A few months ago, in the entry Religious naturalism and religious thinking, we criticized the much-vaunted but actually non-existent benefits of religion within the context of philosophy (which actually does not exist) which eschews the regular supernatural components of traditional religious beliefs. We saw that:

• once you take the supernatural out of religion, you are left with nothing at all – that there is and can be nothing in naturalism deserving of the term “religious”;
• religious naturalism – in particular, John Bowie’s interpretation of it – postulates a deep-seated human need for various myths and stories, religious practices, and ethical frameworks which religious naturalism does not yet possess, and without which religious naturalists are apparently able to live spiritually fulfilling lives perfectly well;
• that religious naturalism – and religion in general – attempts to hijack numerous perfectly natural and human qualities and label them “religious” to justify their claims; and that
• by searching for answers to the “big questions”, religion – and religious naturalism in particular, by allowing us to see what happens when we remove the supernatural elements – clearly encourages and propagates the kind of conceptually mistaken thinking which causes people to ask those questions in the first place, and thus propagates the misery thereby caused in order that it can (falsely) claim to provide a solution.

Recently, continuing discussion over on “Swimming the Sacred River” demonstrated a marked reluctance on the part of Bowie in particular to address these issues, indeed having to defensively hide behind a long list of excuses in order to avoid doing so. The kind of basic questions being asked of religious naturalism boil down to: what is it? Why is it useful? Why should the sought after stories, practices and ethics be considered necessary if even religious naturalists appear perfectly able to get by without them? One would think that the creator of a blog dedicated to religious naturalism would be able to answer such fundamental questions with a snap of his fingers, but not only have answers not been forthcoming, but it appears that Bowie is incapable of providing them. He spoke of his desire for religious naturalism to become a “mainstream movement”, to which I replied:

Isn’t this putting the cart before the horse, a little? Doesn’t one usually have something to promote, and only then develop a “movement” to promote it? I’m confused as to how and why one would want to turn into a “mainstream movement” something that not only does not yet seem to exist in any meaningful form, and not only has no firm definition for what it would be even if it did exist, but something of which only the vaguest of statements can be made as to what even that definition might one day look like…all I really see when I look at [religious naturalism] is a combination of atheism and what I might loosely term progressive liberal morality, and the superstructure appears to have little purpose other than to attempt to justify that. Beyond those two things – which require no such superstructure [of the kind “Sacred River” attempts to provide] – to put it crudely, I genuinely cannot discern what you are trying to sell.

Further down that same comment:

The whole thing seems to me to be looking for a solution which will then and only then be used to try to find a problem to go along with it.

“Religious naturalism”, as it currently stands, clearly does not exist. The myths, stories, religious practices, ethics and beliefs which are intended to comprise it are not yet there, as pretty much all religious naturalists would agree. Yet people are writing blogs about it, and talking about turning “it” – if “it” is even an appropriate word for an entirely mythical movement – into the “mainstream”.

Once more, religious naturalism provides a good example of what religion is really about because it excludes supernatural beliefs (although it does, as we saw in the case of the so-called “big questions”, attempt to give some form of reality to non-natural things, even if they can escape the “supernatural” label). It also avoids the kind of wild mystical claims that many occult movements constantly make.

What we do see with religious naturalism is the search for a solution to a problem that nobody has. This is interesting, because when we normally look at religious (and we correctly include “the occult” within this heading) movements we are normally struck by the nonsense of their doctrines. The overtly supernatural claims of the Abrahamic religions are an obvious example, as are the claims of “praeternatural secret chiefs” or “hidden masters” in various types of Western occult movements. Conversely, when we look at religious naturalism, we see the entire religious “instinct” in and of itself being nothing but a misdirection.

To put it more clearly, Bowie asserts that he is “working towards developing something that can fulfill the spiritual drive”, but the very existence of that drive must be brought into serious question. Whatever that “something” that Bowie claims to be developing is, we can plainly see that it does not yet exist, and that it’s non-existence does not appear to be preventing anybody from doing, well, anything. Bowie and other “religious naturalists” already claim to be variously awe-inspired by the wonders of nature, to find “meaning” and “purpose” in the natural world, and to achieve all the other things the “spiritual drive” apparently requires, all in the glaring absence of this “something” that he claims is necessary to fulfill it. That being the case, why would anyone look for such a thing?

