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PILLAR 2: REVERENCE OF NATURE

We should have reverence for nature and an inborn sense of the holiness of the earth.

Anthropocentrism, Colonialism, and the Suffocation of the Western Spirit
Ur-Shintou: The Spiritual Practice of All Mankind
Distinguishing Features of Ur-Shintou

Nature Worship, Polytheism, Animism
Cycles, Impermanence, Mono-no-aware
Karma, Interconnectedness, Dependent Origination
Śūnyatā, Anātman, Yuugen
Frugality, Acceptance, Wu-wei
Sensuality, Fertility, Compassion
Impurity, Taboos, Purification
Conservation, Tradition, Ancestors
Voluntarism, Non-Compulsion, Decentralization

Spirituality Without Superstition: Sacred Play
Enframing and Technological Control
How to Safeguard the Fourfold

1. Anthropocentrism, Colonialism, and the Suffocation of the Western Spirit

I would like to argue in this section for a sense of spirituality that can help those suffering in modern, industrialized societies. The western world has become increasingly secular in the past century at a rather astonishing pace. Even in America the number of people who report having no religion is growing, and remarkably fast. We have cast off much of the guilt and fear that Abrahamic religion operates by. And yet, misery and hopelessness abounds. I argue that we need a new kind of spirituality, which is in fact the oldest of all. I talk about a lot of the following in terms of the tradition I have been fortunate enough to learn a bit about and have some experience of, Japanese Shintou. But I speak of something that I believe is universal and common to all mankind.

And let me be very clear before I sound too self-important: I am the worst example of the western man, alienated from himself, alienated from nature, and alienated from his community. I spent most days on my computer playing video games. I would die in the summer without an air conditioner. I am weak and have a flabby stomach. I can barely cook. I have almost no connection to the city I live in and feel completely indifferent to it because I substitute most joys through my machines. I hear no animals on a daily basis. But I have made the first steps of recognizing what is wrong with me and my surrounding culture. And I do all I can to try to be the change I want to see in the world and live in a way that is autonomous and in opposition to the dominant culture around me.

Why has the modern western man arrived at such a sorry state? I think it is primarily the result of an anthropocentric religion and the inhumanity of colonialism.

Marketa Lazarová (1967) by František Vláčil

Word educator is "your god." Educators teach fake beliefs. God is an academic deception. God is like hate for children. God causes an armageddon. I am wiser than a word god. Adult word god is but an evil scam that crucifies children. Bring forth your god - and I will chase him off the Earth.
Gene Ray, "Time Cube" [1]

The Abrahamic religions have been a net negative to the western peoples. Of course, I am speaking of these religions as an institution. There is much that is valuable in them at the level of individual teachings and followers. The man Jesus of Nazareth seems to have been an excellent moral teacher who taught many wonderful lessons against the evils of greed, hypocrisy, brutality, vanity, pride, and inequity. But the faiths that have evolved around those teachings have given the western world many terrible lessons that we have all had to pay the price for. If we look in the long-term, we will soon see that these religions are an exception to the rule. They are a strange and radical insurgency in the natural religion of mankind that has held the human species in the midst of an inversion of everything natural and whose corrosive effects still seep into "secular" western societies. Of the numerous ills caused by Abrahamic religion, I will focus on two in particular: destruction of the natural world and destruction of culture and community.

It is obviously high time that the Jewish conception of nature, at any rate in regard to animals, should come to an end in Europe, and that the eternal being which, as it lives in us, also lives in every animal should be recognized as such, and as such treated with care and consideration. One must be blind, deaf, and dumb, or completely chloroformed by the foetor judaicus, not to see that the animal is in essence absolutely the same thing that we are, and that the difference lies merely in the accident, the intellect, and not in the substance, which is the will.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena [2]

First, the destruction of the natural world. The creation story in the book of Genesis makes the classical Jewish conception of nature very clear: It is given over to us to make our own, to be subject to us, and to be plundered. We are the only animals that are created in the image of god and therefore are superior to all the animals around us. It is very difficult to advocate for preserving the environment in the framework of a religion that either believes we were given the planet to dominate (the Old Testament conception) or that the planet is run by the forces of evil and is soon to pass out of existence anyway (the New Testament conception). But our ecological crises can only be solved by acknolwedging the fact that we have duty to the environment and that it isn't ours to manipulate freely forever.

