The Great Matter
It seems, to me, quite simple: Religion and spirituality are the domains the generations alive at this time have preserved for the psychological confrontation of birth and death. They’ve been made optional out of fear, but — thank God — the opportunity remains.
I mean to imply that they are circumscribed domains. The ways in which religious frameworks and spiritual pursuits interact with the operational requirements of daily life will vary within individuals and cultures. To be sure, the interaction is critical. But it can obstruct.
Religious people — and people who deign to identify as ✌️“spiritual people”✌️, too — in this time are prone to a serious mistake. They take their interest in the Great Matter to mean that putting all their mental effort into their approach to the Great Matter is all that matters.
What this leaves out is interaction. Inter-action. That is, the world. Everyone comes into — and goes out of — the world with whatever they need for the trip. But in between, there’s all this. All these beings on their own trips. They’re not all on your trip. THAT is your trip!
I feel like one reason the internet as a “social medium” has become such an important locus for religious and spiritual interaction is because religion and spirituality are of the nature of media. Intermediaries. Channels between people, who are also “mediums.”
As social creatures, we get that. Media are intuitive to us. We experience reality via media. This is why it is a nearly universal human mistake — if many testimonies across cultures, places, and millennia are any indication — to believe that what one receives is all there is.
Taken as media, religious frameworks and spiritual practices provide heuristics, shorthands, Ways. They suggest concrete steps for immersing oneself in the medium, to swim in it rather than drown. But it’s not a race. We are all leaving from and swimming towards different places.
Lest this sound like a materialist take, I assure you, that is a religious view like any other. The only certainties — the only entities — I am pointing to here are relationships. Media are modes of transmission between points of relation. The content of media is relationship.
So the tension is, we are born in our own way, we die in our own way, but in between, our own way is an infinitely small aperture into infinitely many other ways. And what we learn from that in-between — that medium — is that there are infinitely many ways to be born and to die.
Sure, there seems to be a Nature to all this. It is natural that the nature of relationships would be sharing things. But as part of it, all we can know is our part — though that part consists of encountering other parts.
Anyway, it is wonderful to discuss the Great Matter.
I just wouldn’t want anyone to feel as though their approach depended on the accumulation of Ways, be they paths to try and follow simultaneously or other souls to bring in line, as though to add resonance to one’s own Way.
Don’t be afraid.
