1. The World is Too Big
In the film, Man of Steel, there is a scene where the young Superman is in a classroom, and suddenly gets overwhelmed by his sensitivity to the world. He hears distant and even the most minute sounds – the clock ticking, sirens blazing, hearts beating, and even the sound of pencils scratching on paper. He sees food digesting in people’s stomachs, eyeballs rolling in their sculls, lungs inflating and deflating, and the clamour of his classmates’ sinister thoughts. Eventually, he storms out of the classroom, locks himself in a storeroom and covers his eyes and ears, hoping to silence the avalanche of information. Finally, his mother arrives, and he cries out to her, saying, “The world’s too big mom.” To which she replies, “then make it smaller.”
The irony is that the human mission is to make the world bigger – to break out of our biological limitations, as it were. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave[1], for instance, Socrates paints the picture of prisoners who, since childhood, are chained to the bottom of a dark cave. Their limbs and necks are shackled so that they cannot move. Behind the prisoners, a wall shields them from seeing anything except the wall in front. Above and further back, a fire illuminates the cave and the light shines on the wall ahead of the prisoners like a projector in a movie theatre.
Then, Socrates imagines people walking with figurines between the fire and the wall behind the prisoners, thus casting shadows in front of them. Bearing in mind that the prisoners have been chained there since childhood, their only conception of reality is the shadows that appear before them. The prisoners even interpret the feet shuffling behind them as coming from the animations on the wall – a kind of surround sound system if you will. As the allegory goes, the prisoners even develop strong feelings and beliefs about the different types of images they see, unaware that they are mere projections from a fire behind them.
Amazingly, this allegory was imagined more than 2000 years ago. Today we attend movie theatres, and even though we know that the film we are watching is not real, we nevertheless get taken in. We laugh, cry and even chant for the good guys, only to be rescued back into reality when the movie ends. This is a metaphor for our conception of reality. In the same way that the projection of shadows enthralled prisoners, and we are taken in by movies, our vision is similarly a reflection of light from objects into our eyes. Likewise, our eyes can only see a narrow spectrum of light compared to what actually exists – and the same applies to all our other senses. Needless to say, we consider everything we experience fundamentally real even though it is only a slender interpretation of reality.
It is from these biological and other limitations that scientists, philosophers and artists of all stripes have sought to break us out. Today, our tools help us see further, and travel faster; we are even immortalised on social media and YouTube. The byproduct of these advances, however, is that we are inundated. In some sense, we have arrived at the terrible realisation that the world is too big. However, there appears to be nobody encouraging us to make it smaller. Instead, the unspoken narrative is to make it even bigger. To add more.
2. Dilution of Reality
Fifteen years ago, I was fortunate to build tracking systems for cars. At the time, GPS was a relatively new consumer technology, and the idea that one could locate their vehicle on a computer, let alone a phone, was astonishing. The way GPS works is relatively simple. There is a constellation of satellites orbiting the earth more than 26,000km away.[2] When your phone tries to find a location, it connects to as many satellites as possible, which in turn respond with a signal relative to where they are. If the device cannot connect to more than four satellites, it reports a signal error. A good signal is usually eight satellites or more.[3] The more satellites, the more precise the location becomes – up to one metre.
In the same way that satellites improve location, attention improves our experience of reality. But what happens when attention is compromised? Our attention, nowadays, is pulled in multiple directions at any given moment. While eating, we are listening to music, watching television, writing emails and possibly stalking people on social media if not watching a movie. Therefore, the quality of our experience is greatly diminished; only one or two sensorial satellites, as it were, contribute to what becomes a partial experience (of eating, for instance). Thus, our reality is further diluted. This dilution is, of course, praised as our ability to multitask. The truth, however, is that we are robbing ourselves of the richness of experiences.
The way we perceive the world, therefore, has changed. Our ancestors did less but experienced more; we are doing more but experiencing less. Be that as it may, our biology has not evolved to account for this change. Therefore, the thirst and hunger for high-intensity experiences follows us as a shadow of dissatisfaction, boredom and loneliness, even though we are seemingly busy and endlessly preoccupied. We are fed but not nourished.