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
Matthew 10:34-36 [3]

But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your father, which is in heaven. Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ.
Matthew 23:8-10 [4]

For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 3:28 [5]

Much ado is made about the "individualism" of western societies versus the "communalism" of eastern societies. There are some theories that it goes back to the influence of ancient agricultural practices of wheat-centered societies versus those of rice-centered societies. But I think it is clear that the idea of individualism was deepened by Christianity. It is hard to overstate just how radical verses like the above were when they were written some 2000 years ago. The Greco-Roman world revolved around clans, bloodlines, families, and tribes. And more broadly, about the nation-state as a broader reflection of these. People would have had a very communal idea of who they were. This all changed with a religion that posited that every man must stand alone before the judgement seat of god with nothing but his own good or bad actions (if you're a Catholic) or faith or lack thereof (if you're a Protestant). In both cases, people have to stand on their own.

Now, the only way to get these isolated people together is through Christianity. Spiritual practice is traditionally the source of social cohesion, identity, and meaning of a people. But in a monotheistic religion there is no room for disagreement. So this meant that all the peoples who met the forces of Christianity (and Islam) had to abandon their old practices and be completely reborn from nothing, with nothing but Christianity. Indeed, this is the tone of much of the New Testament. The Romans found the religion completely alien to all they believed in: against the plurality of gods, against the beauty of the natural world, against the ties of family and community, against the traditions of our ancestors. That is because it fundamentally is. And very few have really accepted these full implications of the religion.

Of course, wise and just individuals have existed in all religious traditions on earth. Many great Christians like Leo Tolstoy, Martin Luther King Jr., Walter Rauschenbusch, Adin Ballou, and Jacques Ellul have understood the true teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in their purest, most excellent form: loving your neighbor as yourself, helping the downtrodden, turning the other cheek, and opposing all state authority over the conscience of the spirit. Many of the great moral triumphs of the western world, and especially in the United States, were influenced by Christian values. Abolitionism of slavery, desegregation of the races, and many other early social justice movements in the United States were led by Christians. But I maintain that the Christian religion, as a separate thing from the teachings of Jesus and the religion of his greatest and truest followers, has caused more evil than good for the western people. It has severed historical ties and traditions of cultures and peoples all around the world ever since it became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) by Werner Herzog

He also consistently talked about how the colonial people of America were "discriminated" against more than anyone, because they were robbed of knowing essential truth, both historically and philosophically. "I think the white man is most discriminated against because he is discriminated against by his own kind. The truth! We are believers in the truth, and not the facts as this society follows." He maintained that they were robbed of a relationship to their actual history and to their own nature, both of which their civilization brought them to forget.
Stan Rushworth describing Phillip Deere [6]

The evil of colonialism has made all of this worse. Of course, it is not only Christian societies that have engaged in colonialism. But the religion gives it a certain perverse justification: if a man needs nothing but the Christian faith and the earth is the property to the devil in the first place, he can live anywhere and everywhere. There is no need to have any roots to a particular piece of land, because the whole world is bequeathed to us to use as much as we can before the imminent apocalypse. And the effects of colonialism have been horrible evil to both conqueror and conquered. No one needs to recall the slaughter and persecution of indigenous peoples across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania by colonial western powers. The word heinous doesn't even begin to do it justice, and the terrible effects are still obvious. But colonialism has also caused profound spiritual damage to the colonizers.

Take someone like me, who was born and grew up in a big city in America. I am luckier than most of the black descendents of slaves in this country in that I at least have a pretty good idea of where my ancestors came from. I believe that my family were French colonists who made their way to Louisiana by way of Quebec. But am I "French?" God no. I cannot go to France and feel a deep-seated connection with the land there. I am a spiritual orphan, with no great repository of tradition, ancestral wisdom, and ancient land to draw upon. I am on stolen land that in no way belongs to my people and yet the land of my genetic history is even more alien to me. The traditions of the Gallic people have been eroded and replaced by Christianity and modern science for over 1000 years. And in both the Christian and modern scientific view, no one place on earth is greater or worse for people than any other because they attach no spiritual significance to the earth.

