Totality Beliefs and the Religious Imagination

Totality Beliefs and the Religious Imagination

Anthony Campbell

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2009 Anthony Campbell

Smashwords Edition: Licence Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share it with someone else, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

About the author

Anthony Campbell was a consultant physician at The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital (now The Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine) for over twenty years. He retired in 1998. He has published books and articles on homeopathy, medical acupuncture, and complementary medicine as well as three books on back pain for patients. He has many interests outside medicine and has published a novel as well as several books on non-medical topics, including two on Transcendental Meditation, which are discussed in this book.

For M-C, who profoundly disagrees with me but respects my right to have a different opinion.

Reviewers' comments

I especially like Campbell's autobiographical approach to religion, where he explains his religious journey throughout his life. This gives him an opportunity to present some arguments, but more importantly, to put these into context and tell the reader why those arguments moved him. The result is not so much a philosophical meditation as a story. And such a story is powerful in its own way. Reading it is like listening to the wisdom of a thoughtful person who has had interesting experiences in a long life. Because this wisdom is based on an individual's experience, it is to a certain degree personal. It may not always be easy to generalize and make into an abstract argument. But I find it fascinating and valuable nonetheless. [Taner Edis]

Anthony Campbell gave the rather challenging title of Totality Beliefs and the Religious Imagination to what is really a most readable autobiography, a story, during which he shares a remarkable depth and breadth of knowledge and a distillation of his personal philosophy. We read biographies not just as non-fiction stories, but also in hopes of finding something about ourselves as much as the subject of the biography, and Campbell's story is one in which many will find a mirror, reflecting, and perhaps rendering more clear, their own thoughts about this life. [John Floyd]

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1. The Casaubon Delusion

Chapter 2. Roman Catholicism

Chapter 3. Starting TM

Chapter 4. Doubts and Difficulties

Chapter 5. Moving On

Chapter 6. Mysticism

Chapter 7. The Religious Imagination

Chapter 8. Buddhism

Chapter 9. Miracles

Chapter 10. The Soul

Chapter 11. Letting Go

Appendix: References for Chapter 9

Bibliography

Preface

There are many motives for writing, but one is to clarify one's ideas to oneself. The result is more a voyage of exploration than a formal setting out of views. This book is in that category – written in the first instance for myself, though I hope it may be useful to at least some readers. The ideas I look at here have been in my mind for more than fifty years, so it seems that now is the time to put them down on paper if I am ever going to do so.

Many books criticising religion have appeared in recent years, but most have been written by people who never had a religious belief or lost it early in life. This one is different, in that it offers an inside view of what it feels like to be immersed in two quite different religious belief systems and then to leave them. At various times in my life I have been involved in Roman Catholicism and in Transcendental Meditation (TM), which is based on Indian (Advaita – non-dualist) metaphysics. Many years ago I wrote a book on TM called Seven States of Consciousness. Occasionally someone who has come across my website sends me an email to ask if I am the Anthony Campbell who wrote the book and, if so, do I still agree with what I wrote there and do I still practise TM? The answers I give to such people are usually greeted with silence; I never hear any more from them.

I don't much like having to reply to these correspondents because simple yes or no answers to their questions would be misleading and to reply in more detail would require more time and space than an email could easily accommodate. In a way, this book is a reply to questioners of this kind but its relevance is, I hope, not at all confined to people who practise TM or have given it up. I am writing here for people who question the need to adhere to any totality belief system. The book may be useful to anyone who thinks they are reaching a similar position but wonders what it will feel like if they let go. I want to show that letting go can actually yield a great sense of freedom.

Whatever I may have been in the past, today I regard myself as a fully paid-up supporter of the values of the Enlightenment – the intellectual movement which began in France, Germany and Britain in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries (historians argue about the exact chronology) and advocated reason as the primary basis of authority rather than revelation.

These values are under attack today in all kinds of ways. I may even have contributed to this myself in the past, by using enlightenment in a different sense, to mean almost the opposite – to refer to a mystical form of illumination that is non-rational. So this book is, in a sense, a recantation of former views, but no matter. I have always believed that we should be prepared to change our minds when the evidence demands it.

