Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

by Ehrenreich, Barbara

  The Other who appeared in Philip K. Dick’s theophany was even more overtly creaturelike. As related in his novel VALIS, in which the author figures as the main character, Dick fought his way back from inpatient status by working obsessively to understand and communicate his encounter with a deity of extraterrestrial origin that is “in no way like mortal creature” (his italics). This deity or deities—for there may be at least a half dozen of them in Dick’s idiosyncratic cosmogony—bear some resemblance to biological creatures: They have their own agendas, and what they seek, through their self-disclosures to humans, is, according to Dick, “interspecies symbiosis.”

  Ideally, for further insights into the nature of this Other—its properties, its powers and possible intentions—we would turn here to a vast database of all recorded mystical, spiritual, and religious experiences, not just those of monks and writers but of anonymous adolescents, street-corner prophets, indigenous shamans, peyote-eaters, and so forth. But no such database exists, nor is there any reason to think that an exhaustive one is possible. How could we know what proportion of mystical experiences ever get recorded in one form or another? Maybe the recorded ones are only a small and unrepresentative minority of the total. And how could we correct for the possibility that many recorded experiences have been censored or at least recorded in a form designed not to offend any of the prevailing deities or their human representatives? The intended audience for Saint Teresa’s autobiography, for example, was the Inquisitors who were investigating her for signs of heresy, so she may have redacted any visions or insights that could possibly be interpreted as diabolical in origin. The twentieth-century Jesuit mystic and scientist Teilhard de Chardin struggled mightily to imbue his insights with a “Christic sense” lest they be seen as “godless pantheism”—and still his superiors often forbade him to publish.

  But we do know enough to say that this Other who appears in mystical experiences is not benevolent, or at least not consistently so. Here I am not talking about the monotheistic God, or whatever entity can be blamed for natural disasters and birth defects—just about that Other whose existence could be inferred from reported mystical experiences or, for that matter, from close attention to natural phenomena like tropical weather. The early-twentieth-century theologian Rudolf Otto surveyed the works of (mostly Christian) mystics for clues as to the nature of the mysterium tremendum, as he termed it, a.k.a. the “Wholly Other,” and concluded that it was “beyond all question something quite other than the ‘good.’” It was more like a “consuming fire,” he said, perhaps from personal experience, and “must be gravely disturbing to those persons who will recognize nothing in the divine nature but goodness, gentleness, love, and a sort of confidential intimacy.” As Eckhart, one of Otto’s many sources, had asserted centuries earlier, referring to the Other as “God,” the religious seeker must set aside “any idea about God as being good, wise, [or] compassionate.”

  This of course poses a nearly insoluble problem: Mysticism often reveals a wild, amoral Other, while religion insists on conventional codes of ethics enforced by an ethical supernatural being. The obvious solution would be to admit that ethical systems are a human invention and that the Other is something else entirely. After all, human conceptions of morality derive from the intensely social nature of the human species: Our young require years of caretaking and we have, over the course of evolution, depended on one another’s cooperation for mutual defense. Thus we have lived, for most of our existence as a species, in highly interdependent bands that had good reasons to emphasize the values of loyalty and heroism, even altruism and compassion. But why should a being whose purview supposedly includes the entire universe share the tribal values of a particular group of terrestrial primates? The God of religion, the enforcer of ethics, is one thing, the “Wholly Other” revealed in mystical experiences quite another.

  Otto, good Protestant that he was, refused to make this distinction. Religions, especially of the highest, so-called world religion rank, seem to require their founding revelations—annunciations, Damascene moments, visits from Allah in a cave—to convince us of their nonhuman, “divine” origin. Presumably the Hebrews would not have accepted the Ten Commandments if they came in the form of a memo. The commandments had to be delivered by a bearded prophet whose mystic credibility had been conferred by the burning bush and who came down from the mountain accompanied by a terrifying display of thunder and lightning. Somehow human authority is never enough; we must have special effects. Otto, too, wanted his Christian ethics to be grounded in the “numinous” as glimpsed by the mystics, so he perpetuated the confusion. Even some of our more scientifically grounded philosophical thinkers today, like the Canadian philosopher John Leslie, struggle mightily to detect some ethical principle infusing the natural world.

  If the Other as perceived by mystics is not benevolent, neither is it necessarily malevolent; in fact both descriptions are flagrantly anthropocentric. Why should it be “for” us or “against” us any more than the God of monotheism should favor the antelope over the lion? A creature of some kind, an alternative life form, as suggested by Dick, would have its own agenda, sometimes working to our advantage and sometimes against us—as in the lowly case of E. coli, which plays an important role in human digestion but can also be an agent of mortal illness—but we do not know what that creature is, if “creature” is even the right word.

