Written on July 30th, 2006, but a good question today
I write early on Sunday morning, the windows having been wide open all night to maximise coolth in the bedroom, & no curtains pulled across so that light stole in long before dawn. Witty voices and song renditions from passing revellers and karaoke contestants also stole in to enliven the night hours. It’s a consequence of our relative poverty and choicelessness that we set up home opposite two pubs. In my benign hypnagogia the invading sounds were witty and of astonishing artistic originality. Thus have the gods blessed me. But now the day is pure and virgin.
Out of the unconscious and the grateful Sunday morning silence, arises a new tool for understanding, and that is my topic.
When a house is divided, both are wrong. The wrong is no more and no less than a one-sided view. It is not evil, but simply the attempt to achieve unity and simplicity by leaving out that which does not fit our vision. Apply this tool to those places in the world where there is conflict. Not just the wars reported by the media – they too have one-sided views – but where parents and teenagers, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, black and white, east and west, are all locked in irresolvable hostility.
Perhaps. like me.
you find the previous paragraph blindingly obvious. Let’s move on to other spheres, like health. In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) is the third biggest employer in the world, after the Chinese Army and the Indian State Railways. The service is free, so you would think that fee-charging health services in the UK would be sought only by the rich and snobbish. Nothing could be further from the truth! Alternative medicine, often based on quite dubious principles, proliferates and flourishes, and its patients can often ill afford its services. The two competing approaches to health, on which so much money is spent, have each failed to corner the market. Have they agreed to carve up the market between them, and work together? No. Do they despise one another? Of course.
Conventional medicine treats illness as being the malfunction of a particular part of a complex machine. Interventions by drugs or surgery patches the malfunction and the machine can return to full-speed operation, until it wears out eventually and the patient dies. What could be simpler?
Alternative medicine treats illness as a symptom of disharmony of the whole. Mind and spirit are just as important as body. Energy, or chi, is a mystical force which flows along certain channels of our body and can be put back into harmony via subtle interventions when it gets dammed up somewhere. How we think, how we behave, our spirit’s harmony with the greater whole, all affect our body’s functioning. What could be simpler?
Both models of health spend a lot of their resources on defending their rightness. Of course. Just as in any conflict zone, propaganda is the main weapon of the war, for actual results when measured statistically are just inconclusive numbers waiting for interpretation.
But what I really want to discuss, according to this tool of understanding, is the war between the atheists and the adherents of “spirit”. The atheists look for support in science, which like Lord Nelson puts its telescope, or microscope, to its blind eye, and proclaims, “I see no ships!” or rather, “I see no evidence!” The adherents of spirit, whether religionists or New Agers, unfettered by the requirement for evidence, don’t allow their beliefs to be fettered by mere facts.
The sheer unresolvability of these opposites has led, in “polite society”, to the rule “Never discuss religion or politics [if you want to keep your friends, customers, a semblance of family unity etc]”. So there is a long tradition of sweeping them under the carpet or blunting them with platitudes.
So I will write on this topic. Enough for now.
a wayfarer’s notes 
The Tower of Babel story; the story of the seven blind men describing (parts of) an elephant – – helps us to understand this dichotomy / divide that exists. But truth liberates! If people want to remain embracing their version of truth, content in that – nobody needs to bother about them. Silence is better then argument. I’ve found people can be won over, by example, compassion, and explanation in personal, human terms. Best, rama
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As long as being religious is equated with holding beliefs unsupported by reason or experience, religion will remain a source of division in the world. How can it be otherwise? People who consider themselves deeply religious, especially in the west, put adherence to dogma front and center. And these various doctrinal Truths of the various religions and their sub-sects, are incompatible. Nobody’s ever going to come up with a “unified field theory” in religion in which, say, Jesus is the Christ AND Mohammed is Seal of the Prophets. Authenticity in matters of the spirit is about being and becoming, not believing. I also think that becoming more of a person makes tremendously more of a difference, as compared to what we may say we believe, to how we actually conduct ourselves in life. I don’t see how what we believe or don’t believe about Mary’s virginity or whether Jesus walked on water has much of a role in saving the planet…
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I agree with you, Rama & Darius both, in the matter of beliefs, and accept your advice not to bother about trying to change anyone’s adherence to such beliefs. There is plenty to be silent about, indeed. But my restless curiosity will not let these matters rest. To consign the glue that holds together people’s social and interior existence to a container marked “beliefs” is, in my view, the effect that Western phenomenon called “the Enlightenment”. It happened because Science became the new yardstick of truth. Personally I consider modern religious movements to be grotesque relics, like the bones of saints. They are a worn-out heritage that has to be constantly renewed to survive. I agree about “authenticity in matters of the spirit”, however mainstream scientism denies spirit for lack of evidence, and the people are confused. Attempts to construct a new doctrine of spirit are drowned in New Age commercialism, as the potential of “spirit” as a “product” has been fully exploited. So this is what I’ll write about!
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PS In their context, the “beliefs” of the shamans as taught to the aboriginal peoples of many continents are a flower of the human spirit and embody much science and art and healing. Today the New Age Movement tries to capture their subtle essence, and the rationalists mock those attempts. Rather than try to be a scholar, whether in Vedas, Sutras, Bible, Koran, or anthropological studies, I prefer to commune with Nature directly. Yes, it is about being and becoming but still we need a language to share experience, and rituals to regulate our social life.