Towards a New Revelation (Or, Why I Am Not a Traditionalist)

From a book proposal I'm working on, tentatively titled Outside: Spiritual Nomads and the Way Beyond Religion:
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When you live inside a tradition, and that includes scientific secularism, you agree to view life through its window - an outlook, a way of framing reality, carefully preserved through time. That frame has a fixed form, originally designed by and for a world long gone. It can allow embellishments or simplifications, but not ideas — not even self-evident truths — so new or foreign that they would pull it apart and make it unrecognizable. (If a Catholic tries to tell you how open to new ideas his Church is, just say two words to him: women priests.)

Every tradition demands that you accept its inherited ideas, even those that violate our evolving understanding — Jesus’ mother was a virgin! the universe is blind, mindless matter! — and reject or give second-class status to ideas from other sources, even those that might better illuminate reality. These demands are presented as tests of faith, but they are always also loyalty oaths to authority, and shibboleths proving membership in a tribe. Because of people’s natural need for security and belonging — and not least of all, their need just to make some basic assumptions and get on with life — it can easily happen that the frame becomes the view. Fidelity to one way of looking becomes more important than seeing.

“Outsiders” have all the same human needs — for community, for a conceptual operating system, for metaphysical and not just physical shelter — but they find themselves unable to deny the central fact of our time: that all the old certainties are being shattered by two great new transforming forces, science and globalization. (Science is now evolving so fast it’s trashing its own certainties.)

To defend any crumbling fortress of certainty today is to go to war not only with the defenders of other certainties, but with reality itself. The reality is that we’re being hurled back to square one, to a naked primordial unknowing face to face with the universe that challenges us to rediscover it from the ground up. News of other cultures, other galaxies, maybe even other universes (as in string theory), leaves us feeling we know as little as the hairy primate who stood up clutching those first stone tools of the mind, “What?” and “How?” and “Why?”

Article Author: amba

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