3. Transcendence
Spirituality appeals to us by offering an antidote to the dilution of experience. The spiritual path demands putting things down and reconnecting with one’s senses – at least as a first step. Having put down worldly contrivances, we are encouraged to take further ascetic steps by suppressing our desires for sex and food. In some Buddhist schools, for instance, inhibiting pain is celebrated as a milestone in spiritual development. This was put on full display in Vietnam in 1963 [4] when monks, protesting ill-treatment from the government, occupied the street and one immolated himself, marking a turning point in the history of Vietnam. In other spiritual schools, people fast until they are completely emaciated – they mummify themselves in the name of attaining spiritual awakening. The spiritual need of putting the world down, it seems, has its bizarre extremes as well.
Nevertheless, spirituality strives for transcendence through asceticism. That is to say, by suppressing our basic instincts, and in some sense, giving up who we are with the promise of discovering who we really are. On the other hand, technological innovation, and dare I say modernity, also strives for transcendence, although by challenging or even breaking our biological limits. Both paths appear to be destined for somewhere other than where we are. They both seem to say there is something wrong with where we are that we must find a sense of meaning elsewhere.
A Darwinian might argue that nature is always evolving, albeit slowly. Therefore technology only moves evolution faster! In other words, there is nothing wrong with breaking our biological limits because nature would have done that anyway, although slower. Of course, there are many questionable presuppositions about this point of view, but their justification for transcendence (or going beyond where we are) is that it is inevitable.
On the other hand, platonic idealists would argue differntly. For them, there is a perfect form to which all things aspire. The purpose of this life is to strive for perfection, or to realise our ideal. In the same way that Christ sacrificed himself in this life and became one with the Father, we too ought to sacrifice ourselves by subduing our deficiencies, and in so doing make a case for a place in heaven (or the forms). Therefore, they also support an idea of transcending, at least insofar as it brings us closer to perfection.
Existentialists might argue that the world is inherently harsh, and chaos beckons. Innocent children die, good people fall ill, natural disasters are amoral, and the clouds of evil always linger behind twinkling eyes. Therefore, there is no point in holding naive views or ideals; the meaning of life is not to be found in some ideal. Rather, it should be created by each individual by taking on the burden of responsibility for their life — by choosing to create order in a world of chaos. In this regard, responsibility is the means by which one transcends a naive sense of the world — it is the sense by which one effectively grows up!
While these perspectives are not exhaustive, they all appear to find faults or inadequacies in our present form — they prescribe some improvement, one way or another. Thus, the consequence that we are at loggerheads with ourselves as we are, and the antidote is transcendence in some form.
4. Nature’s Medicine
In 1903, Ralph Emerson made a similar case in his essay titled, Nature.[5] He remarked that “nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other’s hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapour to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses into rain; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal, and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish[es] man.”
Even though nature serves us, Emerson nevertheless laments our blind dissatisfaction. He complains that, for whatever reason, we scrape the earth and pave it with railway lines. “Mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, man darts through the country from town to town, like an eagle… By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon!” — how we have made the world unbearable by trying to make it more habitable.
As an antidote to man’s madness, Emerson prescribes solitude. He adds that even reading a book ought to be prohibited when in solitude. After all, books raise questions for which nature possesses answers. Solitude means walking amongst the trees and listening to the gentle breeze gossiping with the leaves. It means swimming in a river, feeling the pebbles at the bottom of the riverbed and allowing ourselves to be carried away by the current. And in the evening, it means gazing at the stars, the envoys of timeless beauty that remind us of the city of God.
Oh, Emerson! If not from nature’s wrath — earthquakes, hurricanes and volcanoes, or violent beasts — then it is certainly from the demands of everyday life that one is rudely awakened from this paradise.
