To survive and progress, a religion has to be a religion appropriate for the future.
To become appropriate for the future, a religion has to let go of or change its words, concepts, and practices if necessary.
However, a religion has to change slowly, avoiding introducing words, concepts, and practices that haven’t acquired collective meaning.
To change, adherents of a religion must first claim the freedom to be who they are today.
Our religious tradition is a reservoir of the past that we can dig to find its future. To dig it, we have to see this past as unfinished and open for more interpretation.
- See Bloch (1995), Principle of hope, 1, 200.
- “to keep the past unfinished, refusing to accept its appearance of closure as the final word, springing it open once again by rewriting its apparent fatality under the sign of freedom,” Eagleton (2015), Hope without optimism, 32.
To be free, we need to practice Gianni Vattimo’s “weak thought.”
- Research this further.
We change a religion and make it freer not through a destructive revolutionary moment (überwindung) but through weak, subtle, and creative ways that reinterpret and transform it (verwindung).
- “Nothing in the world is soft and weak as water. But when attacking the hard and strong, nothing can conquer so easily. Weak overcomes strong, soft overcomes hard” (Tao Te Ching, 78)
Verwindung involves a slow but conscious reform and reinterpretation of the languages and practices of one’s religion to claim one’s freedom to change.
Religion has remained strong and potent despite the Enlightenment and globalization. To change direct it toward a liberal and progressive direction, we have to access and understand its strength and potency.
- ==For me to direct my spirituality toward a new one, I need to understand why it has remained in me despite all those years and challenges. I need to have a continuous access and understanding of this strength and potency it has.
==I think the big question for me while thinking about this is what is it that I am changing, directing. I have left the JWs and don’t practice anything they teach. I couldn’t change what I don’t practice. What is it then that I am changing and directing? The answer that is on top of my mind is that instead of changing and adult spirituality, what I’m actually doing is like trying to figure out how to nurture something that is so personal, which is what has remained after everything was shed.
- To do: Look for a good metaphor for this.
- An attempt for a metaphor: I cultivated this tree through the help of my parents. It blossomed. But then it went through a cold winter where it almost died. There are signs that it could still be revived. (?? Doesn’t capture it well. Misses something)
- ==Another alternative answer to this is that by leaving the JWs yet still desiring a religious existence, I am aligning myself to liberal religion which has a rich history of its own, which I can then be acquainted with and join in changing. However, this is project of its own. Before I could get into it, I might perhaps seek reincorporation first with my past religion.
To transform a religion and escape from its damaging components, we have to make the past present by conversing with it through verwindung.
- ==Did I inherit anything from my past religion, perhaps unconsciously, which I could change? I think I may have (as alluded by the panelists in ANWW20).
- “Overcoming is worthy only when we think about incorporation.” (Heidegger)
- ==I think I thought I have overcome it, but not yet. Because I haven’t incorporated anything yet. Incorporation is what I have been seeking since that San Pablo walk. This is proven by questions like, “What is it from my past religion that I can incorporate in my new life?”
- ==Perhaps this desire for reincorporation is also manifesting as this desire to try to reconnect with others from the past in a way that we can coexist despite our differences.
Religion is “always unfinished and radically open.” It can be reinterpreted and even overcome through the gentle process of verwindung and weak thought so that it could give us new value as it continues to retain some of its old.
For religion to continue to provide us value, it is necessary for it to be reinterpreted. We have to guard its present state by helping it transform and evolve so that it can continue to uncover its value from its past.
- “the meaning of past events lies ultimately in the guardianship of the present” (Terry Eagleton)
To be guardians of a religious tradition, we have to commit ourselves in a patient process involving a community of people who are also committed in a disciplined educational practice.
Resist the idea of building a religion of the future and instead work on what we currently have (a tradition with a rich history) and transform it.
Andrew’s prescription is to
- Aspire to be a “free spirit” (c/o Nietzsche).
- Aspire to be an “archeologist of morning” (c/o Olson).
- Aspire to be a man without a position (c/o Wienpahl).
Nietzsche’s four-phased therapeutic journey to become a free spirit
- Phase 1 “Hearth Health”
- Our old inherited supernatural religious and metaphysical traditions could ground and secure us but eventually we outgrow them and start to feel restrained by them especially if they aren’t changing with us.
- Phase 2 “Sickness of Nihilism”
- What leads us here is recognizing the loss of our “hearth health.”
