I keep thinking about John Shanley's lines from my previous post.
Each of us is like a planet. There's the crust, which seems eternal. We are confident about who we are. If you ask, we can readily describe our current state…Your answers are your current topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so.
Doubt is a recognition that personal earthquakes happen. Magma can erupt at any moment. Continents shift. Fast, not requiring eons to reshuffle the contours of our existence.
Yet each of us erects belief structures upon this unstable ground. We're drawn to do so by the same natural forces that cause the tectonic shifts.
Such is the universe's yin and yang. Creation and destruction. Light and darkness. Order and chaos.
To only doubt…that way lies madness, indecision, depression, suicide. To only believe…that way lies fundamentalism, rigidity, closed-mindedness, unreality.
There must be a middle way. Not in the Buddhist sense, necessarily. But something like that. A way of living that melds confidence in what we know and experience now with a sense, This could change in the next instant.
Not only "could." Will. This will change in the next instant. Life is constantly demolishing my expectations, my understandings, my supremely confident belief that I've got things figured out.
Last night I realized that Outlook wasn't keeping up with my email message typing. I had to repeatedly press the space bar to make distinct words ratherthanrunonletterslikethis.
Amazingly (in retrospect), I jumped to the conclusion that it was an Outlook 2007 problem. I fired up Google, typed in "Outlook slow typing" and found countless complaints about this Microsoft offering not keeping up with fingers on a keyboard.
It was so obvious.
And became more obvious the more I thought about it. Until, after I'd tried some of the suggested software fixes, finding no effect, a disturbance broke through my encrusted mind: "It's the spacebar, stupid."
And so it was.
A few minutes of "sticky spacebar" Googling later, I'd pried off the plastic cover and finished cleaning the mechanism with some WD 40 soaked Q-tips. Back to normal now. Thank you, doubt, for breaking up my unsupported certainty.
Last week, while vacationing in central Oregon, I bought "The Ruins" at the Paulina Springs Bookstore. I felt like reading a good horror story, and the cover of the book featured a to-die-for (if you're the author) blurb from Stephen King:
"The best horror novel of the new century."
From the first page I struggled to put the book down. I was sucked into an unrelenting tale of good intentions gone awry, of people making choices that seem utterly right to them and turn out to be utterly wrong, of young people who had their lives ahead of them until a sinister force appears with a different notion.
I was surprised by how much I liked entering a fictional realm where you know (or at least deeply suspect) that nothing is going to turn out to be likable.
Scott Smith, the author, skillfully led me into the psyches of the characters. Along with them, in my imagination I struggled to deal with a situation that starts off as worrisome, evolves into something bad, and goes steeply downhill from there.
"The Ruins" was an antithesis to the spiritual books that are my usual reading fare. I found myself resonating with a worldview in which no matter how deep a person digs for courage, compassion, understanding, and truth, that effort is going to be undercut by an uncaring corner of the cosmos.
Well, not just uncaring. Evil. Uncaring would have been a godsend for these visitors to a Mayan jungle. They had to deal with an actively malevolent force.
Which I don't believe exists. My bet is that the universe has a "humans, shumans" non-attitude towards us. It doesn't give a shit about our existence because it doesn't give a shit about anything. Including itself.
So when those tectonic shifts happen, there's no reason for me to take them personally. They shake up my certainty with a powerful earthquake of doubt, but I can't assume there's any purpose behind it all – though I'd like it if I were the epicenter of some divinity's concern.
In "The Ruins," meaning (or meaninglessness) comes from within. Nobody or nothing is going to save you. What you make of the horrifying and horrible situation is up to you. A paragraph from near the end:
She thought briefly about praying – for what, forgiveness? – only to realize she had no one to pray to. She didn't believe in God. All her life she'd been saying that, instinctively, unthinkingly, but now, for the first time – about to do what she was about to do – she could look inside and claim the words with total assurance. She didn't believe.
Brian,
you wonder if there must be a middle way between being sure and being in a state of doubt.
I also have thought about this. When one at first believes there might be a nice force out there taking care of us, and then questions this, the temptation is to run to the other, dark side of the coin, and believe that a god that doesn't give a shit about us or itself is bad news.
If there is a middle view, I think it would be something like the question simply not arising in the first place as opposed to for or against. As long as we are in a state of -self-consciousness, seeing the universe as fluctuating energy, of which we are a fully integrated aspect, feels more like a stoner's observation, as in "dude, we're like totally connected" as opposed to the simple profundity of "form is emptiness, emptiness is form."