We might laugh at the Mormons and their ludicrous belief that ancient Israelites from the bible came and settled the Americas and left a spiritual legacy for settlers who would arrive over 1000 years later. But what can you expect for people living in a post-colonial state? Imagine seeing the tribes in the Americas and, even if you couldn't admit it, feeling such a deep-seated sense of jealousy at their spiritual connection to their land. Of course the Mormons and anyone else secretly hunger for the same thing. The only alternative is a view that they were deprived of connection to their ancestral lands by their own faith. And if that's the case, where are we to feel at home? How can people like us ever become grounded when we were born without ground? How can people hope to find meaning and feel at home in the world against a civilizational story of antagonism or apathy towards the world? People say that Americans are true "individualists," but that is more of a curse than a blessing. We have no choice but to be because we were severed from our own cultural and spiritual heritage, and therefore our communal sense of being.

Still though, there is hope. All religions can evolve and reform, and there is plenty of evidence that the Abrahamic faiths are improving on the whole. There are many Christians who have come to view the natural world with reverence and responsibility. The most powerful Christian on the planet, Pope Francis, has taken our current environmental crisis more seriously than many secular politicians. But I would like to suggest that we western peoples and others who are alienated turn back to the original, universal spiritual experience common to all mankind instead. It is not easy to do, especially for those of us who live in post-colonial states and big cities, but the possibility for growth is there as long as your heart is open and where there is a will there is always a way. You can call this practice whatever you want; nature worship, animism, paganism, the Dao, etc. I call this practice "Ur-Shintou," and sketch out what I see as its features.

2. Ur-Shintou: The Spiritual Practice of All Mankind

Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974) by Terayama Shuuji

Shintou is the name of the indigenous spiritual practice of Japan. I use it as an example because I think it is probably one of the purest forms of spiritual practice on the planet. But in truth I think it is something like one particular manifestation of a universal spiritual practice. Of course, I am biased, since Japan is the culture, people, language, etc. that I personally love the most. But I think it also gives us a much clearer picture of what this universal practice might look like. That is because a country like Japan which has been isolated for centuries and which is currently rich and powerful is therefore able to continue its native practices almost completely undisturbed and with ample resources and funding.

There are a lot of reasons why people are reluctant to use the word "religion" to describe Shintou. In Japanese history, separating out the indigenous elements of the religion from the ones imported from China and India is a fairly modern phenomenon. It was only in the Meiji Restoration that Shintou and Buddhist institutions were officially separated by law. The choice was born from a lot of nationalistic rhetoric and resulted in some pretty nasty anti-Buddhist radicalism. Some of the destruction of Buddhist temples and icons was truly hideous and tragic. But I do think there was a lot of value in isolating what is uniquely Japanese in Shintou. Because while it has the flavor and particulars of their particular lands and customs, Shintou is in fact something very universal and this helps us see it in a distilled form.

Of course, in order to do this, the Japanese had no choice but to frame Shintou as a "religion" in the same way that Buddhism is, but this is a misunderstanding. Shintou has no founder, no holy texts, no proscribed metaphysical beliefs, and no "commandments." Of course, there are norms and customs. There are rituals and instructions that are carried on. But it is not a systematic "teaching." The word Shintou is made up of two kanji: one for "god(s)" and one for "path" or "way." Shintou is the way of the gods. All of these things, a lack of a founder, a lack of holy texts, no particular necessary beliefs, etc. are distinct from major organized religions. But, to me, what is most distinct and most ancient about Shintou is that it is highly externally regimented while it is, for the most part, internally free.

Let me sketch out an example which really puts it into perspective. In ancient Rome, religion was an important part of the state. But "belief" was rarely a part of it. One of the best examples is the great orator Cicero. He was employed as an augur, which is a kind of diviner who reads into the flight patterns of birds. However, he made it clear that he didn't believe in augury at all! But to the Romans, that didn't matter. You just had to read the patterns. It's similar in modern Japanese shrines as well. A lot of young women do part-time jobs as miko (shrine maidens) even if they don't believe in anything spiritual. That's because there are still certain rites and duties that have to be done for the gods. And their presence helps and functions in the religion regardless of their "beliefs." This is because "belief" is unneccessary for the spiritual practice to function, either in ancient Rome or in modern Japan.

Both of these are the same because to me, the ancient Romans and the Japanese practice two different limbs of the great body of spirituality that is common to all mankind: I call it Ur-Shintou. And the most important part of it is the dual nature of external regimentation and internal freedom. The important part is the focus on action over belief. The externality of it is regimented so that it can unite others in the practice, but the internality of it is free so that no practitioner can be a heretic. And yet it never becomes superficial or cheapened. On the contrary, it makes it even more holy because everyone can approach it on their own terms.