- When here we experience “the hateful assault on everything that had seemed so comforting.”
- We experience profound meaninglessness.
- We shouldn’t fear it, though, because it loosens the chain of the hearth health and leads us to the next phase.
- Phase 3 “Transformative Convalescence”
- This phase has two phases: cool and warm.
- Cool: Characterized by detachment, seeing the world in a scholarly fashion from above.
- Warm: This phase begins when we recognize we need to go down and return to “where the sun warms.”
- Returning to where the sun warms is not a return to the hearth health. You can’t forget your experience of nihilism and the cool phase of convalescence. You have changed and are still changing.
- Moments of return are first short-lived. The coolness and the sickness of nihilism will return from time to time.
- Then moments of warmth begin to get longer.
- What does a good day in warmth convalescence look like? You see and give meaning to the natural world as it is.
- are able to live “as neighbour to precisely the things that the metaphysical tradition only found valuable as indicators of another metaphysical world” (Gordon Bearn: “Waking to Wonder”, SUNY Press, New York 1997, p. 32)
- see everything in the world as loaded with meaning
- “there is nowhere else for a human being to live except in meaning” (Thomas Sheehan)
- you realize you don’t need a supernatural world to give meaning to your life; all you need is to see this world in a different way (i.e., to be close to them)
- Phase 4 “Great Health”
- A person could now live in completely and fully in these moments for life.
- “This spirit freed from the tradition that seeks metaphysical comforts is surprised by a new happiness and a new love for all that is delicate. The great health is a life attuned to what is near.”
- “To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men [sic] divine” (Emerson)
- Source: Chapter 1 of “Waking to Wonder” by Gordon Bearn
The more we see ourselves as free spirits the more we can become archaeologists of morning.
III
Accessing the past in the present or past-as-present (the perpetual morning) is the fuel for a creative life.
Dig in the past-as-present
Past-as-present is available to us in two ways
- “Our own” history - history of all the past people, who make up our identity.
- Not “our own” history - history of the fluxes of nature (matter and energy), changes in it which are also inside and revealed through us. Through these changes, living and non-living things are constantly remade in the present moment.
Matter and energy are always affective so they do not require an unmoved mover.
The question we have to ask ourselves is: how to use oneself and on what?
To become our fullest being and understand what this means, we need to dig in the past as present as “an archaeologist of morning.”
Dig on this present soil, now, in this instant. You are the only reader and mover. Be free from all restrictive theories and creeds.
Work 1: Create things and acts where the form immediately expresses our authentic selves fully and not just an aesthetic clothing.
Work 2: Augmenting the given. Improving ourselves.
Work 3: Perceiving our interconnection with others and our lack of control on life and the world.
We can’t predict what comes out of the perpetual morning. What we can trust is that there will be light and truth here both old and new.
IV
So, to conclude, what do I think is the result of becoming a free spirit who is also an archaeologist of morning?
a “man [or woman] without a position.”
“As I see it, the point is not to identify reality with anything except itself. (Tautologies are, after all, true.) If you wish to persist by asking what reality is; that is, what is really, the answer is that it is what you experience it to be. Reality is as you see, hear, feel, taste and smell it, and as you live it. And it is a multifarious thing. To see this is to be a man without a position. To get out of the mind and into the world, to get beyond language and to the things is to cease to be an idealist or a pragmatist, or an existentialist, or a Christian. I am a man without a position. I do not have the philosophic position that there are no positions or theories or standpoints. (There obviously are.) I am not a sceptic or an agnostic or an atheist. I am simply a man without a position, and this should open the door to detachment” (“An Unorthodox Lecture”, 1956).
one simply cannot know exactly what one is going to find as one begins to dig nor, indeed, if on this or that particular day of digging one will find or notice anything of interest at all. One must simply start to dig and see what emerges from the soil and, in what this process will fully consist, can never be fully worked out beforehand. To be sure one can bring certain pre-existing ideas, perspectives, methods and tools to the initial breaking of the ground but they are there simply to help us to begin to dig which, in turn, may well reveal something that requires new ideas, methods, perspectives and tools if it is to be excavated and interpreted as well and as fully as is possible. The actual experience of being right there with the close and closest things_ _as one actually digs into reality is what drives everything here. As one proceeds one must use all one’s senses because reality is always as you see, hear, feel, taste and smell it, and as you live it, and these senses are there to help provide as many perspectives as is possible to uncover and interpret what is truly there, even as one must remain acutely aware that full scope always eludes our grasp, that there is no finality of vision, that we have perceived nothing completely, and that tomorrow, like a new walk, a new dig is always a new dig.
