The Human Contradiction

in #writing6 years ago

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Humans are divine. We dream, we imagine, we share, we learn, we aspire, we achieve, we improve, we introspect, we understand, we feel awe, we form communities, we love one another.

Humans are mortal. We feel pain, we sicken, we bleed, we poop, we fuck, we breed, we vomit, we tire, we forget, we age, we die, we rot.

We spend our existence experiencing these dual aspects of our humanity, simultaneously, and never feel that they fit together quite perfectly. We sense an irresolvable tension between them, a disconnect we search endlessly for a way to bridge. We strive to resolve the contradiction, and become both fully mortal and fully divine.

I think that's really where spirtuality comes from. We don't start by learning it from a book or being brainwashed into it by our parents—we just have that universal experience of our contradictory humanity, and we start out by searching for way of reconciling the contradiction.


It's not really politically correct these days to talk about divinity or spirituality, granted. So if you're uncomfortable with that terminology, feel free to substitute "symbolic" or "abstract" or some such when I talk about the divine self. That's basically the language used by "terror management theory," a similar argument in psychology that originated from a book called The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker.

Basically, terror management theory posits that the human capacity to anticipate future events—specifically, our own seemingly-inevitable death—conflicts irresolvably with our strong instinct for survival. Unable to escape that conflict within the rules offered by our day-to-day world, we create alternate universes of symbolic meanings and build our identity out of those meanings, in the hope that such an identity will persist after death in a way our mortal identity cannot.

So—

The new hunter, tattooed after a coming-of-age ceremony—
Marriage vows spoken in a cathedral—
A new car and a perfectly-groomed lawn in the suburbs—
A viral video that passes a hundred thousand "like"s—
A Bitcoin wallet valued at millions of USD—
A level 90 gnome warlock, fully equipped with epics—
A completed half-marathon—

—all of these—meaningless in the mortal world—take on great importance as symbols in the universe of the divine. They signal our participation in the symbolic universe, and our attainment of goals within it. We surround ourselves with such reminders that our divine self is real as well, even as we struggle with the trials of mortality.

It has become trendy, of course, to look with contempt at those who locate their divine self in the traditional structures of religion or spirituality. Reasonable people, of course, are fully aware that religion is superstitious nonsense for gullible people who can't handle the reality of the mortal world. And yet, such reasonable people nonetheless go on believing that the electronic switches in a bank's (or witness's) digital files have value, or that it actually matters who wins that game of football (or Overwatch), or that anyone cares about their Instagram food photos, or that political rights and freedoms are a thing, or that human dignity and social justice matter. We're all trying to bring our mortal selves closer to the universe of the divine, one way or another, just as surely as anyone praying in a church.


Opinions differ, of course, on whether the divine universe, in any of these forms, is actually "real"—whatever that means—or if it's simply a trick for distracting our brains from the trauma of mortal existence. I think you can probably reasonably place most approaches to conceptualizing our divinity, and its relationship to our mortality, along a spectrum that looks something like this:

  • Only our divine self is real; our mortal self is an illusion. I think this is a popular sentiment in mysticism—the idea that mortality is a temporary illusion and we'll eventually return wholly to the divine reality—but it leaves open some difficulty in explaining why a divine being would choose to, or need to, perceive itself to be mortal. "Just for fun" is one vaguely reasonable explanation, and I think the Hindu concept of līla is one way of expressing that possibility, as far as I understand it.
  • Only our mortal self is real; our divine self is just pretend. An extremely popular belief in modern materialism. True or not, this viewpoint doesn't offer much to address the very real psychological need for spirituality. Even given a "weak materialism" sort of viewpoint that acknowledges that need, getting your mortal brain to find spiritual acts meaningful even when you "know" it's all just pretend requires some fairly complex and unsustainable double-think.
  • Our mortal self is real, but our divine self is more important and should take priority. This is basically the viewpoint that seems to be typical of Christianity, and what secular Westerners tend to assume that all religion believes. Ancient Christian Gnosticism, drawing upon Greek spiritual philosophy, envisioned the mortal universe as real but evil, the work of a malevolent "demiurge," and believed that the true benevolent God was working to liberate humanity from the mortal universe and bring them into their true divine nature. This isn't too different from the more popularly recognizable presentation of modern Christianity, where the mortal universe is a trap set by the evil Satan to lead humanity away from divine life.
  • Our divine self is real, but our mortal self is more important and should take priority. A logically possible position, but I don't know of any belief system that has formally taken it.
  • Our divine self and mortal self are both equally real, equally important, or are both aspects of the same underlying reality. A nice, safe compromise position, but challenging to articulate convincingly in language. But maybe this is what people in altered states of consciousness are experiencing directly, without needing language to express it?
  • The self in any form isn't real, or nothing is real at all. Logically possible, but epistemological nonsense. Nihilism and depression pretty much end up here. Teenagers and Buddhists trying to sound deep will sometimes argue that "there is no self" or "nothing is real," but what I think they're really getting at is more like "you create your own reality"—i.e., only the reality created by your divine self is real.

I'm pretty sure that no one can really claim to understand why we have this powerful inner sense of contradiction, and that anyone who does probably just hasn't thought about the question deeply enough. But I do think that the things people do, and the things people believe, tend to make a lot more sense when you look at them in terms of this contradiction. I've found it very valuable to keep asking what aspect of divinity a person is trying to grow closer to, or what aspect of mortality they're trying to escape from, or in what situations they feel that the boundary between the two blurs and disappears.


"Humans need fantasy in order to be human—to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape." ~Sir Terry Pratchett

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