Moving to a consciousness-first view takes a more substantial inversion than we realise. Reading about different theories and judging the logic doesn’t make the inversion; we’re still in a detached position outside the stance.
Suppose someone completes all the intellectual steps: they follow the argument, judge it true and accept it as the better model to structure their life. They still haven’t accepted it on its own terms and made the inversion its truth requires. For that it must be lived.
So what does the inversion entail?
In the simplest analysis, inhabiting our worldview is just the actions we take in living, from the momentous to the mundane. It’s found in our choices of what we consume and what we contribute back into the world. Practice in this sense isn’t restricted to saying prayers or chanting mantras. Religious practices include those everyday details but they’re aimed at the deeper level of resonance our whole existence is oriented toward.
In a consciousness-first view the world isn’t indifferent and insentient. It can and does answer back to our deepest longings. The experiences that point toward something beyond the mundane world aren’t evolutionary coping mechanisms for a harsh world. They’re signals that what we long for is actually real.
The question is: how do we align ourselves with these deepest levels of reality? If we succeed, what will we have accomplished? It’s tempting to think that all we’re aiming for is a peaceful state of mind, a way to be happier and more contented for the duration of our temporary sojourn in this world. But the deeper sense of what we’re achieving is discovering who we really are, our true self. Reality is inherently relational, so just as our vision of reality gives us access to deeper levels of the absolute, it simultaneously gives us access to deeper levels of our own self.
If reality is participatory, known only in relationship, then our true self can mean many things. Each is true at its own level, but some levels are more complete than others. A true self is true for one person at one stage of their development. In this context, true means how fully we live what we judge to be reality’s highest good. That can be true right now, from where we stand, without being the final or eternal truth.
Sacred space as argument
To see how a worldview is lived, think about the flavour of religious experience. You walk into a grand cathedral. Everything about the space is designed to produce an experience appropriate to the metaphysics. Its walls and roof tower over you, humbling you to an accurate idea of your place within the cosmos and before the power of God. Stained glass windows illuminate images of the world beyond. The altar stands elevated at the front, the focus of your attention. The architecture itself orients you toward its ideal of the highest good.
The same thing happens if you enter a Zen temple. You’re immersed in simplicity. There are only mats on the floor and no ornate decoration. The mood is quiet and meditative, facilitating an inward journey of discovery, the emptiness of the room a mirror of the inner emptiness you’re seeking.
In a mosque you will experience the utter transcendence of Allah. You’ll see no images of God; instead the walls are decorated with geometric patterns, repeating and infinitely extended rather than fixed in one representation. You face toward the mihrab, a niche in the wall marking the direction of Mecca, your eye drawn to an absence rather than an image. You stand shoulder to shoulder with the other worshippers, no distinction or rank visible. No matter where you are on Earth, all Muslims face toward Mecca in prayer, every worshipper oriented toward the same fixed point.
In a Hindu temple you’ll find the deity on the altar, attended with vibrant offerings throughout the day. The arti ceremony captures all the senses with sounds, smell and sights that evoke the appropriate mood of worship for the chosen deity. Standing before the deity is darshana, a seeing. Not only are you seeing God directly, he’s also seeing you.
In each case the physical structure is designed to produce the experience appropriate to the particular understanding of the ultimate nature of reality. It makes no argument in words; its argument is crafted from bricks and silence. But it immerses you in its metaphysical truths, and you know what it is like to inhabit them. It directly reveals the highest good the structure embodies and how each person should approach it, stand before it, and orient themselves toward it.
Everyone’s life has some experiential flavour: the lived resonance of our chosen orientation. Religious architecture attempts to evoke that flavour and bring it under deliberate cultivation, but the same principle applies to any worldview.
Naturalism has its own unique flavour. It isn’t cultivated as a reciprocal relationship with reality, but one that’s manufactured by the individual and placed on a world taken to be indifferent. Its characteristic buildings are the laboratory, the hospital and the technology campus. They’re aimed at a function rather than an experience. The function aims at this life: understanding it, extending it or making it more comfortable, since it’s taken to be the only life we have. It doesn’t orient you toward a responsive world.
Practice as embodiment
The architecture we inhabit has a flavour, but we all still have to act within it. The practices we undertake don’t work because they give us intellectual knowledge, or because they evoke a particular feeling. Neither of those are the goal. Repetition and bodily participation are the vehicle that carries and reinforces an inner orientation. An orientation can exist silently or its theoretical structure can be written down. But it doesn’t become real unless it’s enacted and lived.
Singing hymns, performing salat or chanting japa are practices that require the participation of the whole person. They demand our attention, breath, voice and physical presence, none of which are needed to hold a silent belief. You can’t perform a practice passively the way you can merely vibrate the sound, “I believe.”
Someone can enter the place of worship and enact the outer form according to convention, but without the inner faith aligning with the form, it’s not authentic. It remains superficial and hasn’t reached their actual state of being. Conversely, we can hold an inner conviction but never express it in our lives; the faith is existentially inert.
We can say we value honesty, but it’s only true if we’re honest when no one will know and the only benefit is the act of honesty itself. When inner and outer align, then it’s true faith: fidelity to what we hold sacred and fully embodied in our lives.
We choose where to align our heart and what tradition speaks to us. Then we adopt its methods and teachings, because they give us guidance from others who share our goal and have found what works to achieve it. This book is no exception. It’s written from inside a standpoint.
The consciousness-first structure this book has described advises you to follow your own faith and confirm that with your own experience. But the structure is also a description of one particular tradition, the Gaudiya tradition. And to leave out their credo, what they name as the highest good and the innermost heart of reality, would leave the capstone off this structure.
The postlude is the music played after the completion of a church service. It serves as a musical sending-off; it transports the divine, along with the participants, back to their secular life.