It hardly needs saying that a book of this kind must be deeply indebted to the ideas of others. There are few original ideas, particularly in religion. The Bibliography lists all the books referred to in the text and also others that I have found useful in helping to shape my thoughts.

Chapter 1. The Casaubon Delusion

It is perhaps surprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religious belief affords as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true; therefore it is true. – William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience).

It is said that when the writer Gertrude Stein was dying, her companion, Alice B. Toklas, asked her urgently: Gertrude, Gertrude, what is the answer? To which Gertrude replied, very reasonably: What is the question?

Alice's question was about the Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything. In Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the supercomputer Deep Thought gives us the answer to such a question, which is Forty-two. This may be about as far as we are likely to get with all-embracing questions about ultimate meaning, but many of us find it hard to accept. There seems to be something in the human mind that is always searching for totality answers, for all-encompassing solutions. But it is a perilous quest. It can even degenerate into a kind of madness.

The Casaubon delusion

In George Eliot's Middlemarch Edward Casaubon spends his life in a futile attempt to find a comprehensive explanatory framework for the whole of mythology. He is writing a book which he calls the Key to all Mythologies. This is intended to show that all the mythologies of the world are corrupt fragments of an ancient corpus of knowledge, to which he alone has the key. He is, of course, deluded. His young wife Dorothea is at first dazzled by what she takes to be his brilliance and erudition, only to find, by the time he is on his deathbed, that the whole plan was absurd and she can do nothing with the fragments of the book that she is supposed to put into order for publication.

In memory of Mr Casaubon, such attempts to find all-encompassing explanations might be called the Casaubon delusion. It is due to an almost pathological overgrowth of pattern-seeking behaviour, which pushes a normal function of the mind beyond its limits. Sometimes it takes the form of believing that the universe is constructed like a giant cipher, a cosmic intelligence test set for us by God which it is our business to puzzle out. Complete esoteric systems have been founded on this belief. Mr Casaubon was part of a long tradition.

For an example of a real-life Mr Casaubon one might take the late John G. Bennett (1897–1974). He was a man of great ability and intelligence, first chairman of the British Coal Utilisation Association, who spent most of his life pursuing enlightenment in one form after another, always hopeful but always more or less disappointed. His quest began when he was blown off his motorcycle by a shell in France in 1918 and spent six days in a coma, during which he had an out-of-body experience. This convinced him that we survive our bodily death.

After the war he served as an intelligence office in Turkey, which stimulated his interest in Sufism. There he also met G.I. Gurdjieff, the Greek–Armenian teacher and mystagogue, and his pupil P.D Ouspenksy. He became convinced that Gurdjieff knew many secrets and had the key to enlightenment, and he worked intensively with both these teachers between the wars.

For much of his life Bennett was affected by the belief that there is a secret organization of initiates, Masters of Wisdom based in Central Asia, which guides human affairs. He was convinced that Gurdjieff had made contact with these people and was in some sense their representative, and it was his ruling ambition to reach them himself. In 1945 he set up an establishment at Coombe Springs in Surrey, where he taught his own version of Gurdjieff's System.

In 1962 he met Idries Shah, who was claiming to have made contact with the Guardians of the Tradition or what Bennett called the Hidden Directorate, the source of Gurdjieff's knowledge. Bennett was at first wary of Shah but soon became convinced that he was genuine. After some hesitation he prevailed on the Council which acted as trustees to give Coombe Springs to Shah outright, believing that Shah would use it to establish a Sufi centre. Shah promptly sold it at profit to a housing developer.

At various times in his life Bennett became involved not only with Gurdjieff and Ouspensky but also with Subud, Roman Catholicism, Hinduism, Sufism, and Transcendental Meditation. In fact, one gets the impression that there was hardly any major twentieth-century religious or esoteric movement that Bennett did not try. Towards the end of his life he decided that it was finally time for him to be a teacher in his own right, and he set up the International Academy for Continuous Education at Sherborne, in Dorset. It seems that in his last year he was trying to create a way of worship that would be suitable for people without a formal religious orientation. His followers tried to continue with his ideas at the Academy after his death but within a few years things fell apart.

