The New Mysticism
What about the spread of Eastern religions and techniques within the West - things like TM, Yoga, the cults? We have moved beyond the counterculture of the sixties, but where to? These elements from the East no longer influence just the beat generation and the dropouts. Now they are fashionable for the middle classes as well. They are everywhere.
What has become important is not whether there is anything that causes an experience, but just the experience as such. What about modern theology in the churches? It is the same thing. Maybe the terminology is "Christian," but the ideas are on the other side - experience is the important thing, not propositions about reality, about God, about salvation and all the rest. It does not matter if anything exists that has caused or conforms to the experience.
What about the sudden growth of interest in UFOs and UFOlogy? Even though not a scrap of evidence exists to support Erich von Däniken's "scientific" theories about spacemen who visited earth in the distant past, millions of people have been taken with these assumptions. He has given his ideas an aura of scientific plausibility, plenty of technical jargon, photographs, and so forth, and because this is a "scientific age," people are impressed. But the real evidence is unconvincing. Is there conscious life in other parts of the cosmos? We do not know. If there is, it would pose no problem for Christianity. Still, at this time there is no proof at all that this is the case. Why then do people accept it? We suggest it is part of the swing to the irrational.
People are hungry for something which will give them hope in life. They are tired of the empty platitudes that politicians and many theologians have made: endless exhortations to be good, to be good, to be good! They are also afraid. Things really do seem hopeless, even on the level of everyday life with its threats of a lower standard of living, of a growing authoritarianism, of famine and ecological disaster, of devastating war. And they are looking for any answer. So the UFOs are messengers of a friendly race from another planet. "Do not fear - the Force is with you!" - to borrow from a current science-fiction film. And so people believe it irrationally. If they used their minds, they would see no evidence for friendly people from outside. But the feeling of experience as they read about this or see it on a screen is enough. It does not matter whether there is any reality to it.
What about the growth of occultism, witchcraft, astrology? Is it simply economics that has put the signs of the zodiac in shops from one end of our society to the other? In part it is economics, but, once again, the real reason is deeper. People are looking for answers - answers they can experience.
What about those who take drugs as a means of "expanding their consciousness"? This, too, is in the same direction. Your mind is a hindrance to you: "Blow it"! As Timothy Leary put it in The Politics of Ecstasy (1968): "Our favorite concepts are standing in the way of a flood tide two billion years building up. The verbal dam is collapsing. Head for the hills or prepare your intellectual craft to flow with the current." So we see again the rejection of the mind. The verbal dam, the concepts, the intellectual craft? These must be bypassed by the "new man."
Wherever we look, this is what confronts us: irrational experience. We must be careful not to be bewildered by the surface differences between these movements. We are not saying they are all the same. Of course there are differences. The secular existentialists, for example, disagree with one another. Then, too, secular existentialists differ with religious existentialists; the former tend to be pessimistic, the latter optimistic. Some of the movements are serious and command our respect. Some are just bizarre. There are differences. Yet, all of them represent the new mysticism!
The problem with mysticism of this sort is, interestingly enough, the same problem we considered earlier in relation to all humanistic systems. Who is going to say what is right?
As soon as one removes the checking mechanism of the mind by which to measure things, everything can then be "right" and everything can also be "wrong." Eventually, anything and everything can be allowed! Take a simple example from life: If you are asking for directions in a city, you first listen to the directions your guide is giving and then you set off. Let us say the directions are: "Take the first turn on the right, called Twenty-fourth Street; then the next turn of the left, called Kennedy Drive; and then keep going till you come to the park where you will see the concert hall just past a big lake on your right." Armed with there directions, you go along - checking up on what you have been told: "Yes, there is Twenty-fourth Street. Yes, there is Kennedy Drive," and so on.
In other words, you are not just told words; you are able to see if these words relate to the outside world, the world you have to operate in if you are going to get from A to B. This is where your mind is essential. You can check to see if the information you have been given is true or false.
Imagine, on the other hand, that someone said, in answer to your request for directions, "I don't know where or what B is. It is impossible to talk about a `concert hall.' What is a `concert hall' anyway? We can only say of it that it is the `Unknowable.'" How completely ridiculous for you to be told, "Go any way - because this is the way"!
The trick in all these positions is to argue first of all that the End - Final Reality - cannot be spoken of (because it cannot be known by the mind) and yet to give the directions to find it. We should notice, however, that in this setting we can never ask questions ahead of time about the directions we receive. They are directions only for blindfolded experience, the blind "leap of faith."
We cannot ask, "How will I know that it is truth or that it is the divine I am experiencing?" The answer is always, "There is no way you can be told, for it is an answer beyond language, beyond categories, but take this path [or that one, or another one] anyway."
Thus, modern man is bombarded from all sides by devotees of this or that experience. The media only compound the problem. So does the commercialism of our highly technological societies. The danger of manipulation from these alone is overwhelming. In the absence of a clear standard, they are a force for the control of people's minds and behavior that is beyond anything in history. In fact, there are no clear standards in Western society now; and where there is an appearance of standards, very often there is insufficient motivation to lean against the enormous pressures. And why? In part, at least, because there is an inadequate basis for knowledge and for morality.
When we add to this that modern man has become a "mystic," we soon realize the seriousness of the situation. For in all these mystical solutions no one can finally say anything about right and wrong. The East has had this problem for thousands of years. In a pantheistic system, whatever pious statements may be made along the way, ultimately good and evil are equal in God, the impersonal God. So we hear Yun-Men, a Zen master, saying, "If you want to get the plain truth, be not concerned with right and wrong. Conflict between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind."
Society can have no stability on this Eastern world-view or its present Western counterpart. It just does not work. And so one finds a gravitation toward some form of authoritarian government, an individual tyrant or group of tyrants who takes the reins of power and rule. And the freedoms, the sorts of freedoms we have enjoyed in the West, are lost.
We are, then, brought back to our starting point. The inhumanities and the growing loss of freedoms in the West are the result of a world-view which as no place for "people." Modern humanistic materialism is an impersonal system. The East is no different. Both begin and end with impersonality.
We have looked at reasons for concluding not merely that these world-views are uncomfortable because they lead to inhumanity, but because they are false. They do not fit into what we know best about ourselves and our environment. Ours is a universe which contains real personality. Neither the universe nor this personality is illusory. We will turn now to the Bible's claim to be the reliable source of information about the universe and mankind. But first, there are two very important introductory comments.