellectually beautiful. And I don't want this just for myself but for everyone. If life is ultimately meaningless suffering or pleasure – I don't believe there is such a thing as meaningless joy – for even one person, then it is for me too, and I have missed the ultimate goal. It follows that if even one person achieves the ultimate goal, then everyone does. This, I believe, is the essence of Christianity. It is also, I think, what Unamuno meant by the phrase "the human finality of the universe."
CHAPTER 2Finality
Nietzsche said that the only real affirmation of life would be a willingness to live it over again just as it was. But that claim is paradoxical, because living it over again just as it was would require that one not be conscious that it was being repeated, since otherwise it wouldn't be subjectively just as it was. So, the possibility one would be willing to undergo would be no different subjectively from having lived one's life just one time and not ever again. What seems right about his thought is that an affirmation of life as one has known it can't appeal to an as yet unexperienced, dramatically different kind of life that would compensate for the inadequacies of life as one has known it, for that is to express a dissatisfaction with life as one has known it. But why can't one affirm life as one has known it to be, believing, "Yes, I am glad I have had my life just as it has been, and when I have to leave this life behind, I would be happy to have another one of the same kind," and yet also hope it could be even better?
In Dreams and Resurrection I tried to explain why I think the wiping out of one's own subjectivity forever is not a real possibility. That helps tremendously when facing dying and death, but having lived through the dying of some important people in my life recently, I've been thinking that the ultimate goal that I hope for includes not only the assurance of everlasting life but also something that guarantees that the suffering that is the inevitable decline into death, that eventually occurs in each life before or as a new life begins, is compensated by some ultimate ongoing glorious joy. In that previous work I stated that it is reasonable to expect the next life to be very similar to this one, with its own joys and sorrows, deaths of loved ones and one's own death to be faced, with no death final but always life after life. Now I'm saying I also hope that there is that human finality of the universe as I've tried to describe above that guarantees the meaningfulness and joy of the unending series. And I'm thinking that there is something unsatisfactory about the idea of an unending series. Or rather, it is all right for there to be an unending series, but there also needs to be something that is not an unending series. And it can't be the finality of eternal death, which would certainly be no solution since its nothingness, if it were really possible, would be just as unending. As Santayana said, "There is something baffling about infinity; in its presence the sense of finite humility can never wholly banish the rebellious suspicion that we are being deluded." (The Sense of Beauty, p. 64) And Schelling had one of the characters in his Clara, or On Nature's Connection to the Spirit World, say the following:
"What is completed is generally more excellent and magnificent than infinity; in art it is the very seal of perfection. However, this universe is the most excellent of all, not only in itself but also as the work of a divine artist, and I asked him if he wouldn't have done better to have tackled the matter from this side than with general concepts, and whether he shouldn't have asked his opponent which was the most perfect, an infinite row of worlds, an eternal circle of beings without a final goal of perfection, or a universe that amounted to something definite or perfect." (p. 70)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Psychedelic Christianity"
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Copyright © 2017 Jack Call.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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Table of Contents
Chapter One: What's the point?,
Chapter Two: Finality,
Chapter Three: Monism, dualism, and the number of ultimate goals,
Chapter Four: What now?,
Chapter Five: God and control,
Chapter Six: God's will and injustice,
Chapter Seven: Release from sin and death,
Chapter Eight: The unforgivable sin,
Chapter Nine: "My kingdom is not of this world.",
Chapter Ten: Psychedelic Christianity and church,
Chapter Eleven: Psychedelic Christianity and Paul,
Chapter Twelve: Forgivable sins,
Chapter Thirteen: The Holy Spirit,