Overview

The Whole - Introductions, Sections, & Chapters - Tangents & Diversions

🍏

The Whole

Throughout The Double Refuge I range widely in focus and approach. I go from Khayyam to Shakespeare, from Zhuangzi to Camus, from prose to poetry, from critical analysis to fiction & autobiography, from serious debate to comic diversion.

Yet I always aim to explore 1🔺 the many-sided beast of agnosticism, 2🔺 the ways that agnosticism is compatible, though distinct from, atheism and theism, and 3🔺 the way that agnosticism and theism can co-operate and even reinforce each other.

1🔺 and 2🔺 are crucial to this study, yet my goal is to sound the depths of 3🔺. This reflects my personal view that poetic mysticism, for want of a better term, connects the material to the spiritual, connects our individual experience to images and symbols which we use to get at that elusive Something Greater, which is forever beyond our symbols.

Philosophically I’m agnostic, yet theologically I’m non-dualist, more or less in the traditions of Neoplatonism and Vedanta. Thinking along these lines puts me in awe of both science and religion, in awe of the mysteries that each tries to explore. I believe that science without limits sees eye to eye with religion without dogma. Perhaps the laws of Nature emanate from a Unified Theory just as versions of religion emanate from a transcendent One.

This line of sight that goes from science to religion might be called the double vision. And yet it’s one line, just as the vision inside the head is of one Greater Reality, which for want of a better term we might call the One or the Whole. People often talk about matter and spirit as if they were separate, as if a Great Wall and innumerable traps are set along the border. They often talk as if there was in fact a solid border, 🔭🔬 impenetrable on one side because of the solid facts of space and the invisible facts of gravity and magnetism, and ✝️🕉️ impenetrable on the other side because of the solid weight of doctrine and the invisible spiritual powers of gravity and magnetism. Yet what is the difference between these types of gravity and magnetism? This is what I’ll be looking at in 1🔺 and 2🔺.

Both sides appear to have different types of gravity and magnetism, atrracting us in different ways and pulling us apart so that we see the two as completely separate. Yet what if the same gravity and magnetism operated in both? What if gravity and magnetism operate in the visible realm, and also in the realm of thought and feeling, psychology and spirit, intuition and belief? What if the border doesn’t really exist, but is just a way of dividing up the same Whole? How many ways can we divvy up what we can’t see? This is what I’ll be looking at in 3🔺.

This is also why I focus on the unifying notion of refuge, the crucial noun and subject which is modified by double. My title signals the same escape or refuge from the same trap of isolation, alienation, & exclusivity that we can fall into if we divide everything from everything.

Notwithstanding this notion of refuge, I’m still agnostic enough to admit that I don’t really know if I’m right or not. So I look as deeply as I can into the question of how the most open versions of realism and agnosticism might connect with the most open versions of mysticism and religion.

In all cases, I suspect that humility is the key: in the double refuge of open agnosticism and non-doctrinal mysticism we see that we’re only a tiny part of the universe and that we can’t claim to speak for the Great Whole, whatever that may be. Scientifically and rationally we may think of the Cosmos; poetically and mystically we may think of the One and the Good. Yet however we approach the topic, the Great Whole may well be infinite and therefore beyond definition, conception, or conclusion. We may not be able to define or lay down borders, yet we can still feel this Wholeness, this Goodness, this Mystical Union, this Yoga of body and spirit, this Holy Spirit connecting to everything.

Or, as Shelley put it, getting as close as possible to the poetic mysticism of ineffability, “Rome's azure sky, / Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak / The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.”

🍏

Introductions

The Double Refuge begins with two wide-ranging introductory chapters, 🍏 Starting Points and 🧩 Complexities. In general, 🍏 Starting Points is more introductory, while 🧩 Complexities goes into more involved questions, like those of zero-sum philosophy, paradoxes of doubt, the philosophical implications of infinity, the practicality of Keats’ negative capability, etc.

Sections

Pathways to Doubt (8 chapters) and Currents of Religion (9 chapters) follow the two introductory chapters. Pathways to Doubt emphasizes the effect of science on religion, especially how astronomy and natural science eroded Medieval certainties, and led to the formulation of agnosticism in the late 19th century. Currents of Religion emphasizes the diverse history of religion as well as aspects of mysticism that survive the collapse of certainty. I’ll argue that this mysticism, with its open borders and lack of doctrine, can act as a conduit between agnosticism and theism — as well as a refuge from the ravages of both.

Throughout The Double Refuge I use historical timelines, yet my arguments are more about the nature of doubt and belief than about historical development. My range is quite wide and varied — from early expressions of doubt and belief in Mesopotamia, India, China, and Classical Europe to the empiricism and agnosticism of the 18th and 19th centuries, to the liberalism and existentialism of the 20th century. I highlight literature that’s especially relevant to the relation of agnosticism to belief — for instance, the proto-agnosticism of Dickens’ Christianity in Bleak House and the Modern agnosticism and mysticism of Forster in A Passage to India (🦖 At the Wild & Fog).

