Being cognition is defined in sharpest contrast to Deficiency cognition on every dimension. When we are propelled by B-motives, we relate to the world by participation, not manipulation; we experience a union of subject and object, a wholeness that overcomes all partiality. The B-cognition is an end in itself, not a means to anything else, and it tends to transcend our ordinary experience of time and space. Maslow does not identify B-experiences exclusively with religion-they may occur in nature, in relation to art, in intense interpersonal relations, even in sports.10 But because B-experiences are so frequently reported in religious literature, they may provide an initial mode of entry into the particular way that people experience the world religiously, even though it is certainly not the only way and we will have to broaden our phenomenological description of religious worlds as we encounter particular religions in more detail.
Herbert Richardson, drawing on such writers as Charles Peirce and Friedrich Schleiermacher, describes something similar to Maslow’s B-cognition when he points out the cognitive aspect of feeling. Feeling, he says, “perceives by participation. Just as feeling is a perception of a whole, so a whole is that which is perceived through participation.”” According to Richardson, aesthetic and some other kinds of knowing involve a feeling of a finite whole, whereas religious knowing involves the feeling of an infinite Whole. He gives as examples of our “affectual communion” with a finite whole the feeling of “the immensity of the ocean,” or “the presence of another.” Jonathan Edwards, as quoted by Richardson, describes the feeling of an infinite Whole:
There came into my soul, and was, as it were, diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being; a new sense, quite different from anything I ever experienced before … I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was, and how happy I should be if I might enjoy that God, and be rapt up to him in heaven, and be as it were swallowed up in him forever! 12
Edwards’s feeling of union with the infinite Whole, which he experienced as participation in the life of God, was accompanied by two other feelings that both Richardson and Maslow argue often accompany such experiences: the general rightness of all things, and personal well-being.
Vaclav Havel in his letters written from prison describes such an experience in entirely nontheistic terms:
Again, I call to mind that distant moment in [the prison at] Hermanice when on a hot, cloudless summer day, I sat on a pile of rusty iron and gazed into the crown of an enormous tree that stretched, with dignified repose, up and over all the fences, wires, bars and watchtowers that separated me from it. As I watched the imperceptible trembling of its leaves against an endless sky, I was overcome by a sensation that is difficult to describe: all at once, I seemed to rise above all the coordinates of my momentary existence in the world into a kind of state outside time in which all the beautiful things I had ever seen and experienced existed in a total “co-present”; I felt a sense of reconciliation, indeed of an almost gentle consent to the inevitable course of things as revealed to me now, and this combined with a carefree determination to face what had to be faced. A profound amazement at the sovereignty of Being became a dizzying sensation of tumbling endlessly into the abyss of its mystery; an unbounded joy at being alive, at having been given the chance to live through all I have lived through, and at the fact that everything has a deep and obvious meaning-this joy formed a strange alliance in me with a vague horror at the inapprehensibility and unattainability of everything I was so close to in that moment, standing at the very “edge of the finite”; I was flooded with a sense of ultimate happiness and harmony with the world and with myself, with that moment, with all the moments I could call up, and with everything invisible that lies behind it and has meaning. I would even say that I was somehow “struck by love,” though I don’t know precisely for whom or what.13
Here we find experiences of participation, of the rightness of things, and of personal well-being, similar to those we found in Edwards. Wallace Stevens has put such experiences in poetic form on several occasions. The following resonates particularly with Havel, though it brings in the idea of awakening, common in religious writing, but not explicit in either Edwards or Havel:
In the ecstatic language of poetry, Stevens evokes the sense of participation instead of describing it as Edwards and Havel attempt to do. In any case, the elements of the rightness of things and of personal well-being are particularly evident.
Overlapping Realities
So far I have treated the multiple realities as largely serial: so much time for sleep, so much for work, so much for television, for socializing, for contemplation, and so forth. But we can also see the various realms of reality as going on at the same time, and occasionally cutting into one another. Objects in the world of daily life may carry more than one meaning, and we may not be conscious of all the meanings. We may relate to our boss in the world of working, perhaps unconsciously, as if he were our father. As psychotherapists know, such a meaning can distort our behavior to the extent that it disrupts our ability to function in the work situation. Many objects that we encounter in the world of everyday have, at least potentially, religious meanings. The tree shimmering in the sunlight that Havel observed could have been hardly noticed as the background of the daily walk in the prison yard, but, for whatever reason, it served at that particular moment to break through the everyday: it was the world-tree that concentrated the whole meaning of the cosmos in its shimmering presence.
