Questioning Everything
Being open-minded means that we are willing to question everything, including those things we take for granted.
A lot of people feel threatened if they feel they are being asked to question their cherished beliefs or their perception of reality. Yet questioning is what keeps our minds supple and strong. Simply settling on one way of seeing things and refusing to be open to other possibilities makes the mind rigid and generally creates a restrictive and uncomfortable atmosphere. We all know someone who refuses to budge on one or more issues, and we may have our own sacred cows that could use a little prodding. Being open-minded means that we are willing to question everything, including those things we take for granted.
A willingness to question everything, even things we are sure we are right about, can shake us out of complacency and reinvigorate our minds, opening us up to understanding people and perspectives that were alien to us before. This alone is good reason to remain inquisitive, no matter how much experience we have or how old we get. In the Zen tradition, this willingness to question is known as beginner’s mind, and it has a way of generating possibilities we couldn’t have seen from the point of view of knowing something with certainty. The willingness to question everything doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t believe in anything at all, and it doesn’t mean we have to question every single thing in the world every minute of the day. It just means that we are humble enough to acknowledge how little we actually know about the mysterious universe we call home.
Nearly every revolutionary change in the history of human progress came about because someone questioned some time-honored belief or tradition and in doing so revealed a new truth, a new way of doing things, or a new standard for ethical and moral behavior. Just so, a commitment to staying open and inquisitive in our own individual lives can lead us to new personal revolutions and truths, truths that we will hopefully, for the sake of our growth, remain open to questioning.
You cannot claim absolute finality for a dogma without claiming a commensurate finality for the sphere of thought within which it arose. If the dogmas of the Christian Church from the second to the sixth century centuries express finally and sufficiently the truths concerning the topics about which they deal, then the Greek philosophy of that period had developed a system of ideas of equal finality. You cannot limit the inspiration to a narrow circle of creeds. A dogma – in the sense of a precise statement – can never be final; it can only be adequate in its adjustment of certain abstract concepts…. Progress in truth – truth of science and truth of religion – is mainly a progress in the framing of concepts, in discarding artificial abstractions or partial metaphors, and in evolving notions which strike more deeply into the root of reality. –Alfred North Whitehead
“Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide.
Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.”
–Jaroslav Pelikan
“Ideas are malleable and unstable; they not only can be misused, they invite misuse—and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That’s because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is by this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea, but with the people who are attracted to it, until the last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly, sense of humor to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogmas by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.” ~Tom Robbins
Dogma is often the corruption of someone else’s spiritual experience. Belief systems are often the enemy of the very spiritual truths they supposedly uphold. Most religious beliefs are not merely the foe of reason, of science. They are the enemy of God; not the man-made tyrant in the sky, but the very source of life, love, and truth. They are the enemy of spiritual understanding that would otherwise flow through us like the blood that circulates through our veins. Dogmatic presuppositions, drummed into our heads from infancy are like security blankets that shroud us in relative ignorance, and chain us to our beast-like tendencies. We are capable of much more. So much more. – Beau Porden, Screenwriter/playwright/mystic
Opening Up to New Possibilities
By Sam Keen
07/11/2013
How does the human brain transform itself from a complex biological phenomenon into an even more complex creative mind and spirit? Renowned pioneer in the personal mythology movement, Sam Keen offers a look into what goes into – or comes out of – the amazing process of being human.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”
– Rilke
“Always the beautiful answer. Who asks a more beautiful question?” – ee cummings
The notion of “thinking outside the box” that is all the rage in business circles these days is an idea that needs to be unpacked. Creative thinking is not a technique that can be reduced to ten easy rules. There is no One Minute Guide to Becoming a Genius. As you live, so shall you think. To win freedom of mind and spirit is to embark on a heroic journey and become a life-long questioner.
That human beings are mindful or spirited animals means that we are animated by a quest for something more than bread and shelter. Our reach always exceeds our grasp. We are travelers on a journey to an unknown destination. Some longing, some missing fulfillment, keeps us searching for a holy grail that is hidden just beyond the mist.
The great mono-myth of “the hero with a thousand faces,” about which Joseph Campbell wrote, converts the process by which we break out of the constraints of mind and spirit imposed upon us by our society and become self-transcending persons into a dramatic narrative of a literal quest in the external world. But the greatest adventures and travelers may never stray more than a few miles from home. Indeed, they may be confined to a wheelchair, as is Steven Hawking.