  Barred from more respectable realms of speculation, the idea of a powerful invisible being or beings has been pretty much left to the realm of science fiction, where, as it happens, I spent some of the happiest hours of my youth. In some classic sci-fi, the being in question is a god or a kind of god. Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 novel Star Maker, for example, ends with its far-traveling human protagonist finally encountering the eponymous “eternal spirit,” who has been allowing one planetary civilization after another to flourish and die out, for no evident reason: “Here was no pity, no proffer of salvation, no kindly aid. Or here were all pity and all love, but mastered by a frosty ecstasy.” In Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Nine Billion Names of God,” Tibetan monks who have set themselves the task of generating all the possible names of God finally get some assistance from a computer brought to them by Western technicians. As the technicians make their way back down the mountainside from the monastery, they look up at the night sky to see that, “without any fuss, the stars were going out.” The monks had been right: The universe existed for the sole purpose of listing the names of God, and once this exercise in divine vanity was accomplished, there was no reason for the universe to go on.

  Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End more fully develops the theme of an über-being that uses humans for its own inscrutable purposes. Clark was no New Age fluffhead; he was an avowed atheist with a background in physics and rocket science. Yet the plot centers on an unseen “over-mind” of remote extraterrestrial provenance, which sends its agents to essentially domesticate humankind. War is ended, along with many of the more obvious forms of injustice, leading to an era of peace and harmony that Clarke, with typical Cold War contempt for utopias, portrays as comfortable but dull. Meanwhile, the over-mind’s agents seek out the more mystically adept members of humanity, who are eventually recruited into a kind of trance culminating in mass spiritual unity with the over-mind. When that has been achieved, the earth blows itself up, along with the last human on it, after which the over-mind presumably moves on to find a fresh planet—and species—to fulfill its peculiar cravings.

  Science fiction, like religious mythology, can only be a stimulant to the imagination, but it is worth considering the suggestion it offers, which is the possibility of a being (or beings) that in some sense “feeds” off of human consciousness, a being no more visible to us than microbes were to Aristotle, that roams the universe seeking minds open enough for it to enter or otherwise contact. We are not talking about God, that great mash-up of human yearnings and projections, or about some eternal “mystery” before which we can only bow down in
awe. I have no patience with Goethe when he wrote, “The highest happiness of man is to have probed what is knowable, and to quietly revere what is unknowable.” Why “revere” the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?

  Science could of course continue to dismiss anomalous “mystical” experiences as symptoms of mental illness, but the merest chance that they represent some sort of contact or encounter justifies investigation. After all, rational people support SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, despite what is so far a resounding silence from the skies. Similarly, scientists prowl the earth looking for “weird life,” meaning not just the “extremophiles” that inhabit hot springs and glaciers, but organisms that may be based on silicon instead of carbon or arsenic instead of phosphorus. It is not unscientific to search for what may not be there—from intelligent aliens to Higgs bosons or a vast “theory of everything” underlying all physical phenomena. It is something we may be innately compelled to do.

  The fact that this being or beings is so far undetectable to us and our instruments does not mean that it is made out of some supernatural “mind-stuff” unlike familiar matter and energy (not, I should note, that “familiar” matter and energy any longer seem to comprise very much of the “stuff” in the universe). Whether this being is alive, in a biological sense, as Dick proposed, is of course entirely conjectural, if only for the simple taxonomic reason than that biologists themselves are not agreed on a definition of life: Does life involve metabolism, meaning eating and respiring, or is it enough to be able to reproduce, as in the case of viruses? Monotheism inhibits us from imagining anything involved with the “numinous” or “holy” as part of a species, since a species generally has more than one member. But if the hypothesized beings are “alive,” that is, technically speaking, what we are dealing with.

  As for those who insist on a singular deity, I would note that the line we draw between an individual and a multitude is not always clear: Slime molds can exist as individual cells or join together to form a single body; bacterial colonies can exhibit a kind of intelligence unavailable to individual bacterial cells. Humans can live alone or in small clusters and then suddenly, in the face of a common enemy, band together and begin to act like a single unit, which in turn just as readily disperses. If there seems to be some confusion here on the subject of case—whether to say Other or Others, deity or deities—it grows out of the limits of our biological imagination.

  One possible biological analogy for the relationship between humans and the Other or Others would be symbiosis, as Dick proposed. This is the kind of relationship that exists between humans and the trillions of microbes that inhabit our guts. The microbes get a comfortable place to live, regularly bathed in nutritious fluids; the human gets digestive assistance, some defense against foreign bacteria, and useful microbial products like vitamin K. To scale up, rather joltingly, from intestinal flora to the God of monotheism, there have even been suggestions that he exists in a symbiotic relationship to humans. The twentieth-century theologian Abraham Heschel wrote that Jewish mystics were historically “inspired by a bold and dangerously paradoxical idea that not only is God necessary to man but man is also necessary to God, to the unfolding of his plans in this world,” although Heschel gives us no reason to suspect that God’s plans are in any way biologically self-serving.

