This is Water
An extract from 'This is Water'. While all this seemed pretty obvious up front, I found myself thinking about it a day or two later. It connects to my last post somewhat!
Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of
adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing
as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to
worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or
spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the
Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set
of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will
eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap
real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have
enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure
and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will
die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know
this stuff already — it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides,
epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping
the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel
weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the
fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up
feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're
evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day,
getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure
value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the
world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings,
because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on
the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship
of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that
have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The
freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the
center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But
of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most
precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of
winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and
being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over
and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.
The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the
constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of
adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing
as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to
worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or
spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the
Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set
of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will
eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap
real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have
enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure
and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will
die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know
this stuff already — it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides,
epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping
the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel
weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the
fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up
feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're
evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day,
getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure
value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the
world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings,
because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on
the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship
of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that
have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The
freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the
center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But
of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most
precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of
winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and
being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over
and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.
The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the
constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
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