S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 2 2 3 9 Samuel Bendeck Sotillos jective reason but imprisons it therein. It solidifies our true identity with the empirical Ego or separate self. To assert reason’s independence from the Intellect is to occlude the “eye of the heart” as our sole means of knowing spiritual reality directly. The organic union between our human psyche and the planet’s integrity needs to be recognized within the field of mental health, for it has profound implications for the ecological crisis. Wendell Berry (2002, 118–19) writes: The earth is what we all have in common, that it is what we are made of and what we live from, and that we therefore cannot damage it without damaging those with whom we share it…There is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth. Between our relation to our own sexuality and our relation to the reproductivity of the earth, for instance, the resemblance is plain and strong and apparently inescapable. By some connection that we do not recognize, the willingness to exploit one becomes the willingness to exploit the other. The conditions and the means of exploitation are likewise similar. The difference between sacred and secular mindsets has consequences for how we relate to one another and to the world around us. If we take this for granted unthinkingly, we risk not discerning the full implications of our predicament (Peck 1994, 46): The person with a secular mentality feels himself to be the center of the universe. Yet he is likely to suffer from a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance because he knows he’s but one human among [note: seven] billion others – all feeling themselves to be the center of things – scratching out an existence on the surface of a medium-sized planet circling a small star among countless stars in a galaxy lost among countless galaxies. The person with a sacred mentality, on the other hand, does not feel herself to be the center of the universe. She considers the Center to be elsewhere and other. Yet she is unlikely to feel lost or insignificant precisely because she draws her significance and meaning from her relationship, her connection, with that center, that Other. A crippling blind spot in the vision of modernity is its attempt at what has been called “immanentization of the eschaton” (Voegelin 1952, 163). This is the pursuit of a utopian ideal in our impermanent and imperfect temporal reality: in other words, heaven on earth. No matter how many technological advancements are deployed to create a terrestrial paradise (including attempts to indefinitely extend human life and even cheat death), such efforts are artificial and deeply flawed. Utopianism is a fundamental distortion of the universal and timeless wisdom recognized by humanity’s diverse cultures, which recognizes the transient nature of our earthly existence. The unseen informs the visible world – and not the other way around –“the infinite, conceived the finite” (quoted in Waters 1977, 3). This reality is seen as but a pale reflection of a greater realm: “The real world… is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world” (quoted in Neihardt 1988, 85). Our soul longs for Paradise and cannot find peace outside divine Reality. The ecological environment is itself a foreshadowing of the hereafter, and therefore our soul discovers peace therein: “Nature inviolate is at once a vestige of the Earthly Paradise and a prefiguration of the Heavenly Paradise” (Schuon 1984, 143). This is why the loss of religion in the modern world has led to nature becoming – not only a sanctuary due to this void – but a substitute for transcendence itself. Yet this is not to suggest that our purpose on earth is to make the temporal eternal, as this can never be possible given the fleeting conditions that are inherent to life in this world. The goal of the spiritual traditions was never to establish a utopia on earth, for Christ said: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). To envision “a new earth” (Revelation 21:1), or to enact “on earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10), is to be transformed so that the Intellect or “eye of the heart” is restored to see, once again, all phenomena through the Divine. A final point that needs to be made here is that all attempts to erect a man-made paradise on earth (usually through technology) appear to have failed because they are but the extension of our insubstantial Ego and its fundamental impotence in the face of old age, sickness, and death such efforts can only contribute to a veritable dys-topia. Although the Divine can be intuited everywhere, we always need to recall the ephemeral nature of conditioned reality: “All things are perishing except His Face” (Qurʼān 28:88). Attempts to “immanentize the eschaton” have been witnessed in the discipline of psychology. The theories of Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–1990) reached their acme in his controversial utopian novel Walden Two (1948); the title is taken from Henry David Thoreau’s (1817–1862) work Walden, published in 1854. Skinner’s book describes an experimental community informed by scientism that seeks to engineer
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzgxMzI=