Sunday Sermon

Andre Comte-Sponville (from The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality):

When I contemplate the All, the ego seems laughable by comparison. It makes my egocentricity, and thus my worries, a little less intense, a little less powerful. Occasionally, it even manages to obliterate them for a few seconds. What a relief, when the ego gets out of the way! Nothing remains but the All, with the body, marvelously, inside of it, as if restored to the world and to itself. Nothing remains but the enormous “thereness” of being, nature and the universe, with no one left inside of us to be either dismayed or reassured, or at least no one at this particular instant, in this particular body, to worry about dismay and reassurance, anxiety and danger…

[Such tranquility] is an experience that involves or passes through the “I” only to the extent that it breaks free of it. The ego is perpetually dismayed [but] the clarity of darkness is luminous and kind. How important are my worries compared to the Milky Way? Though the Milky Way cannot dispel my worries (what could?), it can make them more bearable (assuming they are not too dreadful), more acceptable (open to observation and action), more ordinary, less weighty. The eternal silence of the infinite spaces reassures me.

This dissolving of the ego is akin to what Freud called “the oceanic feeling”. He described it as “a sense of indissoluble union with the great All, and with belonging to the universal,” very much as a wave or a drop of water belongs to the ocean. Most of the time, this is indeed no more than a feeling. But occasionally it is an experience, and a powerful one—what psychologists call an altered state of consciousness. Of what, exactly, is it an experience? To experience unity, as Swami Prajnanpad would say, is to feel at one with everything.

There is nothing innately religious about the oceanic feeling. My own experience of it is quite the opposite. When you feel “at one with the All,” you need nothing more. Why would you need a God? The universe suffices. Why would you need a church? The world suffices. Why would you need faith? Experience suffices.

When a believer is overcome by the oceanic feeling, it is possible for him or her to describe it in religious terms. It is by no means necessary to do so, however. Michael Hulin [describes] what he calls spontaneous mysticism—that is, the mystical experiences of ordinary individuals who have not been classified as mystics in the traditional sense of the term. These accounts, while they come from individuals who differ from one another in many ways (some are believers, others not) are generally convergent. They describe the same suddenness, the same sense of “everything being there,” the same presence of eternity, the same fullness, the same silence (“the intellect is disconnected,” as Hulin puts it), the same unspeakable, overabundant joy…

Hulin quotes the following passage from Marius Favre, for instance: “Had I been absorbed by the universe, or had the universe penetrated me? These expressions had become virtually meaningless, since the border between my body and the world had vanished—or, rather, seemed to have been neither more nor less than a hallucination of my reason, now melting in the flame of truth…Everything was there, more present than ever before.”

Or the following passage from Richard Jefferies: “Eternity is here and now. I am within it. It is all around me in the brightness of the sun. I am within it, much like a butterfly floating on the light-permeated air. Nothing is still to come. Everything is already here. Eternity now. Immortal life now. I am experiencing it here, at this very instant…”

Or again, from Margaret Montague: “I saw nothing that was new, but I saw all the usual things in a new and miraculous light—in what I believe to be their true light. I perceived the extravagant splendor, the indescribably joy of life in its totality. Every person walking across the veranda, every sparrow in flight, every tiny branch waving in the wind was an integral part of the whole, and seemed to be taking part in this mad ecstasy of joy, meaning, and inebriated life. I saw that this beauty was everywhere present…”

Reading these descriptions, who could possibly say whether their authors believed in God or not? The experiences they describe involve no particular theology or belief; they make no attempt to confirm or refute dogma. This is just why are so powerful—because they evoke something each and all of us can experience, regardless of our religious or irreligious convictions.

Comments

[Jack Shifflett]

Ann--thanks, as always, for the comment. Re "what is it that we have to give?": I don't mean to be flippant, and I am but a humble atheist, but it is my understanding that the Church claims to distribute God directly to believers on a regular basis. What more could it do?

[Ann Markle]

I have been thinking about something like this for a little while. Ego transcendence is essential. Mystical experience is pretty important (call it what you will. “Oceanic” seems a little trivial for how profound it feels). The Church’s agreed upon definitions of theological things are pretty irrelevant these days. But hearts are still hungry. To use churchier language, the God-shaped hole is still there, and still can’t be filled by the usual things we try. So if the church is to continue to exist, what is it that we have to give? I’m wrestling with this.