Mar 15, 2010, 12.00am IST
JOHN HICK.
The way in which we inhabit the universe in the overall tenor of our lives is a reflection of the character that we believe and hence experience it to have.
So what is the nature of this universe in which, and as part of which, we find ourselves? Above all, is its ultimate nature, so far as we humans are concerned, benign, hostile, or indifferent? I say ‘so far as we humans are concerned’ because we are minute fragments of the universe, and it seems very unlikely that we have the conceptual equipment to comprehend the nature of reality as a whole. We may however be able to comprehend its nature is as its affects us. And, as John Stuart Mill said, “If to know authentically in what order of things, under what government of the universe it is our destiny to live, were not useful, it is difficult to imagine what could be considered so. Whether a person is in a pleasant or in an unpleasant place, a palace or a prison, it cannot be otherwise than useful to him to know where he is.”
Each of the great world religions offers a comprehensive conception of the universe, and in so far as such pictures are believed and are built into our dispositional structure, they automatically affect the way in which the believer lives...
As a relatively trivial example of our dispositional state affecting the way in which we experience our environment, consider the following imagined situation. I am in a strange building, and walking by mistake into a large room I find that a militant secret society is meeting there. Many of the members are armed, and as they take me for a fellow member I think it expedient to acquiesce in the role. Plans are being discussed for the violent overthrow of the constitution. The whole situation is alarming in the extreme. Its meaning for me is such that I am extremely apprehensive. Then I suddenly become aware in the dim light above us of a gallery in which there are silently operating cameras, and I realise that I have walked by accident onto the set of a film. This realisation consists in a changed awareness of my immediate situation. Until now I had automatically experienced it as ‘real life’ and as demanding considerable circumspection on my part. Now I experience it as having a quite different significance. But at ground level there is no change in the course of events; the meeting of the secret society proceeds just as before. However my new awareness of the more comprehensive situation alters my experience of the more immediate one. It now has a new meaning for me such that I am in a very different dispositional state in relation to it. For example, if one of the ‘conspirators’ noticed my arrival and threateningly pointed his gun at me, I might act as though terrified but would not actually be so.
This is not an adequate analogy for our religious situation because the cameras and their operators in the balcony are more of the same kind of reality as the set and the actors on the floor. But it may nevertheless help to make intelligible the suggestion that I am making. This is that the understanding of our lives as taking place in the presence of, and as grounded in, the Divine, the Transcendent, the ultimately Real, can make a profound difference to our sense of the meaning of our life now.
(The writer is author of The Fifth Dimension: An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm)
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