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Creating Bridges: Spirituality & Philosophy:
Worshipping by Wondering with Sankara Saranam
Questioning Authority
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by Sankara Saranam |
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The greatest enemy to progress, which can be defined by the accumulation of knowledge, is centralized authority, embodied in political, religious, and/or economic institutions. As human beings we often take for granted that we need to follow an outside authority for answers to life’s questions, not realizing that we all carry the ultimate authority within ourselves. Our tendency to rely on the edicts and decisions of outside authority—both secular and spiritual—is extremely dangerous because it fosters a narrow sense of self that breeds divisiveness and negates intellectual and social freedom. So why do we continue to invest authority in external figures and institutions? What underlies their authority that makes it so compelling, century after century?
Authority, when all is said and done, is but a chimera of the present borrowed from an artificial past. Though it may be projected onto an institution, book, or figure, in fact it is based on individuals willingly giving away their authority to an individual or institution outside themselves. If an individual believes something because a person or book says so, the belief rests on the individual's decision to give authority to such a person or book. Therefore, arguments from authority eventually revolve back to the very individual who is making the argument, proving that he or she is the one who is truly assuming authority—even if professing to give it to someone or something else.
Knowledge is the ultimate weapon against centralized authority, because both religious and secular authority depend upon the privilege, information, and wealth of the few while keeping the masses in ignorance—providing a way for people to comfortably fool themselves into complacency and abrogate responsibility for their lives. The way to combat this and reclaim intellectual and social freedom is for the populace to gain knowledge. In this way we can starve both religious and political authority, because those who aim for authority and its commensurate social power are incapable of defending against knowledge.
Centralized authority based on a divine absolute truth is perhaps the quintessential negation of intellectual freedom and social liberty. Religious authority is the most insidious of all because it gives lip service to virtues, tempts the vulnerable self to partake of a narrow ontological identity, and predicates itself upon the circularity of a divinity that sanctifies its own authority. In 1885, Pope Leo XIII wrote in Immortale Dei: “To despise legitimate authority, no matter in whom it is invested, is unlawful; it is rebellion against God's will.” This represents a case of authority relying on a god predefined to support its own authoritative structure.
Claiming authority for a book, in the end, is no more than an attempt to justify a narrow sense of self. Pope Leo XIII reminded his followers that “The highest duty is to respect authority.” Religious authoritarians have always believed that seeking truth is unnecessary since God has delivered the truth already and that freedom of thought is dangerous, since the only thing we sinful or imperfect creatures would do with such freedom is engage in wrong thinking and damaging actions. Such authoritarianism maintains narrow thinking to this day.
Another kind of authority is the dreaded vox populi, or public opinion. This authority is probably genetically enforced to a degree, meaning it is an instinctive fear-based authority that protects social systems against radical changes and the chaos that comes with dissent. Still, it is reptilian and inhibits a progressively educated and keenly intellectual and intuitive society. Though every great advance in knowledge requires the rejection of all authority, dumbed down public opinion maintains that a basis for belief is found wherever authority is granted. It then attributes virtue to those who are eager to follow the lead and believe, and vice to those who question, doubt, or disbelieve. So for example, when Sean Hannity attacks his liberal guests for undermining Bush's presidency, he relies on a self-contained narrow moral system that does not account for other information, perception, and thought.
Habits like Hannity’s are not ideal for the health of a republic. The successful rule of the people is founded not on its brute authority, but upon its cooperative strength and indeed upon the healthy suspicion of those placed in offices of power. While authority demeans the human spirit, the height of human social aspiration can be achieved by the congregation of educated peoples who are sincerely interested in the highest good, understanding that reason, not arguments from authority, is the best way to arrive at that good.
Authoritarians claim that the highest good justifies their rule. Again, Pope Leo XIII in the same document supplies us with a perfect example: “Just as the end at which the Church aims is by far the noblest of all ends, so is its authority the most exalted of all authority, nor can it be looked upon as inferior to the civil power, or in any manner dependent upon it.” To a believer this view is final, but when deconstructed, it translates into a very different kind of statement: “I am above you and rule all of you because my idea of God, a projection of my sense of self, says so. My self-mystification says I am the best, but those who identify with me, in subservience, will partake of that mystification and feel pretty good about themselves too.” The consequence is that listeners with vulnerable ideas of self identifying with the Catholic Church compensate for their low self-esteem by buying into its authority. Replace the word Church with state or country, God with freedom or liberty, and civil with legitimate, and all today’s versions of Pope Leo are exposed.
The only way to fight such damaging and ultimately divisive authority is to expand the sense of self and identify with all of humanity, paving the way for a united human race. Fifty years before Christ was supposedly born, Marcus Tullius Cicero expressed human responsibility in these words: “We were born to unite with our fellow man, and to join in community with the human race.” But is such unity and freedom from authority possible? If so, why is it often permitted to betray the human race by indulging in a narrow sense of self, but rarely tolerated to betray one's clan, corporation, cult, or country?
The famous psychologist Alfred Adler once said that to be human means to feel inferior. Humans, perhaps in the face of life's uncertainty and mystery, have a tendency to feel helpless, compensating for that feeling with beliefs and actions that will result in a sense of comfort and superiority. Authority plays a crucial role in supplying that assurance and esteem. But those qualities, when provided by authority, translate into moral systems dictating how those who reject the authority should behave, providing a sense of moral superiority to those that accept the authority. Similarly, freedom often becomes that which those outside the narrow group identity must break their backs to afford those within it. Truth, of course, becomes whatever is believed in.
