The End of Faith (27 page)

thinking is the epitome of conscious life and would no sooner have a mind without thoughts
than hands without fingers. The funda- mental insight of most Eastern schools of
spirituality, however, is that while thinking is a practical necessity, the failure to
recognize thoughts as thoughts, moment after moment, is what gives each of us the feeling that we call “I,” and this is
the string upon which all our states of suffering and dissatisfaction are strung.17 This is an empirical claim, not a matter of philosophical speculation. Break the spell of
thought, and the duality of subject and object will vanish as will the fundamental
difference between conventional states of happiness and suffering. This is a fact about
the mind that few West- ern scholars have ever made it their business to understand.

It is on this front that the practice of meditation reveals itself to be both
intellectually serious and indispensable. There is something to realize about the nature
of consciousness, and its realization does not entail thinking new thoughts. Like any
skill that requires refine- ments in perception or cognition, the task of recognizing
conscious- ness prior to the subject/object dichotomy can be facilitated by an expert.18 But it is, at least in principle, an experience that is available to anyone.

You are now seated, reading this book. Your past is a memory. Your future is a matter of
mere expectation. Both memories and expecta- tions can arise in consciousness only as
thoughts in the present moment.

Of course, reading is itself a species of thinking. You can probably hear the sound of
your own voice reading these words in your mind. These sentences do not feel like your thoughts, however. Your thoughts are the ones that arrive unannounced and steal you away
from the text. They may have some relevance to what you are now readingyou may think,
“Didn't he just contradict himself there?”or they may have no relevance at all. You may
suddenly find yourself thinking about tonight's dinner, or about an argument

you had days ago, even while your eyes still blindly scan lines of text. We all know what
it is like to read whole paragraphs, and even pages of a book without assimilating a word.
Few of us realize that we spend most of our lives in such a state: perceiving the present
present sights, sounds, tastes, and sensationsonly dimly, through a veil of thought. We
spend our lives telling ourselves the story of past and future, while the reality of the
present goes largely unex- plored. Now we live in ignorance of the freedom and simplicity
of consciousness, prior to the arising of thought.

Your consciousness, while still inscrutable in scientific terms, is an utter simplicity as
a matter of experience. It merely stands before you, as you, and as everything else that appears to your notice. You see this book. You hear a
variety of sounds. You feel the sensations of your body in space. And then thoughts of
past and future arise, endure for a time, and pass away.

If you will persistently look for the subject of your experience, however, its absence may
become apparent, if only for a moment. Everything will remainthis book, your handsand yet
the illu- sory divide that once separated knower from known, self from world, inside from
outside, will have vanished. This experience has been at the core of human spirituality
for millennia. There is noth- ing we need believe to actualize it. We need only look
closely enough at what we are calling “I.”

Once the selflessness of consciousness has been glimpsed, spiri- tual life can be viewed
as a matter of freeing one's attention more and more so that this recognition can become
stabilized. This is where the connection between spirituality and ethics becomes
inescapable. A vast literature on meditation suggests that negative social emotions such
as hatred, envy, and spite both proceed from and ramify our dualistic perception of the
world. Emotions such as love and compassion, on the other hand, seem to make our minds
very pliable in meditative terms, and it is increasingly easy to con- centrate under their
influences. It does not seem surprising that it would be easier to free one's attention
from the contents of thought,

and simply abide as consciousness, if one's basic attitude toward other human beings were
positive and if one had established rela- tionships on this basis. Lawsuits, feuds,
intricate deceptions, and being shackled and brought to The Hague for crimes against
human- ity are not among the requisites for stability in meditation. It also seems a
matter of common sense that the more the feeling of self- hood is relaxed, the less those
states that are predicated upon it will arisestates like fear and anger. Scientists are
making their first attempts to test claims of this sort, but every experienced meditator
has tested them already.19 While much of the scientific research done on meditation has approached it as little more
than a tool for stress reduction, there is no question that the phenomenon of selflessness
has begun to make its way into the charmed circle of third-person, experimental science.20