3. Distinguishing Features of Ur-Shintou

It was not something that we invented over time, it's something that was given to us. The original instructions were identical all over the world, except for the specific culture; that came from the language that's used, which comes from the vibration of the land, and then people create their own version of the same original instruction.
Ilarion Merculieff [7]

Ur-Shintou by design must have no proscriptions, no commandments, etc. It is none other than the materialization of the awe, the reverence, and the love we have for natural forces. Some people call them gods. The Japanese call them kami. It is therefore against the entire idea of Ur-Shintou to restrict it to a textual catechism of beliefs. All beliefs and traditions have to come down from ancestors in whatever particular part of the world you are in. The beauty of Ur-Shintou is the variety it has grown into around the world, and therefore it can't be locked into some set of rules or commandments. Instead, take the following as "hints" to something larger than any one person can capture in words. While I sketch out Ur-Shintou in contrast to organized religions, there will nevertheless be overlap in terms of concepts and terminology, because every spiritual tradition is born from something authentic. After all, the reason Buddhism was accepted in Japan was because the indigenous deities gave their blessing that Buddhism was another form of truth imparted to the world on their behalf.

a. Nature Worship, Polytheism, Animism

A western anthropological word that comes up when discussing Japanese Shintou and also the spiritual practices of certain tribes in the Americas, Africa, and Oceania is "animism." I am often skeptical of western anthropological terms to do full justice to these concepts, but I think that this one is pretty acceptable. The word is derived from the Latin "anima," the soul or animating principle of any living thing. Ur-Shintou is thus an animism. In its worldview, there is a god, a soul, a spirit, an animating principle, etc. in everything we encounter in nature.

What exactly does this look like? That is too great of a mystery to say. And the metaphysical picture of it has varied in different societies around the world. Does every individual thing have a spirit living inside of it? Or does the spirit "watch over" it? Is there actually a separate, individual spirit for every individual thing (a different spirit in each individual tree)? Or are there slightly more grand-scale spirits that control all objects of a type (a general god of trees)? Is the animating principle a bunch of individual spirits? Or is there a spiritual "stuff" within everything (like the Polynesian concept of mana)? Is there one great spirit permeating through everything? Are they just personifications of the subjective human pathos towards natural objects? I am not sure, but I honor nature and its spiritual blessings regardless.

The thing about Ur-Shintou is that it is not about metaphysics. Trying to put it into any of these pictures seems to limit the power and auspiciousness of the natural world. Ludwig Wittgenstein warned about this insatiable desire for "generality" that philosophers have. Trying to sum up things in these generalized metaphysical pictures always limits them. We have let any one of these speak to us and make itself manifest, but never to stick to one over any other as the "truth." But personally, I have never been a fan of the image of nature as the "great mother." To me it's too personalized, too simple, and too close to monotheism. I think that we can only do justice to the grand variety on the earth and all the forms of worship that have grown on it by imagining the spiritual nature of earth as a grand, teeming web of as many divinities as there are things, whose presence is active and proactive and yet always solemn and dignified.

In John 4:22, Jesus charges the Samaritan woman with the claim of "ye worship ye know not what." I say, precisely! Anything that could be known and delimited into our human comprehension is not something worthy of worship.

Nostos - Il ritorno (1989) by Franco Piavoli

I consider Martin Heidegger to be the greatest philosopher the western world ever produced. His later writings especially show someone who understands Ur-Shintou intuitively and in its full depth. In some of his later writings, he keeps returning to something he calls the "fourfold." He says that human beings come to understand themselves and all other things on the basis of a "primal oneness of the four," namely earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. Our clearest and most authentic kind of being comes when we see ourselves, mortals, as a mirror of the three other parts of the fourfold. We can only have an accurate view of ourselves and any thing at all and "initiate" our being as mortals with a proper openness to the fourfold.

b. Cycles, Impermanence, Mono-no-aware

Everything in existence is cyclical. The rotations of the earth, the progression of the seasons, the our birth, aging, and death, etc. Things get destroyed and then other things grow in their place. The best thing we can do is learn to recognize the cycles of the natural world and live in accordance with them, to the best that we can. Our understanding of cycles has only gotten larger with scale. Now we no longer just talk about the progression of seasons, but the progression of geological ages over time, the progression of the creation and destruction of entire galaxies, the progression from the big bang to the heat death of the universe. But there is still no proof that the universe as we know it is not part of an even greater cycle that we do not understand. Our duty is to work along with those cycles, whatever our role may be.