When the Swiss philosopher Henri Frederic Amiel wrote “Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender,” he was referring not to surrender to centralized authority but to the sacrifice of those very interests often satisfied by centralized power. In other words, authority subsists on those with a narrow sense of self willing to distance their power, and hence authority must foster the narrow self. Surrender may be selfish too since all actions and attitudes stem from a self, but Amiel’s remark points to the difference between the selfishness of an expansive self and a narrow one. Surrender in the spirit of uniting humanity and sacrificing our ambitions on the altar of inclusiveness and reason creates community with the human race.
Having an expansive sense of self means identifying with all of humanity, not just a select group. Someone with an expansive sense of self would understand the following statements: “I am hungry as long as another is hungry; I am homeless so long as another is homeless; I am uneducated as long as another is uneducated; I am abused, dehumanized, and murdered as long as others are abused, dehumanized, and murdered.” Since we are all part of one whole, in essence murderers murder themselves, the greedy starve themselves, warmongers keep themselves in ignorance, and those who promote social inequality lower their own social position.
Christian theology says that the guilty are absolved through the sacrifice of the innocent Messiah, but the principle of expansiveness turns this authority-based belief system on its head by arguing that guilt is collective—that the innocent are as responsible as the guilty. M.K. Gandhi in his work True Patriotism put it this way: “All humanity is one undivided and indivisible family, and each one of us is responsible for the misdeeds of all the others. I cannot detach myself from the wickedest soul.” In other words, only the larger self is real. Even if we do not identify with it or understand or accept it and argue against it as a model, our lives will still take into account the lives of all others. This means that authority is not real, but just another ghost story we repeat to obscure what we’re really afraid of: responsibility to our larger self. For example, today an unwillingness to fight and kill other humans is deemed unpatriotic by a reptilian society pretending to be humanitarian, while those against war are branded cowardly mice.
We talk about identifying with all of humanity, but what authority controls how we interpret the word humanity? As soon as nineteenth-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass proclaimed the rights of humanity as superior to the rights of a narrowly defined race, the self-proclaimed “superior” race agreed as long as blacks were not included in the definition of humanity. The minute homosexuals want to enjoy the social privileges of heterosexuals, the word “natural” is appropriated by the prevailing authority. Who owns the word patriot? Who owns the word God? Who owns America?
Practically speaking, temporal authority owns these words. Congregations of narrow-minded human beings, handing over their power to a centralized authority, imbibe meanings that empower an elite few while providing the illusion of comfort and esteem to the disempowered many. In our seemingly endless dialogue about the soul, spirit, self, and God, these words are often only marginally connected to human beings. Isn't a united humanity a large enough heaven, a big enough God, a great enough goal of spirituality? It's as if we want to forget the small detail of a united humanity when it is clearly the one overwhelming phenomenal challenge constantly staring us in the face. Doing so, spirituality then becomes yet another temporal authority to distance us from unity. After all, who can rightly claim there is less divisiveness among the so-called spiritual than among the religious?
Nearly everyone believes in the divinization of some segment of humanity, but relatively few believe in the divinization of all of humanity—even though reason would state that divinization is either for everyone or no one. I would go so far as to say that we are human beings before we are spirit. Certainly, spiritual philosophies claim we are spirit before human, if not spirit alone. But where did this idea come from if not a human being? And what use is this idea if it does not unite humanity here and now? Can it not degenerate into yet another ploy to create authority, provide ersatz comfort and self-esteem, and exploit others? "We are spirit" is a superfluous flash of words, for the idea of humanity is sufficient. Why distance ourselves from the truth by one step, and afford ourselves another blind belief gap, if not for the sake of irresponsibility?
Ironically, at this point in time the answer to authority is not no authority, but right authority. Since people are habituated into distancing their power, the only hope for undermining wrong authority is in providing an authority that, when mimicked, will help people regain their power—ultimately leading to self-surrender. In the meantime, instead of facing the impossible task of educating humanity in the ways of self-surrender, people's predilection to seek authority can be used to undermine that very tendency.
But where is our Gandhi, our Martin Luther King, to entice our hearts and minds, inspire surrender, and move us away from the mimicry of the Pope Leos of today? |
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Sankara Saranam,
Ascetic, Mystic, Author, and Teacher
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Sankara Saranam is an ascetic, mystic, teacher, and author of the award-winning book "GOD WITHOUT RELIGION: Questioning Centuries of Accepted Truths" (with a foreword by Arun Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma). He is also founder of the Pranayama Institute, where he devotes his life to making pranayama techniques available worldwide at no cost.
Sankara is author of the award-winning book GOD WITHOUT RELIGION:Questioning Centuries of Accepted Truths with a foreword by Arun Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma. In God Without Religion, Sankara shows why organized religion has long been the cause of humanity’s worst wars and most acute suffering—then guides us beyond our divisive history into more expansive perceptions capable of creating a unified, peaceful future. Through a series of penetrating inquiries and practices, readers are invited to examine their beliefs, turn inward, and develop a direct understanding of God.
“It’s possible to enhance your spiritual well-being simply by being curious,” Saranam explains. “Unquestioningly accepting inherited beliefs about God promotes a narrow view of yourself and the world. To expand your perspective, worship by wondering. The more questions you ask, the more profound the answers will be, leading to deeper questions. Constantly challenging your conclusions and refining your knowledge of God promotes deep spiritual growth that takes into account the well-being of all of life.”
For more information and a flash movie about the book, please visit:
www.godwithoutreligion.
com.
Writer and researcher, world traveler and lecturer, Sankara also playsclassical guitar, composes music, and writes poetry. He currently resides in a log cabin in northern Georgia with his wife and their young son. Information about his speaking engagements and teachings can be found at The Pranayama Institute's Web sites:
www.pranayama.org
and
www.godwithoutreligion.
com.
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