04/24/2022. God as Process. Christian God as Male Ego. Metaphysical Oppositions West and East.

The following is taken from a Facebook conversation I recently had with a Facebook friend (it has been revised slightly for this post).

There’s a lot to unpack here in what you wrote, and we could go in several directions—too many for this forum, probably.

Phenomenology. Yes. And the West has a long history of Idealism, Phenomenology being one variant. (I’ve always been a fan of Bishop Berkeley’s Subjective Idealism.) But, you’re right, that the West has mostly chosen Materialism over Idealism. Unlike you, I am maybe more hopeful that the West can “get out of it”—Materialism, that is, and its pending, resultant dystopia. It’s interesting that you say that "a Zen Master maybe could "grasp Being as a verbal”. Yes, existence is a “process” (God is a verb as some now claim), and though we use nouns to create distinctions, science shows us that there is nothing reducible to itself: no nouns. “People, places, and things” are mental distinctions synthesized from the flow of signs in consciousness, and, at deeper levels, synthesized from a confluence of forces. Nothing in existence is reducible to itself: i.e., a thing in itself.[i] And “grasp” is a tricky word. To me it implies an intellectual understanding, but that is not the Zen way. “Intuit” might be better. (“Grok” might even be better, if you are on old Hippie si-fi fan and you’ve read Heinlein.) : )

My own view is that the Christian god is a projection of the (mostly male) ego upon the void. I think that Freud was right to show all those magnificent church steeples as subliminal phalluses (no wonder the Catholic Church and Catholic Universities banned his books—unfortunately, I now see, even currently in the local news, that the anti-intellectual and self-righteous are still at it today), and all those skyscrapers and rockets penetrating the sky, etc. etc. Not that there is anything inherently bad about male energy. That is just nature adapted for survival. The problem is imbalance. It’s clear that monotheism, with its well-documented oppression of women, is a problem—increasingly a problem for the planet. (I may be bias, as I have four daughters.) Monotheism is basically power-worship, an institutionalized expression of mans' need to dominate and control through obedience to authorities both symbolic and human. The more-liberal, New Testament varieties since the Reformation are as much a product of Modernity as they are of Christian scripture. Humanity, out of the intellectual heritage of the West, at least, over time has, with varying success, turned to ethics, right/wrong/justice, etc, (as manifest in the Constitution, a legal document, and Democracy, a process for redistributing political capital back to the citizenry, for example) and away from extreme, top-down, religious Morality, which has always been any particular tribes means of demonizing the “other” through unquestioned obedience to some unassailable authority, again, either symbolic or from some self-proclaimed human representative.

But Humanity still has a long way to go on ethics, we can probably agree. And scarily, the self-righteous moralizers, even as I write, still clamor at the gates, eager to assault what they cannot comprehend due to the fear ignorance engenders.

Anyway, Buddhism and meditation are about as heretical to Christian scripture as possible. Buddhism is non-theistic to begin with (no ultimate agency) and meditation actually seeks to deconstruct the “Word” (i.e., the representational “self” in human psychology and as projected upon the void) and thus enter enlightenment. Few can or do. But meditative practice, maybe, is one small way in which humanity may start to “get out of it.” Personally, I am not encouraged that more Materialism, or science and technology, will get us out of the mess we’re in. And, along with Yuval Noah Harari (Historian and Buddhist), I also doubt that Buddhism will ultimately help much either. But, if you follow my thinking in my blog: that reality is a function of language (i.e., information processing as a system of referral), then it may be possible to affect reality though text widely defined. As I write in the introduction of my experiment novel, “The shape of the text can shape consciousness.” I’m suggesting an entirely new means of human communication, of information processing; a new and radically innovative kind of text-art-language. A Second Coming? (Christ is the “Word” after all.)

By the way. If you are reading this, you may be one of the very few people who might get some head-scratching satisfaction from my just mentioned experimental novel, The Reality Mechanic. You seem to have that kind of mind. It’s available on Amazon under that title. You can afford it.

[i]See Alfred North Whitehead, (1929) Process and Reality, He writes: “The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the “many” which it finds and also it is one among the disjunctive “many” which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes,” p. 26.