The flowing river never stops and yet the water never stays the same. Foam floats upon the pools, scattering, re-forming, never lingering long. So it is with man and all his dwelling places here on earth.
Kamo no Choumei, Houjouki [8]

The river where you set your foot just now is gone--those waters giving way to this, now this.
Heraclitus, Fragment 41 [9]

The Naked Island (1960) by Shindou Kaneto

Because all things are cyclical, all things are also impermanent. Whatever exists will change and eventually perish. The huge, open deserts in the American west were all once a vast ocean in the Paleozoic era. In the last section I argued for good reasons that we need to do our best to slow climate change down and conserve things that are valuable. I still believe this with every fiber of my being. I look at it the way I would look at the protection of ourselves: we all accept that someday we will die, but we push on to always try to live on just a little longer. Why should we not also want our landscapes to live long and healthy lives on the geological time scale instead of dying early deaths caused by the abuses of heavy industry? But even if we all returned to a green anarchist utopia, impermanence would be an inescapable part of life. All things are mortal and have their day of death ordained somewhere in the great wisdom of nature.

Postmen in the Mountains (1989) by Huo Jianqi

If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but linger on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.
Yoshida Kenkou, Tsuredzuregusa [10]

I can barely conceive a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy.
Charles Baudelaire [11]

And yet, it is common to the human experience to become attached to things and to want to preserve them. The impermanence of things has to coexist with human beings' futile desire for them to last forever. But that too is as it should be. The Buddha suggested that we should abandon desires in order to get our of this tension. But the Ur-Shintou view is not so negative. In Ur-Shintou, this tension is fundamental, but it is a positive tension. The tension is what gives our existence its pulse, its vibrancy, and its vitality. To see what is beautiful and realize how frail and transient it is, then to feel the inseparable nature of beauty and melancholy is the most holy and important role of human beings on the earth. We are the ones who must try to perservere in conserving what is valuable even when it is hopeless. It is the whole impetus for the stewardship of the land and the creation of art.

Boys Blowing Bubbles (1640s) by Michaelina Wautier
Seattle Art Museum, oil on canvas
Source
Soap bubbles are a common metaphor for impermanence in 17th century Dutch painting.

The Japanese call this "mono-no-aware" and it is the most fundamental part of their nature-inspired aesthetic sensibility. Perhaps it is best encapsulated in first section of a Chinese poem from the Han period that would go on to be influential to generations of Japanese:

Alas for the breath of autumn!
Wan and drear: flower and leaf fluttering fall and turn to decay;
Sad and lorn: as when on journey far one climbs a hill and looks
down on the water to speed a returning friend;
Empty and vast: the skies are high and the air is cold;
Still and deep: the streams have drunk full and the waters are clear.
Heartsick and sighing sore: for the old draws on and strikes into a man;
Distraught and disappointed: leaving the old and to new places turning;
Afflicted: the poor esquire has lost his office and his heart rebels;
Desolate: on his long journey he rests with never a friend;
Melancholy: he nurses a pivate sorrow.
attributed to Song Yu, Chu ci, "Jiu bian" I [12]

It so naturally moves from the natural world to the human because both of them are thrown into a world that constantly shifts and changes around them. And we can respond to the vicissitudes with pathos for the natural objects around them that mirror them being tossed about in the cycles of time. Martin Heidegger finds a slightly more westernized aesthetic version of this truth when he says that the poet must always bear an attitude of "holy mourning" towards the world.

Late Spring (1949) by Ozu Yasujirou
Ozu Yasujirou's films are said to be one of the best modern expressions of mono-no-aware.

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.4311 [13]

This is tied to another important part of Japanese aesthetics: "ichi-go-ichi-e," realizing that any individual moment will never occur again and thus must be cherished in complete awareness and acceptance of its particular beauty. Our modern life has us too cut off from these natural cycles and thus from our ability to cherish these moments in holy mourning.

c. Karma, Interconnectedness, Dependent Origination

But in truth, if one from Asia should ask me what Europe is, I would have to reply: it is the continent utterly possessed by the unheard-of and incredible delusion that the birth of man is his absolute beginning and that he is created out of nothing.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena [14]

The term "karma" comes from the ancient Indian tradition, where it is given a special metaphysical reification. But karma is true in a very practical and realistic way that speaks to us intuitively. We exist in a vast web of connected causes and effects. Our current climate crisis should be enough to prove that. Everything we do has an effect on other things around us, then those things in turn have an effect, and it continues to spread out. Our actions reverberate out into the world like ripples on the surface of the water.

