Believing in the Mystery

Introduction:

Daoism & Whitman's Transcendentalism

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Mystery & Doubt

The next two chapters examine perspectives that are different from, yet at times quite close to, agnosticism. This chapter, Believing in the Mystery, examines how Daoist writers and Walt Whitman maintain a deep theistic belief yet at the same time remain skeptical of systems, dogmas, and fixed beliefs. The next chapter, The Fiction of Doubt, examines how in his first five novels Salman Rushdie writes about theism and magic while at the same time maintaining a distance which is at times atheistic and at times agnostic, yet almost always skeptical. The two chapters thus straddle agnosticism, the Daoists and Whitman on the theistic side and Rushdie on the atheistic side.

While there’s a line between agnosticism on one side and Daoism and Whitman on the other, the line is rather porous at times. I say this for two main reasons: 1. the pervasiveness of doubt, mystery, and expansiveness in the thinking of the Daoists and Whitman makes them quasi-agnostic, and 2. Rushdie’s interest in religious constructs and Sufi mysticism makes him at times more agnostic than atheistic. Whether or not one can label Rushdie an agnostic is highly debatable, yet the mix of belief and skepticism crops up consistently in his early fiction itself — perhaps best exemplified by his character Aadam Aziz, who can’t seem to shake a God in whose existence he refuses to believe. In an interview published in 1992 (two years after the publication of his fifth novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories) Rushdie says that his aim is “to develop a form which doesn’t prejudge whether your characters are right or wrong … a form in which the idea of the miraculous can coexist with observable, everyday reality.” In general, Rushdie doesn’t believe in this miraculous, and yet he explores it in detail nonetheless.

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Both Mystery and Doubt rework theses written in 1984 and 1996. My 1984 M.A. thesis, Aspects of Taoism in the Poetry of Walt Whitman, is available here at the University of Calgary PRISM site (PDF download link here). I reworked my 1996 Ph.D. thesis into a book, Stranger Gods; Salman Rushdie’s Other Worlds, which was published by McGill-Queen’s Press in 2001. Some of Stranger Gods is available on Google Books (link here).

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In this chapter, Believing in the Mystery, I'll look at two strains of thinking that are theistic yet share many fundamental elements with agnosticism. The first is the American Transcendentalism of Walt Whitman. Whitman's sense of Being (or God) is large and evasive, refusing to be contained by Western theology or by theology at all. Whitman accepts science and other philosophies with ease, melding them into his own personal vision of an open universe, one in which he sees himself as "a kosmos, of Manhattan the Son." The second is Daoism, which has a deep reverence for the ineffable Force (the Way or the Dao) that lies in and beyond Nature. This Dao is so obscure that Laozi calls it the Mother of all things and the uncarved block. Laozi even suggests, It may be the forefather of God.

In comparing Whitman and the two main Daoist thinkers (Laozi and Zhuangzi), I’ll underscore the notion that religious categories such as East and West, immanent and transcendental, theistic and atheistic, are far less important than the experience of what they see as the Infinite or the Ineffable. In this sense they share much with Romantic poets and agnostics: one ought to be open to everything, regardless of category. Phenomenology isn't the preserve of philosophers or of those who have a particular theological outlook. Nature is all around us, and within us. From an agnostic perspective, the Spirit which animates Nature may or may not exist, may or may not be an ineffable Mystery. Yet it remains a Mystery that agnostics are eager to explore.

More specifically, I’ll argue that Daoism and Transcendentalism share three basic aspects — 1. an anti-definitional definition of God, 2. a mystical experience that’s expansive, cosmic, and mysterious, and 3. a religious practice that avoids systematization of any sort. All three of these are intriguing to agnostics, since they suggest theistic possibilities that don't require any fixed dogma or any confession of belief.

In I: The God That Has No Name, I'll look at the ineffable, infinite, and transcendent nature of Dao and how this is similar to Whitman's conception of Being: both are beyond definition and both lie at the root of the physical and the metaphysical (or transcendental, for want of a better term). In II: The Self That has No Definition, I'll explore the different degrees of transcendental awareness attained by Whitman and the Daoists, noting that they experience Being or Dao simultaneously with worldly experiences. Standing both in and out of the game (to use Whitman's phrase) helps them to appreciate the Mystery that mystical experience presents. In III: The Way That Has No Path, I'll explore the paths taken, and the methods employed, to arrive at the experience of Being or Dao. For Whitman and the Daoists, the paths are pathless, that is, they don't require specific beliefs or practices — save being open to the possibilities.

In Religion: Many Tribes and Pascal 3: God & Infinity I suggest that religions — especially Christianity — might open up possibilities by freeing themselves from exclusivity and dogma. In this chapter, Believing in the Mystery, I give a detailed illustration of two systems which come from very different cultures and histories — Chinese Daoism and American Transcendentalism — yet which both have minimized dogma in order to leave greater room for speculation and personal experience.

Throughout the three main sections I'll note that there's a fine yet clear line dividing Daoists and Whitman from agnostics: while all of them reject strict definitions and guidelines, the agnostic retains a skepticism that for the others is overshadowed by a deep, albeit non-doctrinal, belief. Agnostics may feel something of the Being or Dao they write about, yet they're never sure that it's everything it's cracked up to be. Agnostics still doubt the essential or theistic nature of the experience. However deep or satisfying it may be, agnostics still can't say that it's eternal in nature, or even that it constitutes the deepest truth.

