Power Tempts

Many who reject religion and wouldn’t be caught dead engaged in “worship” are nonetheless temped by spiritual power. People who lean this way are reassured by naturalistic descriptions of the spiritual. If the spiritual is a higher or occult kind of power, a power we can tap, capture, and deploy to benefit ourselves, why—that sounds like science. Science? I’d call it magic.

But we’re all of us subject to this temptation. As we emerge from matter, we all go through a magical phase. Some of us get stuck there not because we manage to develop genuine powers but because we discover that we can attract attention and even make money by exploiting the mysterious. At one level attention is money. The magical, however named, is a sizeable industry, its products: books, movies, services, training, music, holy objects with special virtues, websites, and many kinds of groups. People pass through these groups like water through a filter; they leave money behind as they pass. They come expecting powers, are disillusioned, and flow on to other fake “attractors.” Guardians of these faux treasures benefit.

Fear is the other side of power. To conquer fear is to gain power. An element of trade, of quid pro quo, adheres to many religions despite the best efforts of individuals within them to combat this ultimately low tendency. The verse from Proverbs (1:7) is instructive as well as subtle: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” This single sentence in a way sums up the essence of transcendental experience. The fear is a beginning point, felt by those who are becoming conscious. What is rarely stressed is the important word in this verse: beginning. Fear is just a stimulus, the lowest form of an emerging knowledge. I note here in passing, as it were, that our success in mastering nature, illusory though it is—and the great improvement in our standard of living—is the best explanation for the decline of organized religion. Fear has been lowered. I call our mastery illusory because it greatly depends on fossil fuels; and those we shall eventually exhaust; then fear may return and, quid pro quo, religion will once more thrive. An early illustration of this? Church attendance surged immediately after 9/11. Has that surge lasted? I wonder…

Serious travelers of the Borderzone eventually discover that such travel is like art: you do it for its own sake. Indeed, if done for any other reason, it isn’t genuine travel, so to say, but just a form of tourism: snap a few photos and gather a subject or two for conversation once you get home. “Why, the last time we were at the Riviera…”

One of the best-known Sufi saints—and virtually none is known in the West—was Rabia al-Adawiyya (717-801 AD). She put this matter succinctly: “If I worship you for fear of hell, condemn me to hell. If I do so in hope of paradise, deny me paradise.” Why do I cite a Sufi saint of Basra, in Persia, rather than, say, one of the many Christian saints, not least St. Teresa of Avila, who voiced many of the same sorts of sentiments? Here is an sample: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” I cite a Sufi saint because outer forms wear out. There is a reflexive rejection in the West of our own traditions and experience. But we must remember this: all those who wander the hidden ways are in the same country and hold the same citizenship, but people get confused by the different traditional garb that they wear.

Reality and its phenomena always have a naturalistic aspect—which does not mean that there is no awareness and personality behind them; there always is, as in us. To rely on one side of this coin and neglect the other is to worship power ignorantly. Yes, power is tempting. The paradox is that our actual possession of it manifests when we no longer seek it. At that point we’ve made a few steps past the beginning and the radiance of wisdom begins to manifest like a predawn light under the horizon.

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Picture credit: Wikipedia here.