As in any other field, spiritual intuitions are amenable to inter- subjective consensus,
and refutation. Just as mathematicians can enjoy mutually intelligible dialogue on
abstract ideas (though they will not always agree about what is intuitively “obvious”),
just as athletes can communicate effectively about the pleasures of sport, mystics can
consensually elucidate the data of their sphere. Thus, genuine mysticism can be
“objective”in the only normative sense of this word that is worth retainingin that it need
not be contam- inated by dogma.21 As a phenomenon to be studied, spiritual experi- ence is no more refractory than dreams,
emotions, perceptual illusions, or, indeed, thoughts themselves.22

A STRANGE future awaits us: mind-reading machines, genuine vir- tual reality, neural implants, and
increasingly refined drugs may all have implications for our view of ourselves and of our
spiritual pos- sibilities. We have entered an era when our very humanness, in genetic
terms, is no longer a necessary condition of our existence. The fusion of human and
machine intelligence is also a serious pos- sibility. What will such changes in the
conventional boundaries

between self and world mean for us ? Do they have any relevance for a spirituality that is
rooted in the recognition of the nonduality of consciousness?

It seems to me that the nature of consciousness will trump all these developments.
Whatever experience awaits useither with the help of technology or after deathexperience
itself is a matter of consciousness and its content. Discover that consciousness inher-
ently transcends its contents, discover that it already enjoys the well-being that the
self would otherwise seek, and you have tran- scended the logic of experience. No doubt
experience will always have the potential to change us, but it appears these changes will
still be a matter of what we can be conscious of in the next moment, not of what consciousness is in itself.23

MYSTICISM is a rational enterprise. Religion is not. The mystic has recognized something about the
nature of consciousness prior to thought, and this recognition is susceptible to rational
discussion. The mystic has reasons for what he believes, and these reasons are empirical.
The roiling mystery of the world can be analyzed with concepts (this is science), or it
can be experienced free of concepts (this is mysticism).24 Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is
the denialat once full of hope and full of fearof the vastitude of human ignorance.

A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical
behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious
traditions are intellec- tually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual
experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything
on insufficient evidence to actualize it. Clearly, it must be possible to bring reason,
spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This would be the
beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the
end of faith.

MY GOAL in writing this book has been to help close the door to a certain style of irrationality.
While religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even
the possibility of correction, it is still sheltered from criticism in every corner of our culture.
Forsaking all valid sources of information about this world (both spiritual and mundane),
our religions have seized upon ancient taboos and prescientific fancies as though they
held ultimate metaphysical significance. Books that embrace the narrowest spec- trum of
political, moral, scientific, and spiritual understanding books that, by their antiquity
alone, offer us the most dilute wisdom with respect to the presentare still dogmatically
thrust upon us as the final word on matters of the greatest significance. In the best
case, faith leaves otherwise well-intentioned people incapable of thinking rationally
about many of their deepest concerns; at worst, it is a continuous source of human
violence. Even now, many of us are motivated not by what we know but by what we are
content merely to imagine. Many are still eager to sacrifice happiness, com- passion, and
justice in this world, for a fantasy of a world to come. These and other degradations
await us along the well-worn path of piety. Whatever our religious differences may mean
for the next life, they have only one terminus in this onea future of ignorance and
slaughter.

We live in societies that are still constrained by religious laws and threatened by
religious violence. What is it about us, and specifically about our discourse with one
another, that keeps these astonishing

bits of evil loose in our world? We have seen that education and wealth are insufficient
guarantors of rationality. Indeed, even in the West, educated men and women still cling to
the blood-soaked heir- looms of a previous age. Mitigating this problem is not merely a
matter of reining in a minority of religious extremists; it is a matter of finding
approaches to ethics and to spiritual experience that make no appeal to faith, and
broadcasting this knowledge to everyone.

