our choices. That doesn’t mean it’s created in isolation. We inherit our beliefs and values from existing religions, philosophies and our culture. Regardless of those sources, we have to live out our worldview for it to be real.
We rely on second-hand knowledge for many things in our lives: our doctor for knowledge about our physical health, our accountant for our financial health. But when it comes to a worldview, second-hand knowledge won’t do. Our choices of how to live are not only personal, they define who we are as a person. What we value and the ideals we pursue must be authentic, arising spontaneously from our inner nature. And the true expression of our nature is shown in the way we act.
Fidelity to our ideals
If religion is orientation toward a highest good rather than assent to a set of beliefs, then faith isn’t belief without evidence. Faith is fidelity to our ideals. Fidelity is an old-fashioned word. It’s not flashy or exciting enough for marketing copy. It’s not impressive in any given moment, from the outside it looks rather dull. The truth of our fidelity is found in the small but consistent actions that show we are true to our ideal.
When we expect our faith to overcome intellectual doubt, we’ve reverted to thinking of faith as belief in facts. When we continue despite our doubts, that’s faith as fidelity. Faith doesn’t defy or deny the intellect. It recognises its limits and steps out into territory the intellect can’t penetrate. Fidelity isn’t holding on in spite of not knowing, it’s the shape a life takes when it’s lived honestly at the edge of what can be known.
When we look back on a marriage that lasts through the long decades of a life, we find the satisfaction and the love were in the commitment. At first we have only the promise, a verbal and legal contract. But fidelity goes beyond the legal contract and fulfils the substance of it. Our actions are the substance of a marriage.
The commitment isn’t an intellectual acceptance of a theoretical truth. Faith is the theory brought to life. It’s an act of will, not a belief.
Faith is orientation without guarantees, and on that basis, we must step out alone in untraveled territory. Doubt and hesitation can’t help us, they’ll paralyse us on the threshold. You can’t know the truth of faith by affirming it in theory, by preaching its glories to others, or by casting doubt on its virtue from the side-lines. You must live it and experience it first-hand.
Grammar, not vocabulary
This conception of religion leaves room for many vocabularies. The structure gives the grammar, not the vocabulary. It describes how a relationship with the highest good is structured, what it must include and how its parts relate to each other. The vocabulary builds the words on that structure: it names how you understand the highest good and the practices you undertake to reach toward those ideals. The words are unique to each individual.
But unique doesn’t mean arbitrary. This is like a plant that can only flourish when it’s in harmony with its environment. Each individual has unique characteristics which must be aligned with its environment, and those conditions are independent of the individual’s preferences; they’re an objective standard.
Two different plants growing side by side may not flourish under identical conditions. That isn’t relativism; flourishing occurs when the nature of each individual organism is brought into relation with an objective structure, its environment. Only when the individual is aligned with the external conditions can a harmonious resonance be achieved.
Because each individual is unique, we can’t outsource this alignment. We have to discover it through our own participation, no society or tradition can do that for us. Sometimes that means going against prevailing opinion, because harmony is determined by alignment with the structure of reality itself, not by alignment with the group consensus.
Value isn’t created by participants but discovered through alignment with a prior structure. It’s real and out there to be discovered, but only you can find your particular path to it.
Having an individual vocabulary doesn’t mean there’s no truth and all religion reduces to personal opinion or preference. The ultimate nature of reality is independent of our beliefs about it, and that independence is what stops the personal and individual nature of religion from collapsing into a relativism. Our worldview names the alignment of our will and describes what we aim toward as valuable.
One reality, many levels of realisation
Our freedom lies in our independent choice of the relation we adopt toward the Absolute, how we stand to face it and how we interact with it. No one can occupy our standpoint, adopt our orientation or make our choices. That’s what our freedom consists of. But the deepest nature of the Absolute isn’t ours to choose. It exists independently of what we know about it or how we feel about it. Reality stands in the absolute position. We can only choose how we stand in relation to it.
These different choices are also different understandings of what reality is like. They’re different levels of realisation. Reality itself doesn’t have levels; our knowledge of reality does. Think back to the king, someone who doesn’t believe the king exists, or a citizen only obeying the king’s impersonal decrees isn’t living in a different reality. There’s only one king, and each person has a partial understanding of him. Their understanding doesn’t include his personal features, only the enactment of his power.
Our knowledge of the king deepens through our relationship to him, and how much of him we know and experience in our lives. Knowing a person is a type of knowledge that can only be discovered by interaction. You don’t need to know everything about a person to start a relationship, your knowledge can only deepen once you begin moving toward them.
Knowing the king personally means adapting our will to align with his. We can follow the laws he sets, but when we voluntarily align our will with his, it creates a deeper relationship of friendship and love. It becomes our will to please him.
When it comes to the plurality of worldviews, the same principle applies. The Absolute is known in levels of realisation, and these levels represent our knowledge of the highest good. Each of us understands the highest good at varying levels of resolution. If we’re viewing a mountain from a distance, we see it in lower resolution, it appears as a hazy blob on the horizon, but as we move closer we see more detail.