Rather, agnostics hold at bay Whitman's sense of Spiritual Truth while at the same time applying his notion that however far we travel and however deep our experience goes, there are always further distances to go and further experiences to explore. However much we know, we end up face to face with “the puzzle of puzzles […] that we call Being”:  

I hear the trained soprano . . . she convulses me like the climax of my love-grip;
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies;
. . . . cut by bitter and poisoned hail,
Steeped amid honeyed morphine . . . . my windpipe squeezed in the fakes of death,
Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.

[…]

This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look’d at the crowded heaven, / And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill’d and satisfied then? / And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.

You are also asking me questions and I hear you, / I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself.

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Of Shankara the Son

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, […]

— Song of Myself, 48

In this section I focus on Daoism because of its profound epistemological fluidity, yet the diversity of Hinduism and its deep non-dual strands of thought also resonate deeply with Whitman’s poetry. Indeed, given Whitman's wide-ranging unified cosmic consciousness, one might re-name him Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan and Shankara the Son.

Shankara is a famous 8th century philosopher who advocates a non-dual philosophy whereby everything is understood to be God. A parable from the Nyaya school of Hindu philosophy gets at this situation succinctly: in the dark, one might look at a rope and think of it as a dangerous snake, yet in the light you see that it’s a rope and nothing to fear. Likewise, for Shankara (and his non-dual Advaita Vedanta philosophy) the world isn’t a place of fear, division, or alienation, but rather of love, unity, and connection. While Shankara’s terms of reference are clearly Hindu — and often involve the debate between non-dual and qualified non-dual Hindu thought — his overall argument that everything is God (or Brahman) can be applied far beyond the borders of the Indian subcontinent.

In the long excerpt below — from his 52-section poem Song of Myself — Whitman includes and praises all religions. While he treats religion with respect, this respect is premised on the notion that religion isn’t a fragile thing to be protected, but rather an open thing to be found everywhere. As a result, he tends to treat organized, traditional religion with a combination of three things that are seldom found together: 1. the respectful openness of an ecumenical, 2. the skeptical and playful irreverence of an agnostic, and 3. the radical spiritual democracy of Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta:

I heard what was said of the universe, / Heard it and heard it of several thousand years; / It is middling well as far as it goes—but is that all?

Magnifying and applying come I, / Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters, / Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah, / Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson, / Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha, / In my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix engraved, / With Odin and the hideous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image, / Taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more, / Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days, / (They bore mites as for unfledg’d birds who have now to rise and fly and sing for themselves,) / Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself, bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see, / Discovering as much or more in a framer framing a house, / Putting higher claims for him there with his roll’d-up sleeves driving the mallet and chisel, / Not objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or a hair on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation […]

I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over, / My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths, / Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern, / Believing I shall come again upon the earth after five thousand years, / Waiting responses from oracles, honoring the gods, saluting the sun, / Making a fetish of the first rock or stump, powowing with sticks in the circle of obis, / Helping the llama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols, / Dancing yet through the streets in a phallic procession, rapt and austere in the woods a gymnosophist, / Drinking mead from the skull-cup, to Shastas and Vedas admirant, minding the Koran, / Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife, beating the serpent-skin drum, / Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine, / To the mass kneeling or the puritan’s prayer rising, or sitting patiently in a pew, / Ranting and frothing in my insane crisis, or waiting dead-like till my spirit arouses me, / Looking forth on pavement and land, or outside of pavement and land, / Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits.

Whitman puts all religions on the human level, equating them not only with each other but also with the most down-to-earth things like physical labour or a curl of smoke. In doing so, he turns everything that seems a snake into a rope. Some would say this destroys the unique, sacred stature of religion, but others would say that he’s merely pointing out that everything is God, a point of view one finds most rigorously and exhaustibly argued by Shankara.

This point of view — which one might call non-dual or democratically mystic — is so fundamental to Whitman’s vision that it constitutes the title of his life-long poetic work, Leaves of Grass, the final deathbed 1892 edition of which contains Song of Myself and about 400 other poems. When Whitman says, “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,” he’s not just referring to his mystical view of infinite small things, but to the wider philosophic non-dual notion that the grass in itself is infinite. This democratic mystical sensibility is what makes him so appealing to agnostics and to radical ecumenicals, who want to stretch the incandescent meanings of religion to everything, rather than to condense them into a prescribed doctrine or apply them selectively to a saved person or a chosen people.

Because Whitman praises many forms of religion, it seems surprising that he doesn't mention Daoism. Yet it's very likely that he hadn't read the writings of Laozi or Zhuangzi. I imagine that if he had read Zhuangzi he would have been blown away by the fluidity, naturalness, and open nature of his thinking. He would have perhaps dedicated a special stanza to it, integrating it into his notion that God is everywhere.

He might also have used Zhuangzi to advance his democratic notion that we can’t discriminate between those who believe in God and those who don’t — rendering ineffectual special names like elected, chosen, believers, enlightened, or brahmin. Certainly it would be harder to make this point in the Hindu context, where hierarchies of consciousness and the caste system get in the way.

In any case, Daoist philosophy resonates deeply with Whitman’s poetry even though it isn’t mentioned. Both Whitman and Zhuangzi are remarkably individualistic and free from dogma. As a result, Daoism might be seen as especially compatible with what Whitman praises as the "formless, free, religious dances ... from the Orient."

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Next: I: The God That Has No Name

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