This essay is part two of an ongoing series; you can read the beginning here.
Last time, I wrote about how the felt sense is a doorway, and how there are ways of knowing that aren’t intellectual or conceptual. Our direct, embodied experience can tell us so much!
Embodied metaphysics investigates how bodily felt experience grounds and informs our understanding of lived reality and being. And, I’m also curious about what we can know or understand about the nature of reality and the ultimate (that‘s the metaphysics).
What is ultimate or most important to us plays an obviously large, though often unrecognized, role in our lives. I’ve been experimenting with reclaiming the term “God” for what’s ultimate for me. Here’s briefly how I mean the term God, from my article, God is a Verb:
The ever-unfolding, always-becoming, here-and-now is all that is. Anyone can experience this directly, no belief required. In fact, you might need to lay your beliefs down for a moment in order to access this experience.
For shorthand, we can call this ever-unfolding Allness “God”. It may be helpful to think of God as a verb —a happening, a becoming— rather than a person or person-like being, or an entity, or noun of any sort. God: the great unfolding.
I know the term “God” is a loaded one. Lots of people squirm at the word, and if that's you, that's ok. I still take issue with the word “god”, as it's been used and abused for centuries, but I find it a useful word and am in a personal process of reclaiming it.
So, let’s talk a bit about ultimate concerns and what “God” actually is/might be. This is important for understanding our metaphysical assumptions, which influence our embodied experience and understanding of life.
We all have gods, whether we call them that or not. What you value most in life is, for all intents and purposes, your god. The philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich wrote1 of one’s “ultimate concern,” and we all have an ultimate concern. It may be all too easy in daily life to get swept up in prioritizing that which is only worthy of a partial allegiance, rather than putting front and center that which is our true ultimate concern: the infinite and eternal.
There is an existential reality at play here, which leads many people to neurotically avoid “nonbeing by avoiding being.”2 Full living—full being—includes coming to terms with what is ultimate. Again, this ultimacy may be different for different people, or at different moments in life, though I think there tends to be a process by which we eventually settle into one general view of what our ultimate concern is. Eventually, seeking and searching slows, and we no longer have that eager hunger for an ever-distant shore: we’ve found our ground.
I’ll be using the word theology, a word we ultimately get from the Greek θεός/theós, meaning “god,” and λόγος/lógos, which means word or speech. So, God-talk. I bring theology in because I’ve learned that what makes a person “religious” isn’t any specific beliefs or affiliation, but the kinds of questions one asks, which fundamentally have to do with one’s ultimate concern. When your ultimate concern fits under the heading of “God-talk,” well, we may be in the realm of theology.
It’s a much broader field than you might expect.
An important aspect of spiritual maturity involves questioning what is ultimate for you, examining what’s real, and choosing your moral values and systems with integrity and coherence. To be fully mature, we must move towards standing on our own feet with regard to our inherited concepts. Personal experience is fundamental and must not be ignored, but it is not the only story.
Jung wrote that “when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”3 And Plato’s Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”4 That which we ignore or refuse to examine will still drive much of our lives. This is true of metaphysics, theology, and more. Let’s get curious about what’s behind the curtain.
To many, theology seems like an intellectual game. Religious traditions have developed vast systems of doctrine, metaphysics, apologetics, and philosophical argument. There’s a long and illustrious lineage in many traditions of well-known theologians.5 But for many people today (especially those seeking an honest and intimate spiritual life), the God of doctrine, systematic theology, scholarly treatises, or institutions more generally can feel distant, abstract, or irrelevant.
An embodied experience is an understanding that our processes of cognition, including thoughts, emotions, and perceptions, are grounded in and arise from the interactions between the body and the world. The epistemology of embodiment tells us that the body and its environment are not really separable; there is constant communication and interaction going on. This interaction or interbeing has deep and wide roots that connect us and our lived experience to the One, the Mystery, the Ultimate. This is what I call the theology of the felt sense.
What if God (spirit, the True Self, etc) is more than a belief to have, but is a reality to participate in? What if God speaks not just in words and ideas, but in direct experience? What if God is not primarily a concept to believe in, but a presence to encounter? And what if the body, the very ground of our felt sense, is the place where that encounter begins?
To be continued…
See, for instance, Tillich’s book Dynamics of Faith for his discussion of ultimate concerns.
Tillich, The Courage to Be, 61.
From Aion in Carl Jung’s Collected Works, vol 9, part 2, chapter V, §126.
Plato, Apology, 38a5–6.
Including, for instance, Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen, Ibn Arabi, Abhinavagupta, Thomas Aquinas, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rosemary Radford Ruether, al-Ghazali, Sallie McFague, James Cone, and Shankara.