Chapters

The first large section, Pathways to Doubt, follows a rough chronological order. I start by looking at the revolutionary impact of astronomy (🔭 The Sum of All Space) and at the parallel rise of science and skepticism from the 16th to 20th centuries (🔬 Science & Mystery & ♒️ A River Journey). I then look at the skeptical and empirical strains in agnosticism, from the Greeks to the 19th century (❤️ Three Little Words), after which I look at 17th and 18th century empiricism in light of my personal experience while visiting Guanajuato in the year 2000 (🇲🇽 Señor Locke). I then look at the shift from pre- to post- Darwinian thinking in Dickens’ England (🦖 At the Wild & Fog), at the relation between agnosticism and theism in the 20th century French existentialists Sartre and Camus (🎲 Almost Existential), and at a mystical version of the contemporary existential heroine in the song, “A Lighter Shade of Pale” (🧜🏽‍♀️ The Mermaid).

Currents of Religion also follows a rough chronological order, starting with an overview of religious history (🌎 Many Tribes). I then look at the influence of Mesopotamian civilization on Judaism & Christianity (♒️ Currents of Sumer), at changing religious paradigms (⏯ Systems & ✝️ St. Francis), at a fictional Biblical & Mesopotamian scenario (🍎 The Apple-Merchant of Babylon), at religion vs. science in contemporary France (🇫🇷 The Priest’s Dilemma), at mysticism in Classical China & Whitman’s 19th Century Transcendentalism (💫 Mystery), at the battle against dogma in the Indian subcontinent in the 20th century (🇮🇳 Fiction), and at the age-old puzzle of death (☠️ Ars Moriendi).

🍏

Tangents & Diversions

The bulk of The Double Refuge is written in essay form, although I sometimes shift into fiction and autobiography. Two chapters are entirely fictional: in 🇫🇷 The Priest’s Dilemma a Parisian priest struggles with evolution and philology, and in 🍎 The Apple-Merchant of Babylon the business troubles of Moses lead him to a novel form of monotheism (these two chapters are excerpted from my sci-fiction novel Fractal Hearts). Two other chapters are autobiographical: ☠️ Ars Moriendi reflects on the death of my father and brother, and 🇲🇽 Señor Locke applies Locke’s theory about sense impressions to traumatic experiences I had (being robbed at knifepoint in Mexico City, and being held by criminals in Istanbul). This fictional and autobiographical veering away from exposition & argument is in keeping with my notion that while agnosticism and theism have abstract philosophical dimensions, they are based in personal experience.

This is especially true for agnosticism: at its heart it isn’t as much a system or doctrine as it is an open mode of operating and being. It urges us to think and feel critically, openly, and eclectically. Of course, religion can work in this open, critical way too, which is why I think of open agnosticism and open theism as the double refuge. Christian ecumenicalism goes some way in this, yet it often remains within the sphere of Christianity rather than becoming part of a global religious sensibility. Notable exceptions to this can be found in the writings of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Merton, Raimundo Panikkar, Bede Griffiths, or, more recently, Richard Rohr.

The following poem I wrote exemplifies what I mean by a global religious sensibility. In it I try to combine this sensibility with the desire to burn away the chaff, that is, to remove whatever stops us from connecting more broadly, from exploring and empathizing, from loving and forgiving, from reaching the grain or valuable substance which is protected yet also hidden by the chaff. In my poem the names of God are many, and are meant to emphasize the experience of purification and regeneration, which takes place invisibly inside each individual. God thus becomes Shiva, the God of destruction and creation, as well as Christ, the God who is killed and resurrected. In both agnostic and mystical thought, it doesn’t matter what the name is; it’s the principle of improvement and the experience of reconstruction that counts:

By and large religion is dominated by those who tend to think in exclusive terms, often promulgating the notion that their religion is the best. They set Christ against Krishna, Mary against Mahakali. Personal experience too often gets subsumed by the doctrine of a particular church, sect, or school — just as it does by the atheist doctrine of positivism, which argues that the only verification we can rely on comes from the scientific method. Agnostics, by the very nature of their philosophy, are loathe to make such claims to exclusivity and superiority. It’s why agnostics aren’t bothered in the least if an agnostic embraces faith or leaves it altogether — that is, if they stop being an agnostic and become a theist or an atheist. It’s the sincerity of the search and the honesty of the appraisal that counts.

🍏

While The Double Refuge has themes and threads, I have a laissez-faire attitude in the pages themselves, taking tangents wherever I think they might yield some insight. A certain amount of latitude seems especially appropriate in exploring the relation between poetic agnosticism and mystical theism, both of which seem to me sliding, floating endeavours. It may be that if you’re willing to explore everything, you’re likely to shift your bearings quite often, and at times quite abruptly. Even to include humour, as when I have Moses in The Apple Merchant of Babylon get so frustrated by the Indian apple sellers that he invents a new religion. Or by seeing God as the Scarlet Pimpernel, having fun rather than making fun of what’s so often seen as exclusively serious:

In my exploration of doubt & belief I follow timelines and threads, but beyond these there are other trajectories and fabrics. Much as beyond Miró’s blue blob there’s a galaxy of gold and black lines with hints of stars and justice, of upside-down smiles and beings on faraway planets.

The lines we type onto the page or Internet stretch so far from us that eventually they become other, our scheme intersecting with other schemes, until we suspect that the universe is full of patterns and schemes. To impose a pattern or gospel on the universe says more about us than it does about the cosmos.

🍏

Next: 🍏 Core Beliefs

Back to Top

Contents - Detailed Contents - Core Beliefs - Overview