A journal entry in search of a home…
When I wander the halls of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, the rooms where I am most impressed, actually awed, are those that contain the collection of hundreds of Buddhas, Guan Yins, Ganeshas, and other idols.
When I contemplate the enormous mass of religious matter excreted by humans in all the time we’ve been humans, it seems to me that for several millennia religious art—the attempt to engage and ensnare the divine in nets of stone or paint or language—was the center of gravity of human consciousness, the swirling hub of the whirlpool where critical mass was being formed, eventually precipitating a plateau-ending revolution. Sorting through that hopelessly mixed, tangled, mostly useless metaphor, I think what I am trying to say is this: as a species we worked at religion’s forms—its liturgies and sacred art, its trances and its rigid modes of life—because we could work on them. Our monkey minds were able to grasp, barely, the idea of greater, wiser intelligences than our own, and could also grasp the idea of supplicating those intelligences in search and support of our own elevation.
It follows that the (slow and painful) recession of religion’s influence in our time is due, not to moral decay, but to increased capacity—we’re ready, now, for a harder game. Where before we sought dialogue with the divine, we now seek to embody and harness that intelligence in vessels of our own making, that is, the computer intelligences that so occupy now, and to which we are giving over the running of our societies and cultures. It is time, in other words, to leave childish things behind.
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