The road is not clay, nor is the path through a literal wilderness any more than the boxes out of which we must break in order to be free are made of wood or metal. “Stone walls do not a prison make, no iron bars a cage.” The grail is no cup that once held wine or hemlock. The quest is not a mythic journey undertaken only by the heroes, but the essential activity that transforms the brain into mind and spirit.
In the beginning, the brain is a biological phenomenon. It is well organized to handle practical matters. It sees to it that we breath when we are asleep, seek food when we are hungry, avoid such obvious dangers as high places, loud noises, and large wild animals. But beyond programing us with basic instincts for survival and preparing us to learn primitive skills of hunting and gathering, most of the brain is unemployed. It remains asleep, awaiting the kiss of the imagination to bring it to life. In the beginning, it is an acorn, an oak-in-waiting, a raw potentiality that may be actualized in as many ways as there are unique persons. Its dance card is mostly empty. What the brain is to become is written neither in our genes or our stars.
To change the metaphor, think of the brain of a newborn child as similar to an ancient forest with a few organized enclaves (the reptilian and mid-brain). It is like what you might see if you had an aerial photograph of medieval Europe: a largely uninhabited wilderness containing a few walled cities connected by footpaths and primitive roads. The brain is an underdeveloped country that only becomes mind when intricate neural pathways develop. As civilization is created when new towns and cities emerge and roads are built into the interior, so the mind is created when a neural communication system joins the cerebrial cortex – the new brain – to the wilderness of the primitive brain. The mind is a self-created network of criss-crossing roads leading to destinations more numerous than the stars.
Perhaps the greatest enduring mystery that theologians, philosophers, and scientists continue to ponder is: How does the kingdom of mind emerge from the unspecified potentialities of the brain? By what magic do we escape from the prison of impulse and instinct, from captivity to the automatic responses coded in the reptilian brain, and become freely pondering and deliberating animals? What is the origin of the impulse that travels across the synapses linking neuron to neuron to form pathways where there were none? What is the divine spark that causes biological entities with unprogrammed brains to metamorphosise into self-creating human minds? Michaelangelo pictured the moment on the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel when God touches Adam and gives him life, but how are we to understand this in a less literal and mythological way?
My candidate for apotheosis, for that ever-recurring divine instant when flesh becomes spirit, is nothing more or less than the humble question. The heroes and heroines – the questers – are the men and women who ask new questions and open our minds and spirits to new possibilities.
We are unfinished animals, biologically endowed at birth with a brain but destined to become self-conscious and self-creating. The informing principle of all life – the cosmic DNA – call it God, or Nature, or the indwelling creative principle – does a strange trick with humans. He-She-It implants an impulse that will carry us beyond our own programming. We are created to be self-transcending. What is unique about human beings is that at the heart of our DNA lies the necessity of freedom, the potentiality to become something that is not yet defined. We are driven to transcend old boundaries and limits, to surpass the biologically given conditions of our lives of necessity, we transcend “nature” – the imposed reign of instinct and automatic responses – and become creatures of mind or spirit. As the nun in The African Queensays to Humphrey Bogart: “Nature Is what we are put here to rise above.” We are designed to be escape artists. Like Houdini, our destiny is to break out of boxes.
The creative mind is a gypsy that is destined to wander into unknown lands and explore new mysteries. It respects no boundaries and gives no loyalty to settled conslusions. It is at home only when it is on the move, confronted by problems, baffled by paradoxes. What we mean by “mind” is our perennial romance with the unknown, that impulse that drives us to explore some problem or mystery just beyond reach. Mind creates and inhabits worlds without end. It entertains questions without end. The more it fails to find what it is looking for, the more powerful mind becomes. The destiny of the human mind is to grow more powerful as it is used.
If we stick to description rather than interpretation there is no need to manufacture an unnecessary conflict between the science of mind and the vision of human beings as spiritual animals. All but the most doctrinare materialists will agree that human beings are meta-biological animals, hyphenated beings. Something drives the most creative members of our species beyond the inherited and imposed limits of their biology and culture. This restlessness has myriad names: the spirit, the divine spark, the logos, the image of God, “the exigence to transcend” (Marcel ).
Whoever is touched by this divine daemon is destined to wrestle with an angel in order to win a mind, a spirit, a name.