The old folk wisdom that no man is an island is true. Nothing comes into existence alone and without an innumerable other number of forces influencing it. We have to see ourselves as fellow travellers on the planet with everything else: human, animal, plant, even inert "material". Some Ur-Shintou traditions interpret this in terms of reincarnation, but not all of them and I don't consider a belief in reincarnation to be a "core" tenant. But interconnectedness is. It is the first step in recognizing our bad effects on the environment and learning how to let it heal, for one thing. But it doesn't end there.

d. Śūnyatā, Anātman, Yuugen

Things keep their secrets.
Heraclitus, Fragment 10 [15]

To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole--a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole--it is this that is mystical.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.45 [16]

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
John 3:8 [17]

As I mentioned above, everything is interconnected. But that raises a question: Where do we draw the limits between things? Are a seed, a sprout, and a tree all different things, or are they different stages of the same thing? And if they are different stages of the same thing, what is there then to distinguish that tree-thing from the soil that feeds into it, the sunlight that it absorbs nutrients from, etc. since they also feed into the substance and "stuff" of the tree-thing? The answer is simple: the distinctions are all nominal and conventional. None of them reflect something real in nature.

In Buddhist thought, this principle is called "śūnyatā" or "emptiness." The fundamental teaching is that all phenomena are "empty" in the sense that they dissolve under thorough examination. That is to say, when we look for a "tree," we find it to be unable to be distinguished at an ultimate level from the sprout, the seed, its leaves, its trunk, the sunshine, water, and soil that give it nutrients, etc. One way we can think of this is that everything is "empty" in the sense that none of them have an eternal, unchanging, static nature that stands above their phenomenal character. And that phenomenal character is always changing and always dependent on something else.

But another way to think of that is not that everything is empty, but that everything is full of everthing else. In the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, which is foundational to the Chinese Huayan school of Buddhism, this principle is explained with the metaphor of Indra's net. The god Indra has an infinite net which spreads out infinitely in every direction. At every eye of the net there is a single transparent jewel hung on the mesh. If we look at any individual jewel, we will find every other jewel in the infinite expanse reflected inside of it. Every single jewel reflects every other one in the infinite expanse. In the same way, every piece of phenomena is interconnected and dependent on everything else around it. All phenomena thus exist in a profound "interpenetration."

3D representation of Indra's net by Schnerf~commonswiki
Source

And yet, we ARE able to make distinctions of things our everyday life. We ARE able to distinguish the seed from the tree and from the soil and sunshine. How can we if all of these things are ultimately not real? That is a mysterious and profound thing. Somehow, everyone can "carve out" and "delimit" specific phenomena out of this vast interpenetrating web. In the Buddhist tradition, this dual nature of reality is referred to by a theory of "two truths," the conventional and the ultimate. And the conventional is not less than the ultimate. It still tracks truth. But it is only half of the story.

Martin Heidegger calls attention to something similar. Traditionally we think of truth as "correspondence." That is to say, we take a proposition like "the hat is on the table" and see if this corresponds to the situation of something called "hat" and "table" in the real world. However, that truth-as-correspondence is dependent on being able to carve up and delimit certain phenomenal "things" like "hat" and "table." A good example of this is lightning and thunder. In western countries, we have two words because we see it as two separate phenomena that always occur together: a light phenomena that happens, ends, and then a sound phenomena that follows. In Japanese, however, they only have one word for lightning-and-thunder: "kaminari." That is because they see it as one phenomenon: a phenomenon with a light component and then a sound component. The way that these phenomena "reveal" themselves differently is a simple metaphor for the more fundamental truth that Heidegger talks about.

He calls this truth "aletheia." It is an ancient Greek term for "truth" and in terms of etymology it is a negative thing. "Letheia" in Greek means concealing, forgetting, etc. You might know it from the mythological River Lethe in the underworld, where the souls of the dead drink and then forget their past lives. A-letheia is thus an un-concealing, an un-forgetting, a revealing. And what is revealed in it is true. However, it is only a small part of a whole. For Heidegger, every revealing exists on a background of concealing. Heidegger's analogy for it is a clearing in a forest. The space of intelligibility and meaning that we make for any phenomena is a small clearing that we carve out in the midst of a vast forest of the unknown.