Of course, one senses that the problem is simply hopeless. What could possibly cause
billions of human beings to reconsider their religious beliefs ? And yet, it is obvious
that an utter revolution in our thinking could be accomplished in a single generation: if
parents and teachers would merely give honest answers to the questions of every child. Our
doubts about the feasibility of such a project should be tempered by an understanding of
its necessity, for there is no rea- son whatsoever to think that we can survive our
religious differ- ences indefinitely.

Imagine what it would be like for our descendants to experience the fall of civilization.
Imagine failures of reasonableness so total that our largest bombs finally fall upon our
largest cities in defense of our religious differences. What would it be like for the
unlucky survivors of such a holocaust to look back upon the hurtling career of human
stupidity that led them over the precipice? A view from the end of the world would surely
find that the six billion of us cur- rently alive did much to pave the way to the
Apocalypse.

T H I S world is simply ablaze with bad ideas. There are still places where people are put to
death for imaginary crimeslike blas- phemyand where the totality of a child's education
consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. There are
countries where women are denied almost every human liberty, except the liberty to breed.
And yet, these same societies are quickly acquiring terrifying arsenals of advanced
weaponry. If we cannot inspire the developing world, and the Muslim world in particular, to

pursue ends that are compatible with a global civilization, then a dark future awaits all
of us.

The contest between our religions is zero-sum. Religious violence is still with us because
our religions are intrinsically hostile to one another. Where they appear otherwise, it is because secular knowl- edge and
secular interests are restraining the most lethal impropri- eties of faith. It is time we
acknowledged that no real foundation exists within the canons of Christianity, Islam,
Judaism, or any of our other faiths for religious tolerance and religious diversity.

If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and
cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of
faith. If our tribalism is ever to give way to an extended moral identity, our religious
beliefs can no longer be sheltered from the tides of genuine inquiry and gen- uine
criticism. It is time we realized that to presume knowledge where one has only pious hope
is a species of evil. Wherever convic- tion grows in inverse proportion to its
justification, we have lost the very basis of human cooperation. Where we have reasons for
what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our
connection to the world and to one another. Peo- ple who harbor strong convictions without
evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing
we should respect in a person's faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.

Nothing is more sacred than the facts. No one, therefore, should win any points in our
discourse for deluding himself. The litmus test for reasonableness should be obvious:
anyone who wants to know how the world is, whether in physical or spiritual terms, will be
open to new evidence. We should take comfort in the fact that people tend to conform
themselves to this principle whenever they are obliged to. This will remain a problem for
religion. The very hands that prop up our faith will be the ones to shake it.

IT is as yet undetermined what it means to be human, because every facet of our cultureand
even our biology itselfremains open to innovation and insight. We do not know what we will
be a thousand years from nowor indeed that we will be, given the lethal absur- dity of many of our beliefsbut whatever changes await
us, one thing seems unlikely to change: as long as experience endures, the difference
between happiness and suffering will remain our paramount concern. We will therefore want
to understand those pro- cessesbiochemical, behavioral, ethical, political, economic, and
spir- itualthat account for this difference. We do not yet have anything like a final
understanding of such processes, but we know enough to rule out many false understandings.
Indeed, we know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy
of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.

We do not know what awaits each of us after death, but we know that we will die. Clearly,
it must be possible to live ethicallywith a genuine concern for the happiness of other
sentient beingswith- out presuming to know things about which we are patently igno- rant.
Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person you will pass in the street
today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and
family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be
any- thing but kind to them in the meantime?

We are bound to one another. The fact that our ethical intuitions must, in some way,
supervene upon our biology does not make ethi- cal truths reducible to biological ones. We
are the final judges of what is good, just as we remain the final judges of what is
logical. And on neither front has our conversation with one another reached an end. There
need be no scheme of rewards and punishments transcending this life to justify our moral
intuitions or to render them effective in guiding our behavior in the world. The only
angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only
demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed,
and faith, which is surely the devil's masterpiece.

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of
its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.
The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for
any experience we might wish to call “spiritual.” No myths need be embraced for us to
commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us
to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be
rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that
our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that
people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. The days of our religious
identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civi- lization itself are numbered
would seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this.