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation
Faith and Science: Open to Change
Monday, October 23, 2017
God comes into the world in always-surprising ways so that the sincere seeker will always find. Is sincere seeking perhaps the real meaning of walking in darkness and faith? It seems to me that many scientists today are very sincere seekers. In fact, today’s scientists often seem to have more in common with the mystics than do many religious folks who do not seek truth but only assert their dogmas and pre-emptively deny the very possibility of other people’s God-experience.
The common scientific method relies on hypothesis, experiment, trial, and error. We might even call this “practice,” just like many of us have prayer practices. Yes, much of science is limited to the material, but at least the method is more open-ended and sincere than the many religious people who do no living experiments with faith, hope, and love, but just hang on to quotes and doctrines. They lack the personal practices whereby they can test the faithfulness of divine presence and the power of divine love.
Most scientists are willing to move forward with some degree of not-knowing; in fact, this is what calls them forward and motivates them. As new discoveries are affirmed, they remain open to new evidence that would tweak or even change the previous “belief.” Many religious folks insist upon complete “knowing” at the very beginning and then being certain every step of the way, which actually keeps them more “rational” and controlling than most scientists. This is the dead end of most fundamentalist religion, and why it cannot deal with thorny issues in any creative or compassionate way. Now I know why Paul dared to speak of “the curse of the law” (Galatians 3:13). Law reigns and discernment is unnecessary, which means there is little growth or change in such people. When you do not grow, you remain an infant.
The scientific mind today often has more openness to mystery than religion does! For example, it is willing to speak of dark matter, dark holes, chaos theory, fractals (the part replicates the whole), string theory, dark energy, and the atomic structure of all material things, which seems totally counter intuitive. Scientists “believe” in many things like electromagnetism, radioactivity, field theory, and various organisms such as viruses and bacteria before they can actually “prove” they exist. They know them first by their effects, or the evidence, and then argue backward to their existence. Isn’t this how good theologians have often tried to “prove” the existence of God?
Even though the entire world was captivated by the logical cause-and-effect worldview of Newtonian physics for several centuries, such immediately verifiable physics has now yielded to quantum physics, which is not directly visible to the ordinary observer at all – yet ends up explaining much more – without needing to throw out the simple logic of Newtonian physics in the everyday world. True transcendence always includes the previous stages, yet somehow also reshapes and expands them – just like mysticism does with our old doctrines and dogmas.
It feels as if the scientists of each age are often brilliant, seemingly “right,” but precisely because they are also tentative and searching – which creates a practical humility that we often do not see in clergy and “true believers.” A great scientist will move forward with a perpetual “beginner’s mind.”
Thus many scientists end up trusting in the reality of things that are still “invisible” and secret. It keeps them on the search. This feels like faith to me, whereas what many church people want is perfect certitude and clarity before every step forward. This does not create great or strong people.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Introduction,” “Evidence,” Oneing, vol. 2, no. 2 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2014), 12-14.
Fundamentalism, I believe, appeals to people who need rigid structures and uncomplicated explanations of faith. … Essentially, then the attraction of fundamentalism is psychological, not theological. –Fr. Joseph Breighner
“Fundamentalism isn’t about religion, it’s about power.” –Salman Rushdie
“Religious fundamentalism, even before it eliminates human beings by perpetrating horrendous killings, eliminates God himself, turning him into a mere ideological pretext.” ~ Pope Francis
Spirituality and fundamentalism are at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum. Spirituality seeks a sensitive, contemplative relationship with the sacred and is able to sustain levels of uncertainty in its quest because respect for mystery is paramount. Fundamentalism seeks certainty, fixed answers and absolutism, as a fearful response to the complexity of the world and to our vulnerability as creatures in a mysterious universe. David Tacey, Rising Waters of the Spirit
The mentality of fundamentalism is by no means an exclusive property of orthodoxy. Its attitudes are found in every branch of Christendom: the quest for negative status, the elevation of minor issues to a place of major importance, the use of social mores as a norm of virtue, the toleration of one’s own prejudice but not the prejudice of others, the confusion of the church with a denomination, and the avoidance of prophetic scrutiny by using the Word of God as an instrument of self-security but not self-criticism. The mentality of fundamentalism comes into being whenever a believer is unwilling to trace the effects of original sin in his own life. And where is the believer who is wholly delivered from this habit? -E.J. Carnell