What we really have here is an unexamined belief that something unspecified is needed to fulfill an unspecified drive of a vaguely spiritual nature. What we see with religious naturalism is that the whole search for religion is itself a religious belief. Or, to put it another way, the search for religion is itself a religious practice.

To understand what we mean by “religious practice”, a good example arose recently on LAShTAL.com. In a thread entitled The Practice of the Magical Diary, Ian Rons criticised the usual justifications given for the practice in question and concluded that:

It sounds good and scientific to keep a magickal diary, but in practice it doesn’t really help…If it were scientific in any meaningful sense, Crowley’s followers would be working in teams (or at least pairs) and using basic stuff like thermometers, ECGs, EEGs, etc….I think you’ve hit the nail on the nail when you refer to the record-keeping as an “instruction” — a religious instruction that is an article of Crowleyan faith, not something that is done for any serious scientific reasons…I really wonder whether people don’t keep diaries in the same way that some Christians use worry-beads to count mantras, or whether (in fact) it isn’t actually a religious practice in itself, rather like prayer. Having had this discussion (following on from a recent, more general discussion about whether Thelema is a religion), I am now tending towards the latter view. Thelemites are told to begin a diary as their first and principal magickal practice, whilst the equivalent in Christianity or Islam is to pray and attend mass/masjid.

In other words, students of the occult are told – particularly by Crowley – to keep a diary or “magical record” for an number of reasons, from keeping scientific records of their “occult experiments” to achieving greater self-insight at a later date. What Ian is suggesting here is that – whether or not those claims are actually well-founded – most Thelemites never bother to find out, and those who do keep such a diary do so, in essence, because they are told to do it, and because they simply believe that is has value, not because they actually determine whether or not it does.

We might, therefore, define “religious practice” as:

a practice performed as a matter of faith; a practice which is believed to have merit, but whose merit is never examined.

Not all practices promoted by religions or performed by religious people will fall under this heading. In addition, a religious practice may actually have value, but what distinguishes a religious practice is that any such value is never actually properly assessed by the practitioner. Just as in  Religious naturalism and religious thinking we distinguished between “religious claims” and “claims made by religions or religious believers”, here we distinguish between “religious practices” and “practices carried out by religious believers or promoted by religions”, recognising in both cases that they are not necessarily the same.

Bowie’s search for religious naturalism gives us a striking parallel. He seems to believe that the religious trappings of stories, myths, practices, and ethics are necessary in order to “fulfill the spiritual drive”, but the fundamental underlying ideas that there is a spiritual drive that needs fulfilling in the first place, and that these stories and whatnot will be able to fulfill it, go completely unchallenged. The merits of the search for such a brand of spiritual movement remain conspicuously unexamined. There appears to be an underlying belief, indistinguishable from a religious belief, that there is a genuine need to be filled, and that such a project will be able to fill it. But, as we have seen, the fact that religious naturalists themselves appear perfectly capable of fulfilling whatever “spiritual drive” they might have without the sought-for trappings of religious naturalism – which everyone admits do not exist – should immediately cast severe doubt on this belief.

It’s important to distinguish this attempt to establish a movement from the individual ways in which the individuals in question may themselves achieve “spiritual fulfillment”. One doesn’t need a reason to gaze up at the stars and feel a sense of wonder, for instance, and the lack of a coherent theoretical framework for such an action may therefore be of no consequence. What is of consequence is the active quest to go out and try to find things which are “spiritually fulfilling” – what in some circles is called the “Great Work” – because one does need a reason to go so far out of one’s way to engage in such a task. If one does not have such a reason, then the “Great Work” itself is a religious practice of dubious merit.

