Alienation Part Two: Body and Spirit

“So watch yourselves carefully... so that you do not act corruptly and make a graven image for yourselves in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the sky, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water below the earth. And beware not to lift up your eyes to heaven and see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, and be drawn away and worship them and serve them, those which the LORD your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven."

-Deuteronomy 4:15-19

“Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. In the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept us safe among them... The animals had rights - the right of man's protection, the right to live, the right to multiply, the right to freedom, and the right to man's indebtedness. This concept of life and its relations filled us with the joy and mystery of living; it gave us reverence for all life; it made a place for all things in the scheme of existence with equal importance to all.” 

-Chief Luther Standing Bear

As a former monotheist, both I and other former monotheists I know often asked ourselves the same question: If there is a God, where is he? In fact through much of Jewish history this question gets repeated as well in another form: how long, God? How long until he acts, in other words. How long before he saves his people. For a deity that acts in and through the very Judeo-Christian-Islamic idea of history, not actually making history is rather a serious failing.

Polytheism has different sorts of problems but also some of the same problems. One problem I always had with it is the idea that there are exactly X number of gods (so there are exactly 26 and not 27?) But also, polytheism is still a theism. Gods are gods and not people or animals or places, there is a vast gulf that exists between a god and a spirit or a being. Gods in polytheism are still (generally) completely different kinds of beings from the beings we see around us everyday, and fundamentally inaccessible beings. In other words, polytheism is just like monotheism except there are more of them. ;) The actual is still deprecated to some degree in favor of an invisible arena that is off-limits to mortal beings. So just as we discussed in Part One, the actual real world is discarded in favor of a conceptual one. We are alienated from God by design, by the nature of our understanding of what a god is. We are ontologically alienated from him: he (or they) are simply not the same sort of being as the beings we know in our actual experience.

Honestly, everyone wants to talk with their god if they have one, and many theists do believe that they talk to him, but it is essentially a relationship with a person who doesn't talk back much. And it is a relationship to a person writ large, the otherness of god is not perceived as being an otherness of nature (Man is made in God's image) as much as an otherness of distance, and there is no easy way to overcome that otherness of distance. Otherness of nature to a degree is actually an approachable thing: for instance, my cat Mango has a very different nature from me in certain ways, but I can come to understand his differentness and perhaps he mine. It is an otherness that is not a closed road but an open one, an inviting one. An invitation to an enlarged reality. In any theism, that road is to some extent closed. You can't approach God beyond your intellectual assent to follow him, and God will let you know if and when he will approach you. God dropping in for supper might have happened to Abraham, but you certainly aren't Abraham. God is a rock star and you cannot have his autograph. For a theistic religion, whether polytheist or monotheist, respect is measured in distance.

Respect for life in a theistic religion is re-routed through these distant beings. You officially respect life, or at least other humans, because god told you to. I say officially because few people are so completely distanced from the real world that this is the real reason, but officially you respect life (usually narrowed to people rather than life as a whole) because that's what your god wants. Again, real-life respect is redirected to an abstraction as the cause of it. You don't murder because your god doesn't like it. As a result, this respect for life is also alienated from its real roots. Interestingly, atheists also locate the cause of their respect for life in abstractions, though they are different abstractions. This is because both atheists and theists are alienated both from god(s) and real life: theists are alienated from god because he is distant, and atheists are alienated from god because he doesn't exist. The left-brained, conceptualizing nature of atheists is fairly well known at least to non-atheists. It is as if what they think they are really is a cerebral cortex and the rest of their body is just the support machinery. In contrast, the nature of the self in animism and even in a vestigial form in Christianity is an embodied self. You are not just a brain but a whole being, a whole organism.

If respect for life is a dictate of a god, then when belief in that god fails the cause of respect fails. In the case of an atheist, if respect for life is a conceptual matter, then it is mere thoughts and as such lacks the substantive reality of scientific materialism.We are alienated from respect itself, respect for life or anything else, because our respect is re-routed through these fundamentally unreal things. Is it any wonder then why we are raping nature, why we are exploiting our fellow man? Of course we are, because our respect has been in one way or another attenuated to a godly ghost or a mental construct.

If you have already guessed what I am about to say, give yourself a gold star. :) Give yourself a hug from me in fact.

Respect is inversely related to distance.

We can have respect for all living things and each other because we realize we are related to them, we are not different in kind from them. I am not better than a grasshopper because I am bigger or smarter than one, nor do I in reality have any rights over that grasshopper that it wouldn't have over me if it had the power to enforce them. We are all kindred. I am kindred with the trees, with you, even with what is usually considered to be inanimate. I am kindred to water, because water made me and is in me. To kill a tree without cause is no different than killing a man without cause. Respect is the most fundamental perception of spiritual reality, more fundamental perhaps even than awe or wonder (though those are pretty fundamental too.) Yes, since animals and plants are a bit more distant to us than people, we tend to take respecting people more seriously, but that distance is of our own making or a symptom of our own neglect. Ultimately to disrespect any thing in the universe is to disrespect yourself or your blood relatives, because we are all in some way part of one body. We cannot live without the plants that give us air to breathe or food to eat; we cannot live without clean water and air. These things are a part of our bodies, but we are also a part of their bodies. If our respect is alienated from this fundamental reality, then it must wither and die to be replaced by hatred or neglect. As I touched on in the earlier post, even perceptually we are of a continuum with what is ordinarily considered to be other than us. Heidegger's convoluted quote that I shared in Part One, the realization of phenomenologists like Husserl or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is the same realization that native peoples have had all along. Our perception is embedded in a participant space of becoming and dreaming of becoming, there is no Cartesian objectivity to be had because we are enmeshed in being and in those things we call "objects" from the outset. To abuse an old detergent commercial: "Existence: you're soaking in it." ;)

In such a worldview, if there are gods they are not intrinsically more important than (or fundamentally different from) the fig tree in your front yard or the clouds in the sky. In most animist beliefs, even those which have some form of polytheism embedded, the most important relationships are the ones you are having right now with the beings in your revealed space. One example of that is Shintoism, which is a sort of modified animist religion. Some kami, spirits, are what might be deemed gods: Amaterasu, goddess of the Sun, is a legit goddess (though not different from the visible Sun). However many Shinto shrines are to very local kami: the kami of a particular waterfall or forest or place or spirits of ancestors who may have lived in that very same place. Kami and gods are not different in kind, gods are just a little more so. Susanoo, Shinto god of storms and seas, is in fact present in real storms and seas, not a sort of distant presiding official in an abstract heaven.

The failure of respect in the modern world is not simply something that affects other beings or people. The results of disrespect to the beings of the Earth and to people are serious to those beings and people, make no mistake. If you abuse any being, you are causing them harm, but you are also causing yourself grievous harm by cutting yourself off from your right relation to the world, your relatedness to the world. You are like a tree that cuts off its own roots in order to kill the rat gnawing on them. You are harming yourself AND everything else.

If you never take seriously any other words I ever say, take these seriously: learn your kinship with all other beings and how to respect all other beings, even inanimate ones. Do not accept it as an intellectual proposition or the dictate of your god: feel it in your blood. Feel it in your body, its relatedness to these very different and yet kindred bodies. Feel the flight of the mourning dove in your own body as if you had wings, feel the sunlight on your skin as if you had leaves. Talk to the plants and animals and attend to how they themselves communicate. Strange though it may seem to we alienated and estranged folk, this is the real spiritual world.