In other words, it is always possible that an object, a person, or an event in the world of daily life may have a meaning in another reality that transcends the world of working. If so we may call it a symbol, following Alfred Schutz’s usage with respect to that term.” We will have much more to say about symbols, but here we may only note that we are surrounded by symbols, or potential symbols, all the time. A tree, water, the sun are all multivalent symbols, but a room is a symbol, a door is a symbol, a book is a symbol, a teacher is a symbol, a student is a symbol. Most of the time in daily life we are operating with a narrowly pragmatic consciousness, with what Maslow calls D-cognition, and we don’t see symbols, or at least we don’t consciously see them. At times, however, even in the midst of daily life, we may experience a B-cognition when something ordinary becomes extraordinary, becomes symbolic.
Abraham Maslow once in my presence told of such a B-cognition. He was serving as chair of the Department of Psychology at Brandeis and was expected to attend the graduation ceremony in full academic regalia. He had avoided such events previously, considering them silly rituals. But, he said, as the procession began to move he suddenly “saw” it as an endless procession. Far, far, ahead, at the very beginning of the procession, was Socrates. Quite a way back but still well ahead of Maslow was Spinoza. Then just ahead of him was Freud followed by his own teachers and himself. Behind him stretching endlessly were his students and his students’ students, generation after generation as yet unborn. Maslow assured us that what he experienced was not a hallucination: rather it was a particular kind of insight, an example of B-cognition. It was also, I would suggest, the apprehension of the academic procession as a symbol, standing for the true university as a sacred community of learning, transcending time and space. He was in a sense apprehending the “real” basis of any actual university. One could say that if we can no longer glimpse that sacred foundation, the actual university would collapse. For the real university is neither a wholesale knowledge outlet for the consumer society nor an instrument in the class struggle, though the actual university is a bit of both. But if the university does not have a fundamental symbolic reference point that transcends the pragmatic considerations of the world of working and is in tension with those considerations, then it has lost its raison d’etre.
Without the capacity for symbolic transcendence, for seeing the realm of daily life in terms of a realm beyond it, without the capacity for “beyonding,” as Kenneth Burke put it, one would be trapped in a world of what has been called dreadful immanence.16
For the world of daily life seen solely as a world of rational response to anxiety and need is a world of mechanical necessity, not radical autonomy. It is through pointing to other realities, through beyonding, that religion and poetry, and science too in its own way, break the dreadful fatalities of this world of appearances.
We can begin to see why taking the world of daily life as the paramount reality is dangerous if it is anything more than a methodological assumption. We have noted that no one can stand to live in the world of daily life all the time. Its governing anxiety derives from two of its features: the fact that it is a world of lack, of Deficiency motives that must be made up; and the fact that the manipulations in which it is engaged have no guaranteed successthey might fail in the attempt to overcome some deficiency. The world of daily life must then be punctuated with periods that are more inherently gratifying: with sleep, with common meals, with activities that are not means to any ends. Alasdair Maclntyre has used the term “practices” to apply to activities whose goods are internal to them.’? The kind of B-cognition that we have used to characterize religious experience is not a practice, because, to paraphrase Stevens, it is not something we achieve but something that happens. Ritual, however, is a form of practice that is broader than religion but of which religion provides important examples. Regularly recurring activities, such as meals, sports, concerts, can take on the quality of ritual. The notion of the Sabbath, the day of rest, is intimately connected with ritual, because traditionally it has involved participation in religious ritual, in worship. In any case the notion that the Sabbath is different from the other six days of the week implies that it is time, in part at least, set aside from the world of daily life, time in which the anxieties of the world of daily life are temporarily allayed, time out of time. If today many people allay those anxieties with sports or other recreation instead of or in addition to worship, this does not change the significance of time that breaks with the rhythm of the world of daily life.
However, the fact that the world of daily life cannot consume the whole of our lives is not the only reason why we may hesitate to characterize it as the paramount reality. In its own citadel it is not always sovereign. The world of working as the world of the manipulation of objects in order to satisfy needs is inadequate to the understanding even of the world of working. The world of working as a world of the satisfaction of marginal utility is devoid of culturally specific subjective meaning. Weber, in describing instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalitdt), which he did indeed take to be a kind of paramount reality, felt that it could be read off by the observer from purely objective observations. Given the external situation of need, the meaning of the instrumentally rational action would be obvious. There would be no necessity for the interpretation (Verstehen) of subjective meaning.
Yet, I believe, there is a pull, even in the very center of the world of work ing, toward the understanding of work as practice, as intrinsically meaningful and valuable, rather than as means to an end. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has described the phenomenon of what he calls flow, a kind of optimal experience of full engagement with the world and full realization of one’s own potentialities, as frequently occurring among ordinary Americans at work.”’ The anthropologist Victor Turner has used the notion of flow to understand ritual, and it is perhaps not stretching things too much to suggest that it is when work becomes (in the positive sense) ritual that it approximates flow.’
