I enjoyed Mitch Albom’s first book, Tuesdays With Morrie. But a few months ago, halfway through his second, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, I gave up and returned it to the library. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what bothered my about it or why it didn’t grab me like his first.
Now I know why, after reading this David Brook’s opinion piece in last week’s NYT: Hooked on Heaven Lite
All societies construct their own images of heaven. Most imagine a wondrous city or a verdant garden where human beings come face to face with God. But the heaven that is apparently popular with readers these days is nothing more than an excellent therapy session. In Albom’s book, God, to the extent that he exists there, is sort of a genial Dr. Phil. When you go to his heaven, friends and helpers come and tell you how innately wonderful you are. They help you reach closure. In this heaven, God and his glory are not the center of attention. It’s all about you.
“Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, the ‘psychological man’ of the 20th century seeks neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it,” Christopher Lasch wrote in “The Culture of Narcissism.” Lasch went on to call the therapeutic mentality an anti-religion that tries to liberate people from the idea that they should submit to a higher authority, so they can focus more obsessively on their own emotional needs.
I’m drawn to the Perennial Philosophy, popularized by Aldous Huxley in his book The Perennial Philosophy. I’ve not read the book but keep coming across references to it by authors who interest me, including one of my favorites, Timothy Miller, in his book How to Want What You Have. Huxley summarizes the fundamental doctrines common to the world religions in his introduction to the book Bhagavad-Gita: The Song of God:
First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness — the world of things and animals and men and even gods — is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.
Second: human Beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.
Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible foe a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.
Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.
More to come, including a long quote that Miller uses in his book from This Is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience by Alan W. Watts.