COMMENSAL ISSUE 98

I have no personal contribution to make to Commensal that would not be a restatement of ideas already cogently expressed by, principally, yourself (Theo) and Michael Nisbet. However, regarding Is it rational to be religious? your professed ignorance of non-Christian perspectives leads me to believe it might be possible to fertilise the discussion by bringing to your attention the following:

Tony Embleton

The Sufi contribution to the release of human potential is dependent upon the understanding of the need to clear away barriers to understanding.

The major barrier to understanding is wishful thinking and following that which pleases one. Hence, if a person is desirous of achieving spiritual states, he or she will pursue this end in a manner which corresponds not with the way in which it can be done, but which gives him (or her) satisfactions.

This is the mainspring of all human movements, whether political, national, religious, economic or other. First there is the objective, then the mechanism for attaining it. And the object must be one which pleases the aspirant; after that, the method must be one that gives him satisfactions.

No other pattern, no other formula, is needed to explain why people believe things, of such a diversity of organisations and systems.

And the pattern is perfect, the system delivers results, subject to a single caveat. This may be stated in the phrase: 'An attractive objective and a satisfying procedure will always produce results, providing that the objective is possible and the methodology is effective.'

A very large number of aims are not realistic, and very many procedures are ineffective. An aim of the ancient Egyptians was to cure bilharzia; a very attractive one. The chosen method was circumcision. Its single flaw was that it did not work. Countless generations of people have wanted to make gold; this was their aim, and a very attractive one. Their methods (which included 'getting the impurities out of lead') did not work.

Today it is widely known that bilharzia is caused by a parasite and that gold is not purified lead. Therefore either the aim or the method loses its appeal; sometimes both lose it. The cause of this failure of the appeal of the aim or of the method is - factual knowledge.

The aims of contemporary people, pursuing power, pleasure, fulfilment and so on can also easily be seen to be, in some cases at least, modifiable or capable of being vitiated by an increase in factual knowledge which would illuminate the false assumptions on which the enterprise and /or its methods are founded.

These false assumptions, reinforced by greed and other subjectivities, are the barriers to knowledge, even factual knowledge. Until people start to ask the equivalent of 'What exactly is bilharzia?', and 'What really are metals?' the 'circumcision' and the 'purification' will continue.

This is the single reason why all Sufi effort is directed towards knowledge. From this viewpoint, all effort without knowledge must be seen as speculative, therefore wasteful of energy and perhaps even impossible of achievement.

ISBN 0 863040 51 9; Copyright 1990 The Octagon Press

People In the West often find it hard to understand the value of religious thought and action in the sense that people do in the East. This is because the Western kind of thought, which is now found throughout the world, operates on an 'either/or' basis, and a selective one at that.

'Either', so runs the unspoken doctrine by which this type of mind works, 'either we are dealing with religion or with non-religion. If with social groupings or psychology, it cannot be religious in the spiritual sense.' The either/or mind also tends to say: 'Religion is good and takes precedence over other subjects'; or, Preligion is irrelevant: other things take precedence'.

If these things were always brought out and dealt with as lucidly as that, there would not be as many confusions as there are. But what in fact happens is that you have to analyse a conversation, a lecture, an article and so on in order to determine what its unspoken assumptions are before you can see exactly what the people are really talking about.

This problem, oddly enough, seldom or never troubles the people who are carrying on the conversations, or writing or reading the articles, or listening to the lectures. It is because of this that it is easy to occasion surprise and sometimes annoyance, by pointing out the assumptions which underlie the thinking in such cases.

In various Eastern societies, on the contrary, the same kind of distinctions are not usually made. Religion, for most people in the West whom one has studied for a quarter of a century, and whose books and other productions can be examined, is something of a rather homogeneous kind, in the sense that a religious person is ideally often supposed:

1. to be virtually incapable of doing something wrong;
2. always to be doing or thinking the same kind of things.