Let us be clear what this statement means. Within the quest for the “Great Work”, one may select various practices to achieve particular aims, all of which are generally directed towards the completion of the “Great Work”. In other words, the motivation for performing all of these practices ostensibly is – obviously – the completion of the “Great Work”. We can, of course, question this assumption at this level of granularity. Ian Rons suggests, for instance, as we have described above, that the “performance” of the magical record may indeed be such a practice that is intended to – or believed to – facilitate the completion of the “Great Work”, but in fact may not. Ian’s comment was refreshing and valuable because it’s the kind of remark which sharply pulls the rug underneath from a view which is often taken for granted, taking the reader aback and forcing him to re-evaluate something which he may not have questioned for a long time (presuming the reader is open to challenging his own views, of course). For some, it can come as quite a shock to realise that they’re even allowed to think about such things.

However, just as any given practice may be simply believed – mistakenly or otherwise – to facilitate the completion of the “Great Work”, so the “Great Work” itself may simply be believed to be meritous. In other words, we can examine the possibility that people may not just be performing specific practices for no other reason than they’ve been told to by someone with religious authority, but that they are attempting to complete the “Great Work” itself for exactly the same insubstantial reason.

To address this issue, we have to start asking questions like: what exactly is “attainment”, or “enlightenment”? What exactly are we trying to accomplish? And why should, for instance, yoga or ceremonial magick reasonably be assumed to accomplish such a thing? Without addressing these questions, then the attempt to perform the “Great Work” – and the belief that one should – becomes a matter of faith. Bowie, for instance, appears to assume that some form of spiritual “movement” is just necessary as a matter of policy, that it’s just the done thing. The question of why one would or should attempt to develop such a movement remains under the radar, and the attempt becomes a religious practice in itself. Similarly, the occultist may hear or read from a variety of sources about the necessity or wisdom of accomplishing the “Great Work” without ever actually stopping to ask “why?”, without ever stopping to actually look at whether this is something he really wants to do. In such a case, the “performance of the ‘Great Work'” becomes indistinguishable from prayer, becoming an empty practice which is done more out of a lack of imagination than anything else. This is emphasized when we have posts like this from the same thread on LAShTAL.com which stress the importance of a “work ethic”. Occult discussion forums across the internet are littered with religious types who stress the importance of “doing the work” as an end in itself, explicitly treating them as religious practices rather than actual developmental aids whose effectiveness should be considered and analysed. Equally, we can consider the almost pathological aversion these types have to “reason” or “rationalism”, and reason has always been religion’s greatest enemy.

The “why?” question is complicated by the fact that it is inevitably left to the individual occultist/religious believer to evaluate it, and the obvious fact is that most of these people are complete dolts. Coincidentally, in another thread on the same site, Ian Rons also sparked off some debate about the “work” of the so-called “Typhonians”, after his hilarious review of Kenneth Grant’s “Outside the Circles of Time”:

there exists, we are told, an existential threat to humanity which requires us to buck up spiritually or face an Atlantis-like destruction…The threat is immediately complicated because, he says, Aleister Crowley and Meher Baba failed to utter the all-important “Word of the Aeon”, which means that in addition to the unspecified and presumably nameless perils, there’s also the problem of a “Wordless Aeon”, something “which has been dreaded and abhorred by the prophets of the past” (though, sadly, nowhere in print), which has to be faced without the usual “guidance from the supernal influences”…The depth of our spiritual plight means that the only way forward in this spiritual desert is, yes, to have astral sex with an assortment of “monsters” from the dungeon dimensions.

This resulted in the usual “of course he doesn’t mean it!” response from Grant’s tiny band of followers, such as this response from Kyle Fite:

Seriously, have you ever read Grant’s treatment of Cthulhu in Outer Gateways, in which he utilizes Lovecraft’s mythic forms to embody, via poetic expression, the obliteration of the ego through exposure to transpersonal consciousness? It’s almost like a Buddhist Sutra in its wild, colorful form and transcendent content. Passages like this that illumine what may be mistakingly read as a “literalism” elsewhere.

to which Ian replied:

The problem is that you lot aren’t interested in truth; and if you’re not interested in truth, you can’t possibly be interested in magick, except as you imagine it: head-wanking.

