What Can’t Be Mechanized

The religious life is a good candidate. But when I think about that, I realize that the religious life is just one aspect of individual soul development. Learning can’t be mechanized either. My meaning for mechanized? I mean repetitive behavior, following rules, repeating formulae, willing the truth of doctrines as opposed, say, to penetrating to their core meanings. The worst kind of mechanization, of course, is tribal behavior—where the faith is just a label of belonging to an “us.”

Excessive use of abstraction is a particularly dangerous habit in those spheres where the genuinely human is the core—provided that my own conviction is correct, namely that we belong to a much more sophisticated, subtle, and free order as souls than we do as embodied souls. It is a mistake to think that people who belong to one of the great religions, especially those with lots of ritual, are uniformly following rites and nothing else is going on. As there are no two snowflakes that are identical so also no two Catholics, Baptists, Buddhists, or Muslims are identical either, or any two adhering to yet some other faith—or none; vast differences separate individuals.

To the contrary however, all athletes train the same way and underpinning all good bridges is genuine engineering functionally identical, whether in their design computers, slide-rules, or just plain reasoning and experience guide the construction. The physical and soul realms have radically different characteristics. The soul escapes all mechanical constraints; you can put the harness on, but it won’t hold the horse. That is both a blessing and a problem. If only we could find the magic phrase or the right sequence of motions…

There is a big difference between the channel that brings the water and the water that it brings. All religious battles are about stonework, embankments, depth, shape, decoration, and such—the engineering of the channel. Interesting subject, to be sure—but the water is the same in all and what it’s all about. But while the human body needs the ordinary water and knows precisely how to use it, individual reception of the higher water, Grace, is much more subtle and complicated. We thirst for it but don’t know what we thirst for. In that realm, where mechanics have no rooting at all, the process of development is invariably and damnably subtle. We have to develop enough as individuals—whether in a system or outside it—before it begins its work in us. It requires learning; but how that process actually takes place is a great mystery, despite vast Babels of learning applied to education all over the world—as, seemingly, we get ever more stupid.