5. A Clash of Two Worlds
On the one hand, we enhance ourselves to contend with the demands of the world. On the other hand, we feel a deep pull towards putting things down and replenishing our souls. The material world is at war with the spiritual and the prevailing logic is that we must choose one side over the other. We must either choose to be rich and miserable or enlightened and poor. I contend, however, that this is hardly a way to lead a wholesome life. There must be another way.
For starters, intelligence is the instrument we use to make a living in the everyday, practical world. Consider an unemployed person, for instance, who is tormented by purposelessness and the need to find oneself. At the core, they are actually looking for a niche in the practical world where they can make a contribution. Hence, when they find an occupation, their thirst for purpose temporarily goes away. Then, once they become comfortable in that niche, the nagging question of purpose returns, albeit at a higher level this time. Only this time, the answer can no longer be found in the everyday, material world. Instead, the yearning comes from the spiritual world.
The spiritual world, however, is different from the practical world because intelligence and utility have no place over there. This idea is not new. It was somewhat captured in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but more beautifully by the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism. A famous Zen Master, Hakuin Ekaku, sought to solve this problem by offering kōans to his students – riddles that cannot be solved with logic.[6] These included questions like, “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” A monk could not graduate until they found an answer. Needless to say, some of the responses were just as bizarre as the questions. Kōans were tools to cleave the mind from its fixation on logic. They were a way of leading the student to a different world which is better described by the Japanese word Yügen, or the Christian word, Grace. Sir Roger Scruton, an accomplished British philosopher, might have called it Home.
The thirst for a higher purpose, therefore, is not quenched by instrumental thinking. In an Emersonian sense, it is in the realisation that nature works charitably in service of our well-being that perhaps a clue hides. Therefore, instead of fighting, sometimes we can and probably should put down our weapons of intelligence and replenish our souls with the splendour of nature. Even in tragedy, such as watching a lion tearing into the flesh of a young gazel while its mother watches helplessly, somehow we find redemption in knowing that nothing in nature goes to waste. Therefore, violent as nature might be from time to time, we always return to it in search of a kind of cosmic hug or a sense of Home. Perhaps this is what we are truly yearning for…
6. Like a Cup of Tea
In one sense, the human condition is characterised by our limitations. We neither possess fangs to kill nor thick fur to keep ourselves warm in winter. Our intelligence allows us to create these extensions out of the remnants of nature – this is essentially what technology is, a need to complete ourselves. As we augment ourselves, however, we depart from who and where we are and slowly grow weary. Then, when we become tired of wrestling with the world, we develop a deep yearning to put things down and follow a spiritual path of replenishment. If we continue along this path, we may fall into yet another trap of suppressing our feelings and instincts, which is also a departure from who and where we are.
This way, we find ourselves pendulating between the material and the spiritual worlds in search of meaning and purpose. However, with this to-and-fro comes a different yearning, a yearning for rest or to be at home with oneself. But consider this: a boiling cup of tea cools down. A block of ice, left alone, warms up. Is it therefore possible that the path home requires that we surrender to the world as it is?
…like a cup of tea?
[1] Plato, The Allegory of the Cave. Brea, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2010.
[2] Federal Aviation Administration, “GNSS Frequently Asked Questions – GPS,” Apr. 23, 2020. https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ato/service_units/techops/navservices/gnss/faq/gps/ (accessed Sep. 23, 2020).
[3] Strava, “Why is GPS data sometimes inaccurate?,” Strava Support, Jan. 12, 2019. http://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/216917917 (accessed Sep. 23, 2020).
[4] R. F. Worth, “How a Single Match Can Ignite a Revolution,” The New York Times, Jan. 21, 2011.
[5] R. W. Emerson, Nature, Addresses and Lectures. Houghton Mifflin, 1903.
[6] Shambhala Publications, “Hakuin Ekaku: A Reader’s Guide,” Shambhala, Apr. 26, 2017. https://www.shambhala.com/hakuin-ekaku-c-1685-1768/ (accessed Sep. 23, 2020).
