There is a Zen saying that teaches that teachings are like a finger pointing at the moon; the finger is not the moon, and unless the student looks beyond the finger towards what is being pointed at, nothing is gained. It’s a pretty common postmodern-pluralistic assertion that Religion, Philosophy, Spiritual Practice and New Age Metaphysics all point to the same thing. Some will even say that modern science -- cosmology, quantum physics and evolutionary biology -- point there as well. But usually that is a way of saying that all these things point to the thing I believe in. But all of these fields of thought and practice are analogous to each other -- they all address the same fundamental questions at the same level; only the perspective differs. If it’s attached to a hand then it’s a finger, not a moon.
Coming to terms with non-belief has been a struggle for me. Over the course of two and a half decades (I started young) I have successfully practiced multiple examples of each of the above. In every case I experienced certain of the promised outcomes, and in every case it ultimately stopped short of showing me the moon. I have a friend who likes to tease me for practicing à la carte rather than committing to a single practice. One might say that the unfulfilled expectations were simply a matter of time. That may be, but the only way to prove it is to commit to a single path for a lifetime, at the end of which I may or may not know. I do not believe that this is a coherent proposition. Neither god nor nature could be so arbitrary and capricious. I believe the real problem is that we are still staring down our fingers and wondering why it’s so bright out there in the distance while we’re still here in the dark.
Having tasted the fruits of multiple practices and having come to the same realizations through each, I have come to a new perspective that I am going to try to articulate and develop. To be clear in terms of what this means, I have had experiences that conform to the Christian, Buddhist, Hindu/Yogic, New Age/psychic, and humanistic ideals. I have found the experiences to be identical although the descriptions and assertions that are canonically drawn from them differ radically. It is my desire to get to the heart of the matter -- at least as far as is humanly possible. And my experience has shown me that humans are capable of far more than we typically believe.
I subscribe to the [Ken] “Wilberian” approach of synthesizing the reliable points of many disciplines and perspectives and distilling from them the most discrete level of commonality, then -- in the formalized rational processes that our minds have evolved to utilize -- to build on what is known and to assert and test what is not known until something new is discovered that can be accepted as corollary to what is axiomatic and so forth.
I’m inclined to call this an “axiomatic spirituality” because I consider spirituality to be comprised of an epistemological foundation, a philosophical teaching, a moral/ethical framework and a developmental practice. But I’m afraid more people think of spirituality as having to do with metaphysical interpretations of existential experiences, and this specifically rejects metaphysics as an artifact of pre-rational interpretation of peak experiences. Also, I worry that people might mistake axiomatic for meaning materialistic-epiricist, which it decidedly is not. Rejecting the unexplainable is more dishonest than making up stories to explain the unexplainable. (This philosophy chooses not to attempt to explain the unexplainable or articulate the inarticulable. Those are addressed on the practical rather than the philosophical level.) So until I come up with something better, axiomatic spirituality it is.
My objective is not to find some new postmodern analog to religions and traditions. Rather, I am asserting that we have reached a point in human development where we are finally capable of transcending the finger and looking at the moon. But this demands that we be willing to give up that which is specific to the finger. It demands that we transcend belief. But this does not mean that belief must be abrogated entirely; following the assertion of Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, each level of development must transcend and include the previous, though incompatible and non-material parts of the previous necessarily fall away in the process. As such, some aspects of our belief stores will be compatible and relevant, and the others we must be willing to give up or they will be a boat anchor, holding us back from our developmental potential.