This Transient Life (1970) by Jissouji Akio

There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas. If I wrote a book called "The World as I found it," I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.631 [18]

Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way. What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that "the world is my world". The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world—-not a part of it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.641 [19]

This all has an important takeaway for how we conceive of ourselves too. It follows that if all things are interconnected and dependent on other things, so are our selves. There is a long history in India and East Asia arguing that the "self" as we know typically think of it is an illusion. The Sanskrit term for it is "anātman" which literally means "not-self." This teaching goes all the way back to the Buddha. The first western philosopher to explicitly make the same argument, as far as we know, was David Hume. He, like the Buddha, simply pointed out that we never come across anything that can be called a "self" or "soul" or "ego" in our conscious experience. We don't ever exist as a "pure" consciousness, but are always directed towards some thing or another.

Hume also realized the dependent origination of phenomena by pointing out that the self was not unique in this regard. All things for him were "bundles." For example, if you try to find the underlying "substance" of something like an apple--the underlying "appleness"--you will never do it. You can only point to properties of the apple like its redness, its roundness, etc., none of which only inhere in apples. If you were going to find the underlying "appleness," it would have to be something independent of all the other properties which are not exclusive to apples. But there isn't any property of the apple which is exclusive to apples! Redness, roundness, juicyness, sweetness, etc. are all found in other phenomena too. Hume thus concludes that all phenomena are bundles of properties, insubstantial, and thus ultimately "empty," to use the Buddhist terminology.

Mandala

Mandala (1981) by Im Kwon-taek

Whatever is the essence of the Tathāgata,
That is the essence of the world.
The Tathāgata has no essence.
The world is without essence.
Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā 22:16 [20]

For the Buddhists, this view of the world has a strong moral implication. Because things are empty and transient, it is supposed to become easier to stop becoming so attached to them and thus easier to renounce our desires, which cause suffering. The ultimate form of that is recognizing that the self is also empty, so we stop caring so much about always fulfilling its rapacious desires and learn to be at peace. Such is the Buddhist point of view. Ur-Shintou accepts that all things are interconnected, and therefore this view seems to follow necessarily in my opinion, but how does Ur-Shintou conceive of the "insubstantial" self or the soul?

Japanese Shintou, like many other traditions that I see as outgrowths of Ur-Shintou, is far less negative about the existence of a "soul" than Buddhism. However, their view of the soul is very different from the Cartesian idea of a "ghost in the machine." A lot of Abrahamic religions have latched onto the Cartesian idea via osmosis, but I don't call it an Abrahamic conception, because you cannot actually find much biblical support for it. For the Japanese Shintouists, the spirit of a person is in fact spoken about as singular whole, but when analyzed closely is made up of four spiritual elements representing dynamism, tranquility, love, and wisdom respectfully. The four are supposed to be harmonized and exist in a balance within a person. In a sense, they are like the four humors in the western tradition. In Daoism there are similar concepts of the kinds of qi that create a peson's soul.

The whole point of it is that is that while Ur-Shintou believes in souls, it by no means believes in them in the sense of an isolated, ghostly, immaterial thing trapped in a meatsack that it is wholly unaffected by. The soul is like anything else in the universe: made of particular pieces that combine and interact in special ways to make more complex phenomena. However, it is also notable that the attitude towards the "soul" is much more pragmatic and prosaic in Ur-Shintou. It is a thing to be treated and cared for, but seems to exist by the same laws of nature as anything else. It is rarely talked about as a "consciousness" or "self." In Ur-Shintou, it seems as though the soul is a part of the self as much as something like the central nervous system is part of the self.

This is where a radically new interpretation of the self or consciousness is required. Here, again, I think Martin Heidegger has the best answer. Heidegger realizes that the old Cartesian picture of a spiritual consciousness trapped in a meatsack is simply not adequate to explain our actual experience and relation to the world. He calls our self "Dasein" (being-there) instead, in order to stress the non-mental and non-conceptual components of it. He wishes to show that it comes into being ALONG WITH the world and is not separate from it. He explains it as a complex STRUCTURE of being rather than one isolated entity. And Dasein is something that is always INTERPRETED by us both individually and collectively. To do this, it is always delimited from the vast number of other ways to be, and this is always a choice. But the other side of the revealing is always a concealing of the innumerable other ways to be that there are.