Naturally he will not necessarily recognise himself from this description, because there has been no noticeable effort made to convey it to him. In Eastern ways of thought, the emphasis of merit lies not in being incapable of doing something, but In being capable of doing it or not doing it. Although this Idea would be claimed as theirs, too, by the people we are talking about, observation does not bear out the assertion that they really believe it or act according to it. Secondly, the religious activity in the East is more marked by the recognition of religion as something which has all kinds of phases. By this I mean that the religious requirement Is that the individual and the group shall act according to circumstances and not according to mechanicality, or dogma as it is generally termed.

Illustrating the first case, we find that in the West people are praised for constant and unthinking service to certain beliefs: whether or not they are applicable to circumstances. While some lip-service is paid to the theme that people may do things which go against their nature and are yet 'good' things to do, this comes under the heading of 'struggling with temptation'.

The Eastern view of this is somewhat more sophisticated. It postulates a third kind of action: one which is performed not because the person cannot help doing it because he is indoctrinated, not because he knows it is good but would really prefer to do otherwise, but because he has an understanding that it is the correct thing to do.

It is this conception of the existence of this third, higher range in human awareness which has been suppressed in most Western thought familiar to us. It can therefore occasion little surprise that the belief systems which generally obtain in the West are regarded by many in the East as assuming that the human being is to be stabilised at too low a level in the light of his capacities as known elsewhere.

Expanding on the second case, we constantly find that religious thought and activities in Western-type communities are increasingly thought to be 'irrelevant' by people outside those circles. It is my belief that the much-lamented decrease in religious awareness in the West is due to this cause: to the gap between what could be done as a response to a situation and what people are attempting to do in order to follow a faithful path or 'party line'.

This latter form of conventionalism is, of course, what produces hypocrisy. Once you know what the community has been trained to regard as the words or apparent actions of a 'good person', all you have to do to imitate these, whether they are having a 'good' effect or not.

This theme has, it is true, been extensively explored in Western fictional literature, when the struggles between what people have thought to be right and what others believe to be wrong have for many years been part of the stock-in-trade of imaginative writers. But we are almost always left with a question-mark. The exploration of this theme has not as yet, to any appreciable degree, led people to ask as to whether human conduct, in its needs among different people at different times, is not to be examined in phases. That is to say, the whole matter is regarded as a conundrum. People have assumed that there is a clash of wills, of doctrine, of attitude to life, and they have generally left it at that.

In the East the response to this situation has more often been the seeking of ways to understand not only what is supposed to be 'good', but when, where and how to do this good, to choose the 'right' course, on some basis more elevated than that of a community which has accepted certain things as always good and certain others as always bad. Further, one that has accepted that certain things have always to be done or thought by rote, or as priorities, without striving for the understanding of which things out of, perhaps, a wide range of possible 'good' things, applies to a particular case.

This kind of thinking, when I have mooted it in Western circles, has usually engendered the response that I am talking occultism or hat it is a 'matter of common sense' as to when, how, and so on, certain forms of goodness or rightness, certain thoughts or actions, are employed. Again, experience does not in fact show that people act in this way at all, even though they may imagine that they do.

There is a way into this kind of more sophisticated thinking, which does not require us to adopt 'Eastern' ways of thought. We only have to face up to relatively recent Western psychological discoveries and observations to see that if we happen to have a conditioned community, we have an individual and collective 'conscience', and that this 'conscience', this response as to what is good and what is bad and when one is to act in a certain direction, is subjective and implanted, not objective. It may, and frequently does, militate against the interests of other individuals and groups, and can be called 'religious' only in the anthropologists' sense that a religion of this kind is a social phenomenon.

