The Double Refuge 🍷 Bubbles Winking at the Brim
Lord of the Meeting Rivers
Each and All - Introductions - On Taking Form - Gates or Rivers, Any Metaphor Will Do
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Each and All
In The Double Refuge I suggest bringing together belief & doubt, faith & science in a way that allows a free flow from one to the other. Key to my argument is the word open: I intend to combine open theism with open agnosticism.
Open theism involves a belief in any religious or mythic idea while remaining open to other theistic beliefs. This form of theism is ecumenical and eclectic. It can also be highly syncretic: it can go so far as maintaining that all forms of positive spirituality — all forms of love, compassion, forgiveness, redemption, enlightenment, etc. — come together in the notion of a positive God.
This God may be a general God, that is, a God with no particular affiliation, or it may be seen in a more particular light. For instance, God may be seen in naturalistic terms (Mother Nature or the Dao), in transcendental terms (Brahman or the Neoplatonic One), or in terms of a moral or intelligent design (Plato’s Good or Aurelia’s Universal Mind). Open theology celebrates all types of positive belief (i.e. not types that encourage coercion, possession, aggrandizement of personal wealth or power, etc.) and is not a zero-sum game or closed arena. Rather, it’s a wide-open country in which people can go from one city to the next, one region to the next, finding different values, customs, languages, and beliefs along the way. Yet always finding welcome.
I aim to combine this open theism with open agnosticism, which uses doubt not as a way to negate or deny, but as a way to explore all ideas and experiences. In this open form of agnosticism — not to be confused with hard or closed agnosticism (see 🍏 Types of Agnosticism) — doubt also doubts itself. It leaves us free to doubt and question, and to integrate science and history into a spiritual view of reality. Shelley gets close to this tension or paradox in his poem, “Mont Blanc” (1816):
The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with Nature reconciled
Shelley suggests a subtle interplay between belief and doubt: one slips into the other, and yet the two can’t be reconciled completely. They remain distinct: doubt and experience tell us that this world is a beautiful and nasty place; faith tells us that everything reflects a deeper truth, one that’s forever beyond reach. Shelley imagines that this faith and Nature come together, and realizes that they also remain separate.
Combining open doubt with open belief frees us from rigid reasoning on the skeptical side, and from exclusive dogma on the religious side. In this sense it’s a refuge from the ravages of skepticism and from the rigidity of doctrine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson gets at the spirit of this philosophy in his poem “Each and All” (1839). He starts off by observing that we generally aren’t aware of how one event affects the next. He observes that we also think we can separate a specific good thing from the things around it. He then sees that a bird and a shell lose much of their beauty when they’re not surrounded by the forest and the beach. He concludes his poem by applying his observations to knowledge and truth:
Then I said, “I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth.”
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet’s breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird.
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
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In a famous passage of his Pensées (1670), Blaise Pascal suggests that belief and disbelief are like two sides of a coin. He argues that we should choose belief because we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Double refugees would rather not flip such a coin. Instead, they’d set it on a table and spin it, so that the physical and metaphysical worlds whirl around each other so fast that it becomes impossible to say which is which.
We might also see belief and disbelief as winning or losing in a game of dice. Double refugees would argue that instead of taking our chances, we can opt not to throw the dice. Instead of betting on materialism or spirituality — a choice based on such limited knowledge that it might as well be based on chance — we keep ourselves open to both:
The metaphors of the spinning coin and the spinning top make more sense to double refugees than deciding on either doubt or belief. To them, both seems more reasonable than either / or.
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Introductions
For an overview of the sections and chapters of The Double Refuge, see the next page, 🍷 Sections, Chapters, & the Scarlet Pimpernel. On the remainder of this page, I’ll touch on some themes that I deal with in the first two introductory chapters.
