The following is an excerpt from a book I am working on. The book is about western mythology and spiritual practice. The following excerpt is about fundamentalism.
There are individuals spread out through history who have
come to fully embody the sense of mystery that sits at the core of the human
condition. Occasionally, their life is eternalized and mythologies begin to be
organized around the example they provided. Not only are they no longer
burdened by the limitations of time and space they now transcend the envelope
of skin, symbolizing a living reality within each and every person regardless
of race, nation, ethnicity, or gender. This form of mythology is a religion.
Religion is a powerful means of preserving, refining, and dispersing
a mythology. In it’s purest form, religion is perhaps the most powerful vehicle
of individuation. However, there are many draw backs to religion. The most
unfortunate of these draws backs is commonly referred to as fundamentalism. Not
only is fundamentalism responsible for some of the most egregious
demonstrations of ignorant willfulness this planet has ever seen—war, genocide,
terrorism, ecological devastation and civil rights abuses—it also immunizes man
to the experience of transcendence that initially inspired the tradition. In
fact, all of these examples of willful ignorance are but symptoms of an underlying
problem, lifelessness. Once the individual is infected by the paralysis of lifelessness, he begins to see everything as lifeless and treat it as such.
The fundamentalist is the individual who subscribes to a
network of ideas and beliefs that do not belong to them. These ideas and
beliefs are unsubstantiated by personal experience, and are installed by the
mechanism of fear. They rely solely on the experience of another person, who,
interestingly enough relies on the experience of someone else. This line of
co-dependency stretches all the way back to the source of the tradition, the
owner of the original experience, so to speak.
Fundamentalism is not a dead mythology; it is the absence of
mythology. It is a belief system that relies upon the experience of another. Unsubstantiated
belief is insanity. It is a grotesque denial of personal responsibility that
leads only to idol worship and spiritual laziness. The fundamentalist stands
back at a safe distance in envy of this individual for embodying the fullness of
their person. They lose themselves in this envy and as a result fail to make
the journey for themselves. They mistake the central incarnation of the mystery for the mystery itself and
end up drinking the cup instead of the water.
As a result, they are thirsty. The fundamentalist suffers
because he is detached from the life giving waters of direct experience. He is
dead inside, so he dreams of a utopia in the distant future where he will be
able to once again take in the breath of life. It becomes, in the words of
Brian McLaren a prominent Christian pastor, “a mass evacuation plan.” He never
even considers the possibility that his utopian dream is an archetypal representation
of the present moment, inviting him into the fullness of Life proclaimed by the
tradition he has misplaced.