People who have done any reading in Sufi literature may more easily recognise what I have been saying, for this point is often made there. One of the advantages of cleaving to this subject, even through the results of social scientists, is that it enables us (1) to postulate something higher in the way of religious understanding; and (2) to recognise the deterioration when it invades originally superior spiritual groups. When the doctrine becomes inflexible, when practice and observance take precedence over the aim or understanding, we are faced with a deteriorated system. In these days, when a myriad of imitative cults are springing up and claiming, however temporarily, the attention of more or less sincere people, such a yardstick is very useful.

All socio-religious formulations, systems of life based on precept and belief, have an outer and an inner aspect. Some people are so well satisfied with the outer aspect that they cannot - and often, for psychological balance, must not - imagine anything other than the literal and immediate. These people are sometimes called 'literalists', or 'fundamentalists', and both their behaviour and abundance are well understood (though often forgotten) in every human civilisation. Their reluctance to examine ideas, behaviour or activities beyond their personal and peer-group experience is descriptive of their own mentality, not of that which is being examined. A horse says: 'Food is grass; there is no other food than grass. If there is, it is not good or necessary. What is wrong with those who want to complicate or upset life?'. No doubt you will know at least one person who reasons similarly. He is, as we can easily see, describing himself and his preferences, not discovering what actually is there. There is food other than grass, whether everyone seeks it or not. Denying its existence places one not among an elite, but visibly among the bigots. The visibility is more or less great according to how analytically the victim is being viewed.

The statement of those who wish, as it were, to look for additional nutrition, is that the outward formulation is not only a solace and a means of support: it is potentially a way towards greater understanding, towards the inward. If, of course, it is regarded as the whole story, it may inhibit, not encourage, inner understanding. Yet the very fact that the outward, simplified socio-religious formulation (the system or way of life as it is often called) can provide acceptable satisfactions for a large number and variety of people means that it also 'protects itself' by this very fact, from successive tampering by people of excessive subjectivity. Social stability for large numbers of people is possible and provides a haven and useful standards and satisfactions for these people. Those who fail to observe this valid function of the outward formulations often accuse such people of being shallow. It would be socially more satisfactory if they were to be pleased that it is so easy to suffice such numbers who, if they were in a ferment, would hardly be contributing to general human tranquillity.

Successful socio-religious systems or formulations are readily identified. They must contain a relatively small number of basic precepts which are of wide applicability; they should appeal to personal or group pride (even if overtly denying this); they must allow for extremes of intellectual and emotional stimulus to absorb the mental and physical demands of the spectrum of the participants.

The degree to which many intellectuals and emotionalists resist outside analysis of the systems to which they adhere, and the sophistication of their avoidance of such analysis, underline the validity of this contention.

The system, for these participants, is providing social and psychological support, as a splint supports a broken limb. Without it the individual would have to rethink the roles of his intellect and emotion, would have to decide to become an individual in the sense of aiming towards a life without the support of a herd of people or mass of ideas; would, in fact, have to contemplate decisions for which he has no preparation at all.

People who say that they believe that they can understand something by thinking it out or by experiencing it, in the field which we are discussing, are unlikely really to believe this. It is more probable, if one is to judge by performance, that these beliefs are interposed to preserve the status quo: to prevent understanding, since it is (often irrationally) feared that understanding might involve commitments which the powerfully intellect/emotion-based mind is unwilling to investigate.

Intellectual and emotional activity, in the minimum necessary proportions, however, may be employed to provoke understanding. They are not continuous with it.

Activities and experiences, as well as working hypotheses in this tradition, are so arranged as to help align oneself with the potentiality for understanding. The understanding is not standardised: it does not come to everyone in the same way, at the same time, even by means of the same formulas. This intricacy of operation is the rationale and the origin of the institution of the Teacher and Guide.

It may be said that all efforts in this tradition are designed to encourage the understanding by man of himself. This is not to say that importance is placed upon fleeting or partial understanding, or vague sense of semi-understanding. These latter are best to be described as no more than preliminary stirrings. To over-value them is generally to destroy their value for the individual who does so.

Submitted by Tony Embleton