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The Double Refuge begins with five introductory chapters. In 🍷 Bubbles Winking at the Brim I introduce the key notions of open agnosticism and open theism, and I suggest that exploring these can be intoxicating, destabilizing, and also regenerating. In 🍏 Agnosticism I look in more detail at open agnosticism, after which I launch into two personal subjects: in 🇲🇽 Señor Locke I recount how the double refuge helps me deal with the trauma of sense impressions (caused in part by being abused, robbed, and briefly held captive); in ☯️ Herr Jung I explain why in dealing with trauma and nightmare I opted to use empiricism and open agnosticism, combined with open theism, instead of the archetypal approach of Carl Jung. These two chapters also serve as a self-introduction of sorts. Finally, in 🧩 Butterflies Landing I delve into more involved terms and concepts, such as positive-sum philosophy, Eliot’s unified sensibility, and Keats’ negative capability.
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In the first introductory chapter, 🍷 Bubbles Winking at the Brim, I suggest that the open refuge is like wine. Whether it’s the wine of the tavern, the wine of the Eucharist, or the wine of Persian poetry, this wine takes us away from our normal sober state, where we aim to square our personal designs with the curves, loops, and arabesques of the world around us. Sip by sip, we slip into a less certain framework. The edges get blurry and we start to let loose of our definitions and guardrails. Whether some idea is true or untrue becomes less an argument than an invitation.
We stop worrying about what we used to think, and let ourselves flow, perhaps even merge with other ideas, people, realities. It’s like a dream, but more solid and less fleeting. The wine may not take us as far as the mystic poets of Persia, and we may not clutch at the moon like Li Po, yet we each in our own way explore further, dipping our toes or diving head first, into the currents of existence.
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While in the first chapter I use wine to suggest the intoxication of open agnosticism and open theism, in the second chapter I try to explain the many-sided beast of 🍏 Agnosticism. I argue that open agnosticism, with its hold on tradition on one hand, and its reach for new ideas and experiences on the other, is complementary to open theism. Both open agnosticism and open theism are willing to grab onto new things without tightening the grasp so much that it becomes impossible to change. Neither counsels an aimless drift, for neither insists on drifting for the sake of drifting. Or on mooring for the sake of mooring.
Open refugees see many rivers leading to the Sea. Their iconoclasm makes them similar in some ways to the Virashaivite poet Basavanna, who sees the body, the soul, and the Lord (in this case Shiva) as one entity:
My legs are pillars, / the body the shrine, / the head a cupola of gold. // Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers, / things standing shall fall, / but the moving ever shall stay.
(trans. A.K. Ramanujan)
Basavanna combines here the static nature of a temple with the mobile nature of the wandering saint. He includes in all of his poems a reference to Shiva, who he calls lord of the meeting rivers, which seems to me a wonderful way of fusing the flux Heraclitus talked about in Ancient Greece with the ever-present sense of infinity evoked in the concept of God.
Double refugees don’t imagine that any one trajectory could be a sufficient metaphor for our journey through life. For instance, they may find inspiration in Dante’s trajectory — into Hell, across the sea to the Mountain of Purgatory, and up to Heaven — yet they see this paradigm as one among many.
At the start of Paradiso Dante imagines his journey to Purgatory and Heaven as a ship crossing the sea. He tells the readers in his wake that if they lose sight of him they may never find their way:
O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,
O you, eager to hear more,
desiderosi d'ascoltar, seguiti
who have followed in your little bark [boat]
dietro al mio legno che cantando varca,
my ship that singing makes its way,
tornate a riveder li vostri liti:
turn back if you would see your shores again.
non vi mettete in pelago, ché forse,
Do not set forth upon the deep,
perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti.
for, losing sight of me, you would be lost.
Dante may be correct to warn his reader about embarking on the high seas, yet open theists question whether we need to be so fearful. If God is in control of the universe, and if He (She or It) is everywhere, omnipresent and omnipotent, where can we go that He isn’t with us, even in the Valley of the Shadow of Death? Double refugees are more likely to heed the warning of Byron, who cautions that if we float “in a Sea of Speculation” we may capsize our little boat. Byron doesn’t tell his readers that they must follow him or they’ll be lost.
