universal reality. In Judaism, Yahweh ( ) is the word for Lord.
Each of the major Native American tribes had their own word for the
Great Spirit, who was their creator and guiding deity. Epicurus
wasn’t an atheist but rejected the idea of an overbearing or
judgmental god. What deity would want the world to live in fear?
Living in fear, he said, is incongruent with ataraxia.
When Krishna speaks of the “mind resting in the stillness of the
prayer of Yoga,” it is the same thing. The Christians believe that God
is that source of stillness in our lives, which extended peace and
comfort to us like a river. “Peace! Be still!” Jesus said to the sea, “and
the wind ceased and there was a great calm.”
There is no stillness to the mind that thinks of nothing but itself,
nor will there ever be peace for the body and spirit that follow their
every urge and value nothing but themselves.
The progress of science and technology is essential. But for many
of us moderns, it has come at the cost of losing the capacity for awe
and for acknowledging forces beyond our comprehension. It has
deprived us of the ability to access spiritual stillness and piety.
Are we really to say that a simple peasant who piously believed in
God, who worshipped daily in a beautiful cathedral that must have
seemed a wondrous glory to the greatness of the Holy Spirit, was
worse off than us because he or she lacked our technology or an
understanding of evolution? If we told a Zen Buddhist from Japan in
the twelfth century that in the future everyone could count on greater
wealth and longer lives but that in most cases those gifts would be
followed by a feeling of utter purposelessness and dissatisfaction, do
you think they would want to trade places with us?
Because that doesn’t sound like progress.
In his 1978 commencement address to the students of Harvard,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke of a modern world where all countries
—capitalist and communist alike—had been pervaded by a
“despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.”
To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging
everything on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of
pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other
defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of