12 beyond wishful thinkingTh is message is not without its terrors. Our spiritual freedom creates
the risk that we may fail to heed the message and follow the path. We
may be cut off and suff er estrangement from him. Like our salvation
itself, this separation may become irreversible and eternal. Neverthe-
less, the view that we have a friend in charge of the universe is the best
news that we could expect to receive, given our impending death and
apparent groundlessness. He is the ground of being, and particularly of
our being. In him we hope to overcome death.
Th e trouble is that belief in this narrative may be hard to achieve or
to sustain. If it is not simply acquiescence in the conventions of a family
and of a culture, it must be the result of undergoing certain experi-
ences. Although these experiences violate our ordinary beliefs about
the workings of nature, they may impose themselves on us with com-
pel ling if not irresistible force. However, apa r t f rom t he mat ter of whet her
we should allow ourselves to be overwhelmed in this way (in view of
our tendency to mistake wishful thinking for insight), we may simply,
despite all eff orts, not undergo such experiences. Having undergone
them, we may fall out of them.
More particularly, reception of the good news requires us to suspend
disbelief in a story of redemption from death and groundlessness that
presents us with three sets of diffi culties. Call them the scandals of rea-
son. Th e fi rst scandal is that we must accept a sudden and radical inter-
ruption of the regular workings of nature, as distinguished from the
transformation of everything into everything else and from the change
of change. Th e second scandal is that par tic u lar individuals and events
have a privileged part to play in a narrative of salvation for all man-
kind: only the par tic u lar plot conveys the universal message. Th e third
scandal is that we must not allow ourselves to be demoralized by the
formidable objections that can be leveled against each of the main can-
didates for an idea of God, from the very standpoint of the belief sys-
tems in which this idea plays a certain role: God as person, God as
impersonal being, and God as neither person nor being— an unnam-
able negation. When we are not in the self- induced grip of either social
convention or religious enthusiasm, we may conclude that the good news
is too good to be true.
A second family of responses to our existential groundlessness, of
which the teachings of Buddha and the philosophy of the Vedas are the