It is not adequate, of course, to have any old answer to the “why?” question we have already mentioned; it is at least implied that the answer should not be a stupid one. Suppose for a moment that Grant’s imbecilic gibberings are indeed not meant to be taken literally, and that he really is “embody[ing], via poetic expression, the obliteration of the ego through exposure to transpersonal consciousness?” So? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Just because Grant’s nonsense may “embody, via poetic expression, the obliteration of the ego”, it doesn’t follow that you’re actually are going to obliterate the ego if you do sit down and imagine having imaginary sex with imaginary alien spider-queens. Once again, just because somebody tells you that “worshipping seafood” will bring about “transpersonal consciousness”, it doesn’t mean that it actually will. Without the important step of actually trying to find out what you are really trying to do, and whether what you are doing is helping to do that, no amount of protesting that “I know ‘why‘! I’m obliterating my ego by calling on the Great Old Ones, of course!” is going to do the slightest amount of good. There is a significant difference, as Ian correctly points out, between actual spiritual attainment and “head-wanking”, and it ought to – but unfortunately does not – behoove the student to discover for himself what that difference is. If the student doesn’t, then what almost uniformly happens is that the “Great Work” he thinks he’s performing becomes a meaningless charade, serving no purpose other than to satisfy his own belief that he is, indeed, performing the “Great Work”. As Ian says in his review:

there is a general unwillingness to treat spirituality as a search, however hopeless, for truth, rather than as a game where you can invent the rules as you (or the “game master”) go along

If the “Great Work” is not a search for “truth” of some kind, then it is nothing at all, which is exactly what it becomes when folks like Bowie and Fite fail to even ask these fundamental questions.

There is a significant difference between these two examples, of course. In the realms of “the occult”, folks are usually concerned with individual attainment of some kind, whereas Bowie is more concerned with stories to make people feel good and ethics to make them play nicely together, but the common thread in both instances is that the entire scheme is nothing but a religious practice in itself, a mere empty and dutiful assumption that what is being performed  – or, in Bowie’s case, what is not even being performed yet – is something valuable. In both cases, the whole framework within which examination occurs is nothing but a house of cards whose lack of substance can be detected with a quick poke of the finger.

There is, of course, no overriding need to talk of the “Great Work” at all. It is quite possible to study the works of John Dee, for instance, from a purely academic angle. It is also quite possible to study ceremonial magick as a form of pure performance art, as silly as it might look to some. It’s only when people start to make claims of actual spiritual merit that the problem of religious practice comes in, when people start swallowing nonsense they’ve been told by their occult leaders, or randomly adopting some assumptions about the benefit of religion without actually inquiring into their truth.

The upshot of this all is that, just as Rons encouraged people to look more critically at the specific practice of the “magical diary”, so should people look more critically at the “Great Work” itself, instead of merely taking for granted that they’re doing something worthwhile because that’s what they’ve been told. What underlies their practice? What are they trying to accomplish? What need are they trying to fulfill, and what is currently missing that is being sought? Is the underlying problem a real one, or – as with the “big questions” religious naturalism attempts to answer – nothing but a failure to achieve a correct perspective, or, even simpler, nothing but a straightforward linguistic error? If alternative “states of consciousness” are being sought, how reliable is the assumption that achieving such states will have an appreciable effect on the quality of one’s daily life, or that such an effect will be in the right direction? How much of what you are doing is actually coming from your own legitimate response to the conditions of your own existence, and how much of it is simply swallowed wholesale uncritically from a bunch of outdated Victorian occult texts? How would you know if you had achieved success in a practice, or, indeed, in the “Great Work” itself? What constitutes “success” in the first place? What would indicate to you that a practice practice should be modified and/or discontinued? Are the experiences that you’ve had actually telling what you think they are, or have you veered off on a metaphysical tangent? Without asking these and myriad other questions, the student is simply flying blind, and his practice is an empty religious one, rather than a developmental one.