“I believe what I see.” She said...with serene intelligence. She is a student of
human psychology: a learner and a searcher, open-minded and sober in
investigation, eager for meaning but thoroughly contemporary in her agnosticism
and skepticism, especially about wild claims about the invisible, spiritual
universe.
“I believe what I see.” This is good start, a wholesome and
trusting empiricism: “I believe…” An act of faith, trust, belief! I believe
what I see…I trust in my eyes …which are given to me to access what is real…and
will show me what is actually there beyond my own mind.
This is
already an act of faith: in my eyes, my mind, my natural capacities for
perception, and the validity of my senses and intellect. This reflects a
wholesome and naïve realism. Implicitly this involves a trust in Reality: that
there is an objective reality beyond subjective experience which unveils
itself, benevolently, to attentive eyes and inquiring intellects. After all, a
deep suspicion and distrust would discredit the validity of one’s own
perception and judgment: maybe I am dreaming, maybe I am deluded, maybe my
deepest thoughts and convictions are entirely the result of cultural
conditioning, of needs and desires, of my own peculiar and finite experience.
It is a good start to trust one’s experience: to look, and think and question
and listen and ponder…receptively, trustingly, gratefully.
Consider:
every act of perception and cognition is already an interpretation, an
intuition of meaning and purpose beyond the immediate, discrete sensory data. A
stranger smiles at you in the street: you smile back, having received it
trustingly; or you look away in defensive avoidance, or glare back angrily
muttering “What do you think you are smiling at, stupid?” You arrive at your
office on your birthday to find a bouquet of lovely flowers on your desk: you are beaming with delight as you already
have a sense of their origin and purpose. Indeed, the human mind is an unending
search for meaning and purpose: what does that smile or this bouquet mean? What
is it all about? What is the purpose of my life, of my yearnings, of my
suffering?
And so the
question is: What do you see?
Do you see a
bad infinity of hard molecules banging against each other senselessly? (Materialism?)
Do you see a
cruel universe where the deepest human longing for love and meaning is
ultimately frustrated? Where life is an endless battle between conflicting
wills, frustrated egoisms and and vicious tribalisms? (Nietzsche?)
Do you see a
futile cosmos that emerged senselessly from Nothing; that lacks any interior
coherence or meaning; that is doomed eventually to disappear into that same
Nothing? (Nihilism?)
Or: Do you
see a marvelous world charged… gratuitously, serendipitously…. with splendor,
surprise, and purpose?
Do you see
the love and compassion that moves you as an image of an even greater, an
infinite love and compassion that moves the stars and the atoms and the human
heart?
Do you sense
that the yearning that possesses your heart…and all human hearts…the desire to
love and be loved TOTALLY…Do you sense that this longing is destined to be
surpassed beyond its own limits?
What do you
see? Cherish your agnosticism as an impetus to learn! Continue to look, to see,
to question, to probe, to wonder, to marvel, to admire, to love, to thank, to
pray (even if skeptically), to sacrifice, to exult and delight in Reality with
all its Truth, Beauty and Goodness…and to Hope!