As Wienpahl says, the point is not to identify reality with anything except itself._ _However, we need to remain fully aware that reality is a multifarious thing and it is to see this, truly to see this, that is to be a man or a woman without a position. The free-spirit-archaeologist-of-morning-without-a-position is always seeking to get out of the mind and into the world, to get beyond language and to the things. And, when one is doing this well, one ceases to be an idealist, a pragmatist, an existentialist, a Christian, a sceptic, an agnostic, or an atheist. Instead, one becomes a man or a woman without a position, someone who is not bringing to bear upon reality a ready-made, fixed blueprint but someone who, through a process of disciplined attentiveness to, and mindfulness of, things, is able to get the content of themselves instant, with no drag and so able to remain as fully open as is possible to what is actually intra-actively emerging as one digs into the soil of the past-as-present on this perpetual morning. This is the kind of detachment which, as a man without a position, Wienpal sought.
This task done well is precisely what guarantees our freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today.
the past is not something which is finished and which fixes us and holds us back, something completely done and dusted, instead, they can see that within the past there are always-already undischarged energies and futures that can be released to the present and which can help us live better, fuller and more creative lives than we did before. Freer lives …
we need to be aware that there is a real difference between being someone without a position and being someone without a direction.
It’s important to see that to live in the world without a fixed position is, in fact, a prerequisite of being able truly to follow the direction of reality as it is actually unfolding and then of being able truly to augment the given.
it is only the man or woman without a position who is able to surf the crest of the ever-moving unfolding wave of reality.
the surfboard is acting as their “door to detachment” which allows them to have a direction that genuinely accords with the reality of the wave’s actual unfolding which, of course, includes the unfolding life of this surfer intra-acting with the unfolding of the wave.
Like surfers, the man or woman without a position is able to surf the constantly unfolding crest of the perpetual morning.
getting out of the mind and into the world, to get beyond language and to the things.
I always try to pick up my camera and go out into the world without a ready-made, fully worked-out blueprint, theory or plan about how, when or where to take a photograph. In this sense, what the surfboard is to the surfer, the camera is to me the photographer. In doing this I’m attempting to keep myself open to whatever whooshes-up or shines before me, whether that is in the form of an obvious “subject”, “view”, or a simple passing play of sunlight and shadow. When something does whoosh-up or shines before me, I stop and take a photograph. To do this I must, of course, temporarily “take a position.” Not only by standing still in this or that place but also by taking a position with regard to the camera settings I am going to use, the f-stop, the shutter speed, film speed and whether to shoot in black and white or colour. Now, were I never to take this or that position with regard to all these things, I would never be able to take any photo (good or bad). However, it is vitally important that, having taken a photograph, I never become wholly wedded to this or that particular position, subject, view, passing play of sunlight and shadow or this or that set of settings—instead, I must move on, intra-actively, on the crest of the unfolding world, to attain another perspective and so allow something else to whoosh-up or shine before me which calls me to shoot, click!
It has long struck me that taken together all the foregoing offers the world an example of what, in his famous essay called “Walking”, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) called the “newer testament—the Gospel according to this moment”.
It’s the only gospel I know of that helps us truly to claim the freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today and, because of this, in my work as a rather unconventional minister of religion, it is the only gospel that I am able to live by and proclaim with a genuinely clean heart and full belief (pathos).
Resources to check
- The Principle of Hope by Ernst Bloch
- Hope Without Optimism by Terry Eagleton
- Atheism in Christianity by Ernst Bloch
- “Present is Prologue” (1952) by Charles Olson (in “Collected Prose” eds. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander, University of California Press, Berkley 1997, p. 205-207)
Thoughts
Contemplating positionlessness
- most things are arguably changeable
- although some things like one’s past and body are difficult or unchangeable
- but our “position” (i.e., stand on matters) are changeable. They’re not fixed. And it’s important to remember that we can change our ideas and beliefs and don’t have to keep those that no longer work.
- one can even take this position-less stand or more accurately a stand that premises on a freedom to change one’s position anytime to adapt to reality