Open refugees see the danger. Indeed, what I mean by refugee is that existential and metaphysical winds can blow very rough. Sometimes we need a safe port, a refuge from the storm. Yet, the steady star to our wandering boat is the pole star, not a specific philosophy or religion. In “Sonnet 116,” Shakespeare makes it clear that the star is love in general:
it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his [its] height be taken.
Shakespeare’s Love isn’t a particular form of love. It could be 1. the love of a mother, father, sister, brother, or friend, 2. the connections and affections that Nature builds in each of us for survival and meaning (in this sense it could be the love of a cat for its kitten), 3. a Neoplatonic love which urges us toward a transcendent Good, 4. the redemptive love of Christ, 5. the love of Krishna, Shiva, Mahadevi, Guanyin, etc., 6. the Sufi love that annihilates the self and opens the tavern door to the intoxication of God, and 7. any other type of love on Earth or any other world. It’s certainly not restricted to Dante’s Medieval version of Christianity. To borrow from Dante’s mentor, the pagan Virgil, it’s the love that conquers all. Before Christ was born, Virgil writes, Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori; "Love conquers all things; let us yield to this love."
A key aspect of the double refuge is that it brings doubt and belief into direct contact. For instance, we can doubt the literal meaning of Dante’s words, yet at the same time we can work through them to reach a greater flexibility. To start with, we can recognize why people generally want to follow in the wake of a larger ship; Blake may tell us to create our own system “or be enslaved to another man’s,” yet that’s easier said than done. It doesn’t have to be, but it can be Dante’s wake, as long as we’re willing to contend with a great deal of Medieval politics and theology. But even here, we don’t have to take everything Dante writes literally. So why not follow in Dante’s wake? And why not also follow in the wake of other ships that criss-cross the dangerous seas? The ships and the seas are just analogies; one hypothetical galleon doesn’t cancel out the other.
There are many ships on the oceans of science and religion, just as there are many mansions in the house of God. His Lordship is reputed to contain multiple dimensions and infinite space, so there’s bound to be room in His house for whatever good thing we might believe, or whatever good news we might hear.
We can follow in the wake of a mighty ship or we can take to the open sea and take our chances. In doing this we may find smooth seas and coconut isles of honey and light, or we may struggle like Melville’s Ahab against the Leviathan of Blind Chance in the Ocean of Doubt. Even if we go down with the ship, we may still find ourselves in amber light. The country beyond whose bourn no traveller returns is a mystery, and no one knows what we’ll find. We may find ourselves sailing back into a port, with a sign on a shop door that says “Wine Tavern.”
We stand on the door sill, one moment looking out at the turbulent winds blowing up from the Strait of Hormuz, and the next moment looking in at the bartender pouring a sparkling shiraz into the glass of a beautiful woman, her ruby lips touching the lip of the glass as the wine flows over her tongue.
We go in and out of the tavern, always stopping for a second at the door, examining its hinges and the strange fact that it exists between two worlds. The door divides the worlds at times, and connects them at others. We wonder about Plato and his world of Ideal Forms. What is this door, this gate between two worlds? And who is the Gatekeeper?
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The Double Gate
Lord, let me pass through the double gate
of sleep and the life to come
fearing no evil
knowing that Thou art by my side
my Travelling Friend and my Blue Fairy
my Strider and my Gandalf
to my shivering Dante and his Ancient guide
Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me
Thou preparest a table before me
in the presence of mine enemies
Beyond my own brief journey
I pray that Love conquers all — soon! —
and that peace contends with freedom — soon! —
so that we live to see the day
when the Tyger lies down before the Lamb
from Kiev to Kinshasa
and from Heaven to Jerusalem
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My poem above contains a number of allusions.