  There are far uglier possible relationships between disparate species. When I was a girl just setting out on my quest, I asked myself whether I would want to know the “truth” even if I was given the “foreknowledge that it would only be a bitter disillusionment.” This possibility had been impressed on me at a very young age by a radio drama, long ago, when there were such things in America, with actors and scripts. Four mostly paralyzed veterans occupy a hospital room, where only one can see out the window. He whiles away the hours by describing the outside world to his roommates—the comings and goings, the laughing children, the pretty girls—until one of the other men demands that he get a turn in the bed by the window. The switch is made. The new guy gets the window and discovers that what actually lies outside is nothing but a brick wall—no comings and goings, no laughter or sunshine. Would I want to know a truth like that? Courageously, or so I thought at the time, I decided that I would.

  Well, here it is: The worst possible relationship between humans and some mystically potent being or beings, at least the worst that I can imagine, would be not symbiosis but parasitism. Plenty of familiar creatures cannot live on their own; they require hosts, and, interestingly, some of them are capable of modifying the behavior, and possibly also the thoughts and feelings, of their hosts. For example, a flatworm, Leucochloridium paradoxum, infects normally shade-loving snails and prompts them to crawl into the sunlight where they may be eaten by a bird, which then becomes the flatworm’s next host. A parasitic wasp compels its spider host to spin an unnatural kind of web that will be used to house the wasp’s progeny, not the spider’s. Some parasites even manufacture hormones and neurotransmitters that can act on their hosts, perhaps even inducing an insect version of ecstasy. Certainly the highly asymmetrical arrangement proposed by Eckhart—between a relentlessly procreative God and the humans who serve as its hosts—looks very much like parasitism. If so, those who think of themselves as “enlightened” may in fact have been infected and, in some hideously intimate way, used.

  Do I believe that there exist invisible beings capable of making mental contact with us to produce what humans call mystical experiences? No, I believe nothing. Belief is intellectual surrender; “faith” a state of willed self-delusion. I do not believe in the existence of vampire-spirit-creatures capable of digging deep into our limbic systems while simultaneously messing with our cognitive faculties, whether we experience the result as madness or unbearable beauty. But experience—empirical experience—requires me to keep an open mind. And human solidarity, which is the only reason for writing a book, requires that I call on others to do so also.

  There are other possibilities than “creatures” or “beings” of any kind. Science has always wrestled with the idea of an immaterial will, or agency, at work in the universe, and for centuries it was thought to be expressed through the “laws of nature.” God might be dead, but he rules on, or so it was thought, through his immutable laws. It turns out, however, that those laws are at best crude averages, rough generalizations. Take a more fine-grained look, or develop more sensitive instruments, and things get more interesting. At the smallest, quantum, level, there are no laws at all, only probabilities. An electron can be here, there, or both places at once, very much as if it had a choice in the matter. At the macroscopic level, the meteorologist Edward Lorenz found that rounding off the number .506127 to .506—for simplicity, and because of the crudeness of his computer—he came out with wildly different weather predictions: the so-called butterfly effect. This is not to say that electrons make reasoned decisions or that winged insects govern the weather—just that the natural world has gotten a lot livelier than it was when I first came on the scene as a young student of science.

  A hint of—dare I say?—animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the “laws.” It can surprise us, as for example, when an electron-positron pair springs out of total vacuum, an ordinary summer storm whips itself into a tornado, or a simple circuit develops the power to oscillate. Nothing supernatural is involved in any of these cases; even the oscillating electrode is following old-fashioned laws of electrodynamics. It’s just following them in ways we could not have predicted, ways that give rise to an “emergent” pattern that seems to come out of nowhere. As for the emergence of matter out of nothing, which tormented me so much as a child, we are coming to see that there is no Nothing. Even the most austere vacuum is a happening place, bursting with possibility and constantly giving birth to bits of Something, even if they’re only fleeting particles of matter and antimatter. To quote the polymathic and determinedly rationalist Howard Bloom, “W
e have vastly underrated the cosmos that gave us birth. We have understated her achievements, her capacities, and her creativity. We’ve set aside will, purpose, and persistence in a magic enclosure and have claimed that…[they] do not belong to nature, they belong solely to us human beings.”

  We have, in other words, made ourselves far lonelier than we have any reason to be. My adolescent solipsism is incidental compared to the collective solipsism our species has embraced for the last few centuries in the name of modernity and rationality, a worldview in which there exists no consciousness or agency other than our own, where nonhuman animals are dumb mechanisms, driven by instinct, where all other deities and spirits have been eliminated in favor of the unapproachable God of monotheism, a worldview in which, as the famed twentieth-century biochemist Jacques Monod put it, “Man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe.” If I was, when I entered adulthood, a little bit nuts, it was because I was struggling to fully accept that view of the world.

  For all that I had learned since middle age about science and new science, religion and the old religion, I would never have committed myself to the project that became this book if not for a couple of disasters. First was the cancer that disposed me to thoughts of imminent mortality at exactly the time I was sorting through my papers with a librarian in 2001. I was prepared to die, at least as the freakish older person I had become, bald and enfeebled by the cancer treatments, but I was not ready to let go of my younger self, which is why I snatched up my journal and saved it from permanent incarceration in a library basement.