Your worldview isn’t something you have or don’t have. It’s not a property you possess; it’s the state of your consciousness. Knowledge is a state of consciousness, so there isn’t some other thing beyond consciousness called knowledge. When one person speaks from inside their own orientation and describes the deepest level of reality, they aren’t wrong; they’re accurately describing what they see. That’s what depth sounds like, spoken from inside it, rather than described from nowhere.
We can of course be wrong about the ultimate nature of reality, but our worldview isn’t merely a theoretical stance, a ghost’s-eye view from nowhere. Our judgements about the ultimate nature of reality determine our stance toward the world and how we respond to it, but our interactions also determine our view of reality’s true nature.
A worldview that can change
Our worldview is a dynamic structure: we continuously update it with new discoveries, both theoretical and practical. We’re not committed to a rigid identity label and so not forced to adapt our experience to fit the theory. We’re not restricted to an eternal set of propositions or one method of discovery. We’re free to trust our own judgement and adapt our worldview accordingly.
If we find an organised religion that has doctrines we can’t believe, but being a part of the community of believers helps us be more honest, more compassionate and loving people, there’s no contradiction in our participating. If we find that we’re more motivated outside any organised community we’re free to walk alone. If we find wisdom in another tradition we can incorporate it into our own set of values.
This is a structure that can function in our modern culture. It leaves room for the freedom of individual conscience while retaining debate and a cooperative search for knowledge. It avoids tribalism since we’re all a religion of one. As such we’re unlikely to be confident that our beliefs are absolute truth writ in stone. At the same time, we know that only we can decide where to place our next step, and we can only do that from where we stand now.
Our worldview isn’t a purely intellectual structure, so its truth can’t be judged on only one axis: it encompasses both theory and practice. On the theoretical axis, we judge its truth by its correspondence with reality. This is the only axis that religion as belief can accommodate. But on this model of religion there’s also a practical axis, and it must be judged by how closely we enact our metaphysical theory. If we claim to value honesty, or think that treating others with love and respect is a high priority, our actions reveal how true we are to those ideals.
Three levels of alignment
A worldview aims at a deeper level than ethics, because good isn’t only the duty we owe to others to produce the universal good. It also means the duty we owe ourselves for how we live. It aims at a worthwhile life in all aspects. The same alignment we’ve seen with ethics must happen at this deeper level.
On the purely physical level, the movement of reality is toward survival, or mere existence. Our feelings of pleasure and pain are signals of how well our movement is aligned with the movement of the field and negative feelings like pain signal misalignment and tell us our survival is threatened.
On the ethical level, the movement of the field is that of an impartial witness aimed toward the universal good. Our mood is the signal of whether the movement of our will is aligned with the movement and a negative mood signals dissonance between our will and the field’s.
Our worldview is aimed at the deeper existential level and tells us whether our life as a whole is good and worthwhile. This existential level isn’t a category distinct from the first two; it’s a progression of description that becomes more complete, and it’s what the first two levels rest on. The existential level is metaphysics, the question of what exists.
Metaphysics has always aimed at these questions by asking what exists and what that means for creating a worthwhile life. The creation myths of human cultures aren’t primitive attempts to explain the mechanics of how the physical world evolved; they’re narratives telling us who we are, why we exist and what that means for how we should live.
Our modern culture has separated these questions, as if reality could be studied in isolation from what it means for how to live. But this distinction is artificial, and it assumes naturalism is true: that the purpose of your life isn’t a fact each individual can discover, but something we impose on a purposeless world.
This existential level includes both survival and mood but it’s a holistic measure of our existence and could be called the flavour of our life. Like the first two levels, the flavour of our life is a gauge and a motivation. It tells us whether we’re aligned with the movement of reality at its deepest or most complete level, and it pushes us in a particular direction: toward a fulfilling and worthwhile existence.
There are stages to achieving the flavour of a worthwhile life. First there must be survival: biological health, or alignment with physical conditions. Then there must be the ethical life. A tyrant isn’t living a good life even if he thinks he is. And on the existential level, alignment means becoming what we truly are, in the sense of the most complete understanding. This alignment isn’t a future static state; it’s the ongoing, dynamic discovery of our truest self, and it deepens with the level of our participation.
Just as pain and mood are accurate signals that we’re in a state of dissonance, the overall flavour of our life is also an accurate signal. On a consciousness-first worldview, that signal points toward something real. This is hiraeth, not a psychological imbalance to be treated or mollified, but an accurate perception that the deepest longings of our hearts are attainable. On a naturalist picture, it’s hard to see how the longing could point toward something in the world that can satisfy it. It can only be a by-product of a mind formed by evolution, in a world that can give us nothing more than survival.
And if we assume the signal points toward nothing and is only an evolutionary by-product, we’ll never commit to a life that could prove it true by acting in fidelity to those ideals. If we rule out the possibility in advance because of our commitment to a pre-existing theory, then nothing can prove it true or false. Just as science is accepted as a co-operative attempt to make discoveries, religion is the same kind of endeavour.
This is why the feeling of hiraeth can’t be silenced: it’s the experiential signal of how far our life is misaligned with who and what we truly are.