First off, the double gate is my own phrase, yet it’s inspired by Hamlet’s notion that “in the sleep of death what dreams may come must give us pause.” My contention is that the double refuge helps us to come to terms with the gates which open us to 1. the uncontrollable realm of dreams and 2. the uncontrollable realm of death. Our conception of these realms (and these gates) has root in our empirical neurology and in the guesswork of our brains, yet both realms (and both gates) remain beyond our control. We don’t even have any reliable information about these realms, which is why Hamlet calls the afterlife “that undiscovered country beyond whose realm no traveller returns.” Just as we are helpless to predict or control our dreams, so we are helpless to predict or control the afterlife. Hamlet concludes that such an understanding “must give us pause.”
In this pause, in this reflection on the fact that we are in fact quite clueless, two things can happen. First, we can become more humble in our pronouncements and conclusions, and hence more like an open agnostic. Second, we can become more like an open theist by opening ourselves to whatever operates these gates and the realms that lie beyond these gates. We can hope, even pray, that the gates of sleep and death will lead to peace & love, order & belonging, culture & beauty, compassion & truth, meaning & happiness. In my conception of the double refuge, we can do both of these things simultaneously.
While Hamlet refers to dreaming and the afterlife, he also applies his thoughts to the world around him (which makes him hesitate to kill his uncle). Likewise, we think about these gates and realms in the present, in the here and now. And just as we think about these realms, so we think about the world around us, aiming at the same goals: peace & love, order & belonging, culture & beauty, compassion & truth, meaning & happiness. In this sense, the way we see the unknowable aligns with, and is made of, the same substance as the way we see the world around us. I imagine this as a type of yoga, a type of unified sensibility (to borrow Eliot’s phrase) where the physical and the mental intertwine. Everything that we feel, think, & are exist in the same time & space of consciousness, whether we’re smelling a rose, slipping into sleep, or whether we’re on our deathbed, with one eye in the world that is perchance to come.
In addition to the obvious borrowings from Psalm 23, I borrow from Blake’s famous short poem “The Tyger.” Blake asks if God made the cruelty of the tiger and also the gentleness of the lamb. We can only hope that the conclusion to our moment in cosmic theodicy (that is, in a world where God and evil coexist) will come soon, and that the Tyger of Chaos & Violence will lie down before the Lamb of Peace & Love.
My notion of Lord and Thou takes many forms, from Yahweh to Brahman. Here Thou is most closely associated with the majestic double-deity of Jesus & Lord. Yet Thou incarnates itself not just in deity, but also in personal forms such as Travelling Friend & Blue Fairy as well as Strider & Gandalf. These doubles are lesser parallels to Jesus & Lord, Krishna & Brahman; they signal ideal human forms as well as a magical Grace that infuses, and is one with, these forms.
One of the most concise articulations of the ideal of omnipotent Grace was made by the pre-Christian poet Virgil, who was Dante’s guide into and out of Hell, and also part-way up the Mountain of Purgatory. Virgil penned the famous phrase, Omnia vincit amor, Love conquers all. Yet here we run into theological trouble, caused largely by closed or exclusive theism. According to Dante, Virgil came before Christ, sand as a result he couldn’t — despite his stellar morality and his vast contribution to culture — be allowed to guide Dante all the way up Purgatory. (Beatrice guided him the rest of the way up the Mountain, and from its peak into Heaven). Therein lies the sad paradox of Medieval and fundamentalist Christianity: a great man like Virgil is left standing on some level of Purgatory because of a graceless rule of Medieval theology. Yet in the thereafter of syncretism and open theism lies the promise of Christianity 2.0. From this open point of view, the Roman Virgil was never left standing, but waited inside the gates to welcome the Italian poet. Realizing the absurdity, the two laughed and talked all the way down a treed boulevard, where marble friezes and cypress trees shaded them, and nightingales sang them into the City of God.
T.S. Eliot gets at this type of redemption or reconciliation in the final lines of his Four Quartets, a long poem in which Christ & the Bible share the stage with Krishna & the Mahabharata. The final three sections of Four Quartets were written during WW II, which makes them applicable to our present world, in which Russia is savaging Ukraine, Israel is savaging Palestine, and America is ripping up the world order.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
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