The Hungry Soul Vol. 1, Fall, 1997 -- Essays: religion,symbols, and power, by Steven Harrison

religion, symbols, and power
by Steven Harrison

"Faith is what results from belief allowing itself to be questioned, examined, tested." In this excerpt from Doing Nothing: Coming to the End of the Spiritual Search, Steven Harrison opens a doorway for the reader to rediscover real faith by challenging the dogma and reactivity of religious belief systems.

THAT WHICH IS not thought, silence, has no language, and is consequently unknown. Humankind has never liked what it could not know, explain, and thereby control.

Religion has always explained the unknown in knowable terms and has created symbols for that which could not be known. This symbology is so deeply imbedded in our minds, cultures, and cosmology that it is rarely questioned from inside the religious paradigms. From outside that paradigm, the religious imagery loses its impact, its subliminal meaning.

The Christian cannot see God in the figure of Kali, fangs dripping with blood, her necklace made of skulls, dancing on a corpse. The Hindu cannot see God in a man nailed bleeding and in agony on a cross. We can only see God if we have been indoctrinated. God is a learned symbol.

Friedrich Nietzsche asked the obvious question: "Which is it--is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's blunders?"

Most importantly, religion functions to relieve the anxiety of the absolute fact for each of us that we will die, that our family will die, that our friends will die. Religion promises us that although we may die, we will continue. And, if we believe, then our afterlife will be glorious.

The repetition of religious ritual reassures us about death in a way that nothing else does, and it is the public, collective nature of these rituals that is so powerful. The group ritual enhances our sense of well-being, of connection, of safety. But, is this effect actual and transformative, or does it merely metaphorically represent the underlying reality that we have yet to absorb? Have we settled for the mechanical, habitual repetition of ritual, when what we need is authentic mystical union?

Do we become addicted to ritual, to religion? Has the death anxiety been relieved or understood, or has it simply been masked? We have to go deeper than blind ritual to fully resolve our fear of death.

Religion has come to have another function over the aeons, which is to control the behavior of the populace and order society. Religion, because of the deeply ingrained symbols, has tremendous power over its populace.

The development of religious conscience conditions the society, and may restrict the expression of primitive and destructive behaviors by proscribing a way of living and acting. This in itself is not the problem.

The problem that grows out of the religious conscience is the division of our world. This is the inner division of our impulses, desires, and aggressions juxtaposed with the conditioned behavior of our religion. Out of religious con science, we have produced rote behavior motivated by guilt. H.L. Mencken called conscience "the inner voice which warns us that someone may be watching."

We have divided ourselves. The "good" person is our religious behavior, which can express itself publicly. The "bad" person must remain hidden and can only express itself in furtive ways.

Outwardly, the effect of religious conscience, and the behavior that comes from it, is conflict among religions. After all, if our religious behavior is the expression of moral rectitude, then all other religious expressions become, at best, misguided. At worst, the differences become the rationale for bigotry, violence, and war.

We are attracted to the moral force of religious belief because it describes with such paternalistic certainty the details of how to live. This surety of what to do that religion brings with it also contains a surety of what not to do.

Juxtaposed, the absolute certainty of two religions can only create conflict. One has to be wrong, and that one must always be the other.

The Quakers say it well in their unique, simple style, "All the world is queer except me and thee; and sometimes I think thee is a little queer."

The control of society through the modification of behavior is the measure of the power of religion. And, as always with power, there are power brokers--the priesthood.

These are the interpreters of the law, the representation of God himself. They speak for the silence, and this is where distortion takes place. Silence does not require a spokesperson.

Religion has, by its nature, created division in the world. It is the greatest of ironies that wars are fought over religion. Religion has brought us the concepts of sin and hell in the West and of acceptance of poverty and injustice in the East. Religion, as a basis for culture, is a force of fragmentation.

Yet, religion reflects something profoundly important and common to us all. It is the exoteric formulation of what is hidden inside us. But, it is only the beginning.

Why do we seek solace in the exoteric without the sublime realization of the esoteric? Without this direct realization, the rituals of religion are unconscious echoes of our collective, historic understanding. The ritual brings this history to the present. We experience, through the conditioning of the religion, the qualities associated with the history of that religion, repeated over and over. The repetition brings with it feelings of familiarity and security.

The exoteric, organized religious form has nothing more to offer than the repetition of these historic, ritualized qualities--unless we go deeper.

AT THE HISTORIC core of every religion is not ritual, but someone who broke through ritual to direct contact with the transcendental. They were not following religion. They were discovering it and living it. Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Lao-tzu, Mohammed were not following anything but the expression of their direct contact with the actuality of life.

But we follow them, not our own direct contact with life. In fact, we follow merely the ritual that represents these mythic figures and we follow the religious hierarchy that controls these rituals.

IT IS THE RITUALISTIC nature of all religion that is most interesting. The inherent promise of all religion is that the adherence to a prescribed methodology, the enactment of particular rituals, the practice of certain customs will bring about the result of heaven, god-realization, enlightenment, or whatever version of certainty a particular religion embodies.

This religious or ritualistic mind is innate to the human psyche. Religion is not the invention of thought. It is thought's inherent expression.

Thought is faced with a vastness, a universal energy that it cannot control, understand, or even touch. In this recognition, thought can fall silent.

Or it can try to find patterns relating the thought-behavior and the surrounding world. This is the ritualistic mind. It is the basis of behavior and personality. It believes, in a religious way, that its behavior affects the world around it.

The truth can be seen from the mind that is silent. The behavior and the world which behavior seeks to affect are the very same thought. Without the illusion of a thinker, this thought is laid bare. This is the end of the religious mind and the end of ritual.

The universe is not actually divided into thoughts and a thinker. Thought does not affect the world through ritualistic behavior. By collapsing this construct into the single actuality, the actuality can be seen. There is the spontaneous movement of thought, which projects a thinker, a behavior, a world to be affected, a god to respond. This is reality, reality is thought.

Looking directly at the nature of the religious mind is difficult for a religiously inclined person. How can the question "What is religion?" approach religious faith without a reaction? Can this faith absorb such a question, or must it protect its structure by cutting off the question or reacting to the questioner?

The faith we are talking about is not faith, but belief. If we believe the sun rises in the east, we can entertain challenge to this belief, because it is based in truth. But if we believe the sun rises in the west, then the challenge to our belief is also to everything we have built around it. We cannot bear the challenge to our entire belief structure, so we cut off with reaction, dismissal, and avoidance. Reaction can never see itself. It has its own rationale for its existence. Reaction calls itself "faith," and says, "I have faith that the sun rises in the west."

A simple observation would show that the sun does not rise in the west. What explanation could possibly be heard by those who believe the sun does rise in the west?

Belief can never be authenticated. It can be defended through reaction, it can be strengthened through conditioning, it can be expanded through coercion, but belief can never know if it is true or not. Belief can never take the risk that it will find out that it is, in fact, false.

This inherent insecurity is why belief is so destructive and has historically made religion one of the great sources of conflict.

Faith is what results from belief allowing itself to be questioned, examined, tested. When belief is placed in that fire, the impurities are burned off and what is left is faith.

Faith is not afraid of questions or challenge. It is not concerned with convincing. Faith is absolute. It is the substratum of the relative world of belief.

Faith is what is left when what can be stripped away, is. In that, what we come to is not faith in the divine, rather what we come to is the divine.

By questioning our beliefs, will we find this faith? The only thing we will get by questioning our beliefs is very tired. It is not being suggested that we acquire a new belief about finding faith by questioning. It is not a mechanical process by which we get from belief to faith in ten easy steps. It is not an intellectual process of methodically questioning.