Whether you choose to call extreme spiritual seeking of this kind delusional is, I suppose, a value judgement. Much hinges on whether you think there is something to be found. But even if it is delusional, it is merely an exaggeration of the inbuilt pattern-seeking tendency we all have, without which there would be no science or art.

The same pattern-making tendency can be seen at work if you are listening to people speaking an unknown language, especially if you are not attending closely. You may be startled by apparently hearing a word or phrase in your own language. It was not really there, of course. Your brain picked out certain sounds and mistakenly interpreted them as meaningful. A few years ago there was a vogue for claiming that the voices of the dead could be heard in the static picked up on the radio between stations. The same phenomenon was at work there.

At a still more abstract level we instinctively seek for meaning in the events that happen to us, and the more important the events, the more we want to find meaning in them. It is difficult, for many people impossible, to accept that there is no ultimate meaning in our lives, our illnesses, our deaths. The search for meaning is what gives rise to religions.

This pattern-seeking capacity must certainly go far back in evolutionary prehistory. Whether as hunter or hunted, animals need to be able to pick out and identify meaningful patterns in their environment. The tiger looking for an antelope amid the leaves of the jungle, the antelope watching out for the tiger, or a bird trying to pick out a moth camouflaged against the bark of a tree – all these are seeking for visual patterns. We have to do the same thing when we cross a busy road; we won't last long if we fail to spot the pattern of an oncoming bus.

I lived at one time in a house which contained a lot of abstract paintings, many made with the artist's hands instead of a brush. I happened to be in a room where one of these works hung on the wall when a visitor arrived and stared at the painting. I can't make anything out of this, he said. Oh, it's easy, I said; look, it's a garden in sunlight; there's the pattern of the leaves, there's a summerhouse … and I went on to describe various things you could make out in the painting if you looked at it closely. The visitor was convinced and went away quite impressed. I myself was sure that these things were there to be seen, in a sort of pointilliste representation. But, talking later to the artist's wife, I discovered that the painting was purely abstract and none of the things I thought it represented were supposed to be there at all.

Religion and the Casaubon delusion

Many people tell you that their religion is the most important thing in their lives, yet if you accept some of the criticism of religion that has appeared in recent years you would undoubtedly have to conclude that all of it is an example of the Casaubon delusion. Writers including Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett have all, in one way or another, told us that religion is a delusion. In fact the title of Dawkins's most recent book on the subject is The God Delusion. If they are right, it follows that most of the world's population is deluded, since the majority believes in one religion or another. And even in a secular society like that of Britain today there are plenty of educated people, including scientists, who say they are Christians. Are we to conclude that they are all deluded?

It may be helpful to put the matter in a slightly less emotional light by looking away from religion and thinking instead about some philosophical ersions of totality beliefs. The great metaphysicians such as Plato and Spinoza have produced thought systems that are not religions but answer similar questions to those addressed by religions. As Stuart Hampshire acknowledges, the construction of such systems approaches and may even exceed the limits of human reason.

But one must also understand the motives of those who overstep these limits in pursuit of complete and final explanations [my italics], since these are the perpetual motives from which philosophy itself arises; and even the most critical may respect and enjoy the extravagant extension of pure reason in its furthest ambition.

Spinoza is particularly interesting because he occupies an equivocal position between philosophy and religion. In his own day he was reviled as an atheist; today he is often called a pantheist. He rejected revealed religion as superstition yet in his writing he frequently mentions God. But Spinoza's God is not personal, and you certainly don't pray to him. He is also not transcendent, not distinct from the universe. In fact, he is the universe. The phrase Spinoza uses to describe him (or it) is God or Nature. From some points of view Spinoza might be called totally irreligious, which is what he seemed to his contemporaries, but from another he could be said to have isolated the true