Posted by: Adam | June 11, 2008 at 01:51 AM
I am pretty sure that for me, such a middle way lies in the disengagement between short term and long term memory.
When I listen to stories about our shared child hood told by my sisters, or descriptions of how I was when I was younger, I always chuckle at how different my recall is, of those same events.
I doubt as a natural recourse, as in the current slang riposte, "...or not." I have to present a certainty to my co-workers, so that I can play effective leader, but only over the very short term: most of our jobs consist of re-checking facts, and factoids. Our memories don't function well enough to really be sure of much, and our reason can't really keep up with the impinging factors that change information.
Belief in a universe that holds me at its center is a juvenile, maybe infantile, "default setting" that I am perfectly willing to use when necessary. I use that point of view especially when I'm being chased by a big, empty, fictional evil non-entity.
Posted by: Edward | June 11, 2008 at 04:21 AM
No horror can be greater than that of the atheist facing either eternal oblivion, Hell, or reincarnation into unknown forms.
Posted by: Joe | June 12, 2008 at 12:38 PM
Joe,
Your three horrors an "atheist might face," i.e. "eternal oblivion, Hell, or reincarnation," sound totally childish. Where did you get these ideas? Please define "Hell" and "eternal oblivion."
Posted by: Adam | June 13, 2008 at 05:24 AM
Adam,
I'm not going to waste my time answering your foolish questions; you can look it up in an online dictionary and encyclopedia if your ignorant about such basic philosophic concepts.
Posted by: Joe | June 13, 2008 at 07:16 AM
By the way, there's no "guarantee" that if God exists and you believe in Him/Her that you wont go to Hell or be reborn depending on your karmas; conversely the atheist could spend time in a Astral Heaven or have a better life if he sowed good karmic seeds this lifetime.
Sorry if my comments frightened anybody!
Posted by: Joe | June 13, 2008 at 11:34 AM
Joe,
So you are admitting that you base your version of reality on concepts I can find in an online dictionary?
Posted by: Adam | June 13, 2008 at 11:46 AM
Joe, you have a good imagination. As noted by another commenter, how did you dream up "eternal oblivion," "hell," and "reincarnation into unknown forms" as the only possibilities?
And why are atheists singled out for these after death destinations? Muslims would say that Christians are doomed. Christians say that Hindus are doomed. And so on.
As is often noted, religious believers are just like atheists, because they don't accept the hundreds of gods in the human pantheon. Atheists just go one step further and don't accept the single divinity that believers do.
So I have to ask: how do you know which god dispenses after life destinations? Are you sure about your knowledge? What prevents me from substituting "religious believer" for "atheist" in your comment?
Posted by: Brian | June 13, 2008 at 07:12 PM
Brian,
I modified my comments in my 3rd post to include religious believers in general. Of course your correct about members of one faith thinking other religionists are doomed.
The reason I "singled out atheists" is merely to point out what Atheists themselves believe; If God does'nt exist what else is there after death but oblivion(you have written about similiar fears yourself in previous posts!)I'm sure there are some atheists or agnostics who might be worried that if they guessed wrong and God exists there may be some punishment coming their way-however I reposted that a persons good conduct would create good karma regardless of what they believe.
Posted by: | June 14, 2008 at 07:44 AM
Joe,
You are wrong about what "atheists themselves believe." In Richard Dawkins, a famous atheist, has written about not fearing death,. He concludes that he can't remember anything prebirth and has no memory of it being unpleastant, so why should he assume anything different being on the other side of life?
The main point I want to emphasize is that atheists, I think, don't believe that their belief would change what will happen in the least. And Joe, the reason I asked to to define Hell and oblivion are not because I have no understanding of the concepts. Instead, I think if you actually tried to define them your own words, they would be revealed for the conceptual imaginings that they are. You simply read or heard about these things somehow and have elaborated them in your mind. I encourage you to try it as an exercise for yourself. What is hell? Can you really define it in your mind? What is oblivion, can you really define that? And most importantly, do you REALLY think that whether or not god exists, believing one way or the other can really change anything?
Posted by: Adam | June 14, 2008 at 08:05 AM
Adam,
I don't give a shit what you believe; I wrote what SOME atheists may think.How the fuck could you possibly know what more than a few believe? I'm not responding to anymore of your dumbass comments.
Posted by: Joe | June 14, 2008 at 09:04 AM
By the way Adam, I apologize for the harsh language and the put down-I'll try harder to keep my cool from now on! Peace
Posted by: Joe | June 14, 2008 at 09:35 AM
I think there might be a differnce between; your and you are. Then, I might be wrong.
Posted by: Roger | June 14, 2008 at 10:43 AM