religion – Turning Signs

Forthcoming works

My ongoing revision of Turning Signs now includes the first 12 chapters. Along the way, it’s persuaded me that the book contains some important ideas relevant to the personal and systemic transformations we are all living through these days. Later on, I’m hoping to make some of those ideas more accessible through this blog. (More visually oriented, for one thing.)

In the meantime I’m looking forward to a couple of forthcoming books that have been recently announced. One of them is by Jeremy Lent, who’s been quoted here before: it’s called The Web of Meaning and will probably explore some of the same territory as Turning Signs. I expect his approach to it will be different from mine, which focusses on core ideas drawn from Charles Peirce’s philosophy of signs. So it will be interesting to see how much the two approaches agree on scientific, cultural and ethical issues.

Another forthcoming book of great interest is Richard Heinberg’s Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. If you follow that link and pre-order it, as i did, you get online access to a pre-release version. Based on my reading of it so far, it’s another wide-ranging interdisciplinary book about the biological and cultural evolution of power among humans. By studying the uses and abuses of power, it will draw some conclusions about how we might deal with the economic/ecological mess we humans have gotten ourselves into.

I’m happy to see that both Lent and Heinberg seem to honor the roles of both scientific and religious (or “spiritual”) experience in shaping human habits. There have always been people who were more science-minded than religious, and religious people who tended to distrust scientific thinking, and dogmatically driven people on both sides, but i’ve always found this mutual animosity lacking in common sense. Turning Signs delves fairly deeply into both scientific and religious experience, and the differences between them (see Chapter 8). My own research leaves me with no doubt that both are vital to human guidance systems, as i call them. That’s one example of an affinity i see between Jeremy Lent’s work and Richard Heinberg’s, and my own. But i trust that i’ll learn something new from them too.

Gratitude

In this Day the inner ear exclaimeth and saith: Indeed well is it with me, today is my day, inasmuch as the Voice of God is calling aloud.

— Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas

The assembly of students in the hall should blend like milk and water to support the activity of the way. Although now for some period you are either guest or host, later you will be buddha ancestors equally throughout time. Therefore, you should not forget the feeling of gratitude. It is rare to meet one another and practice what is rare to practice. This is called the body and mind of buddha dharma; you will certainly become a buddha ancestor.

— Dogen, ‘Regulations for the Auxiliary Cloud Hall at the Kannondori Kosho Gokoku Monastery’ (Tanahashi 2010, 39-40)

Spiritual revolution?

My ‘transition time’ post (which is below, if you are reading this on the weblog) referred specifically to solar power and electric cars. But it’s clear to me that technology alone will not save us from the mess we’re making of the biosphere. Public policy, set by governments at every level, will have to change radically. But many of our political systems seem to be dragging their feet on this, and some (such as the current president of the U.S. and premier of Ontario) are actively obstructing the transition. Partisan politics generally are not up to the task. We need some kind of revolution, in a more-than-political sense of the word.

Maybe it has to be a spiritual revolution. But that’s a loaded word; and even people who value the “spiritual” side of life often take a dim view of the organized spirituality we call “religion.” This is not surprising, given the history of oppression and mutual hostility we’ve seen from religious organizations. Still, how can people work together toward social change without being organized in some way? What can motivate people deeply enough to carry forward that kind of change, if not religion? Greta Thunberg has been called a ‘prophet’: if she’s not a spiritual leader for our time, who is?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the kind of questions we hope will spark a deep, open and honest conversation among our guests at the movie night we’re hosting tomorrow, at the Honora Bay Free Theatre on Manitoulin Island. The conversation will follow a movie called The Gate, about the prophetic figure who led a spiritual revolution in 19th-century Persia that prepared the way for the Bahá’í Faith. This is part of a worldwide celebration marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Báb (whose name translates into English as “the Gate”).

Another question is: in what ways does the Báb’s spiritual revolution connect with, or differ from, the kind of movement we need almost 200 years later, in 2019-30? The film shows how violently the Báb’s movement was resisted by the religious/political establishment of the time, and we can probably relate to that. As for the religious aspect of it, at least one blogger, Adrian Ivakhiv, argues that going forward from our time, some kind of ‘ecological religion’ will need to come together, uniting the various forms that now exist into a global movement that can ‘connect with social, political, economic, and other conditions/needs/movements.’ Religion as he defines it is ‘something like a system of symbols’ encompassing beliefs, deeply held values, and practices ‘by which people, in a more or less structured community, actively locate themselves in a world of power, meaning, and value that transcends yet includes them.’ We need to talk about how this can happen.

Our movie nights on Manitoulin are strictly local, of course, but i’d be happy to hear from other readers of this blog any comments they have on these questions.