We may take, for example, the Zen Buddhist notion of practice, which in its primary sense means meditation, preferably in the lotus posture for definite periods in a meditation hall with other Zen devotees. The notion of Zen practice is then extrapolated to all activities, so that sweeping becomes practice, doing the dishes becomes practice, and so would any kind of work. What makes work into practice from the Zen point of view would be the attitude of mindfulness, a particular form of religious attention. Mindful ness does not mean concern for outcome but openness to the reality of what is actually happening, a kind of B-cognition. Perhaps I can suggest that ritual, in the extended meaning I have given to it, may rival the world of daily life as the paramount reality. Such an assertion bears on the widely shared religious idea that the world of daily life is a world of illusion.
Modes of Religious Representation
Religious reality is a realm of experience, to be sure, but it is also a realm of representation. In fact, experience and representation belong inexorably together. George Lindbeck has described the current major alternative theories of religion in ways that will be helpful to our exposition.20 The first theory of religion he describes is what he calls propositional. It sees religion as consisting of a series of propositional truth claims, stated conceptually. I will have more to say about concepts below, as they are of great importance in religious discourse, but I believe that Lindbeck is right in arguing that the propositional theory of religion is inadequate as a major approach to religion and largely abandoned by scholars today. To identify religion with a set of propositions whose truth can be argued would be to make it into what more accurately should be called philosophy. Religion and philosophy are intimately related, as we will explore in later chapters, but they are not identical.
Lindbeck’s second theory of religion is the widely influential experientialexpressive approach. This view assumes that there is a general human capacity for religious experience that is actualized differently in different religious traditions. The experiential-expressive view in its modern form Lindbeck traces to Friedrich Schleiermacher, and in recent times it was widely propagated by Paul Tillich. The emphasis on B-cognition and the felt whole in the discussion so far largely belongs in the category of the experientialexpressive theory of religion. In one understanding the deep structure of religious experience exists generically in the human psyche. Particular religions are the surface manifestations of this deep panhuman experiential potentiality.
Lindbeck, however, opts for a third theory as most promising, what he calls the cultural-linguistic theory. The cultural-linguistic theory, which derives from cultural anthropology, particularly from Clifford Geertz, takes symbolic forms as primary, seeing them not so much as expressions of underlying religious emotions, but as themselves shaping religious experiences and emotions. I would agree that the cultural-linguistic approach is a valuable corrective to the experiential-expressive approach, but I don’t think we have to choose between them. It seems to me that we can view them as coordinate approaches and that we need to move back and forth between them to understand the phenomenon of religion. Thus when I characterize widely different expressions as examples of Being cognition, I am not arguing that there is a subsistent reality of Being experience that simply comes out in different forms on different occasions. Rather, I am recognizing that there are some common human experiential potentialities that have recognizable similarities, but are inchoate until given shape by symbolic form. Once so shaped, their similarities are always qualified: the differences may be crucial. I am also fully in agreement with Lindbeck that cultural traditions not only shape, they even call forth, emotional experiences. In short, we cannot disentangle raw experience from cultural form. Nevertheless we can see them as equally essential, like the Aristotelian notions of matter and form, and do not have to choose one approach as primary.
As an example of why we need both theoretical approaches, we may consider the experience of the felt-whole. It is true that many who have had such an experience speak of it in terms of ineffability, of the inability of words to express the experience, and so forth. The experience of the felt-whole, a radical form of Maslow’s Being cognition, provides a valuable point of entry (by no means the only one) into the realm of religious reality, but it is problematic with respect to an analysis of religious representations, a central concern of the cultural-linguistic approach. For what we can perhaps best call unitive experience, all representation must be inadequate. Representation implies a duality between the representative form and the reality it represents, but
it is just this duality that the unitive experience transcends. Perhaps it is even dangerous to speak of unitive experience, because in terms of modern Western cultural categories, experience implies subjectivity or innerness as opposed to objectivity, again imposing a false dualism. With this consideration in mind it might be well to speak of unitive events as well as unitive experiences.
Without ourselves experiencing them, we would not know anything about unitive events except through representations. The unitive event, then, is a kind of ground zero with respect to religious representations. It transcends them yet it requires them if it is to be communicable at all. Christian negative theology and the Buddhist teaching of emptiness (sunyata) attempt to express this paradoxically by speaking of nothingness, the void, silence, or emptiness. Yet the very negative terms themselves are symbolic forms, are representations, and therefore introduce an element of dualism into the unitive event even when they are trying to overcome the dualism of representa tion. This is not a paradox to be solved but one to be pointed to as we survey a variety of expressions of the unitive event in the world’s religions.
Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age Page 4