Maboroshi no Hikari (1995) by Kore'eda Hirokazu

One who knows does not speak;
One who speaks does not know.
Block the openings;
Shut the doors.
Blunt the sharpness;
Untangle the knots;
Soften the glare;
Let your wheels move along old ruts.
This is known as mysterious sameness.
Hence you cannot get close to it, nor can you keep it at arm's length;
You cannot bestow benefit on it, nor can you do it harm;
You cannot enoble it, nor can you debase it.
Therefore it is valued by the empire.
Laozi, Dao De Jing, Verse 56 [21]

"Yuugen" is a Japanese term. It is is nearly impossible to translate, but is deeply related to all of the above. "Mysterious profundity" is probably the closest I can come to translating what it means. It is when we sense that the universe is something very large and impossible to fully capture. It is when we see the ways of nature and sense something far larger and more auspicious that cannot be confined into words. It is when we sense that our words pale in comparison to the experience of the ultimate. This profound sense of humility and desire to offer one's logic and reason up to the world in defeat is the essential feeling at the heart of Ur-Shintou. All the metaphysical pictures of the world we sketch ultimately pale in comparison to it. And this is something we should welcome, because the mystery is a thing of rapturous beauty.

e. Frugality, Acceptance, Wu-wei

But what produces such differences in taste? In my opinion it is this: we Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness gives us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable.
Tanizaki Jun'ichirou, In Praise of Shadows [22]

And this the way my people lived; fully embodied trust without thought. We embodied this faith in our lives, ourselves, in Mother Earth and the universe, and in the Great Spirit that lives in all things. And this is a way that was the way of the original human beings that used to promulgate throughout the entire world, and we have forgotten that.
Ilarion Merculieff [23]

Heidegger has a name for the way we will exist with respect to the Fourfold. He calls it "dwelling." We should learn to not only "live on" or "stay on" the earth but to "dwell" in it. When we "dwell," we belong and live on the earth as a home. We must learn to dwell on the earth so we no longer have a relationship of antagonism to it. This means living in accordance with the natural world, following the cycles of nature, and giving back.

In Japan, children are taught from a young age to put their hands together and give a statement of thanks before they eat their food. One of the great tragedies of the western world is that we removed this custom when we removed religion from our lives. This small gesture instills a sense of respect and thanks for the bounty before you. It gives you a better appreciation of how far things came to get on your plate. It lets you remember that each grain of rice was the result of a farmer who sweat over it. This is a small example of the kind of thing we should instill in ourselves. When we do it, we remember our place in the great system of life. Frugality naturally is born as a result.

So many people in the modern world have so many THINGS but are still miserable. Simple living is an important element of living in tune with the world. We are killing the planet through over-consumption, so we should reduce the number of things we need to be happy. The fewer things we have, the freer we become. And it's nice to sacrifice a bit of that freedom so that we can have things that are valuable to us, but too many people today are suffocated because of all the things they own. Nor does this imply being shabby. The fewer things you have, the more clean, neat, and elegantly simple you can keep your interiors.

A simpler dwelling reflects the natural world more closely. In traditional Japanese architecture, an important principle is that a building should look "natural." It should look as if it simply grew out of the environment like the trees around it. And no, this doesn't mean something as simple as covering it in moss and leaves! It means that on a more abstract aesthetic level it should work in concert with the natural features around it. It should not look as if it is causing strain to the surroundings. Heidegger again picks up on this idea when he talks about his example of an ideal dwelling, an old-fashioned and traditional log cabin: it should not be a cabin ON TOP OF the hill or BESIDE the hill but a cabin OF the hill.

Saving does not only snatch something from a danger. To save really means to set something free into its own presencing. To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from spoilation.
Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking" [24]

Much ado is made today about "saving the earth." Heidegger talked about saving the earth back in the 1950s, but his understanding was very different from ours. To him, "saving" something was in many ways a receptive action. To "save" the earth is to allow it to regain its place of authority and let it reveal its nature. For him, saving something is to set it free and let it have its own autonomy. Of course, the paradox of this is that we can't be passive in doing it. We have to ACTIVELY ensure that it comes forth into its own presence. Heidegger calls this "safeguarding." He believes we should keep our places consecrated for when the gods return.

Without stirring abroad
One can know the whole world;
Without looking out the window
One can see the way of heaven.
The further one goes
The less one knows.
Therefore the sage knows without having to stir,
Identifies without having to see,
Accomplishes without having to act.
Laozi, Dao De Jing, Verse 47 [25]

What man performs unconsciously costs him no effort, and no effort can provide a substitute for it: it is in this fashion that all original conceptions such as lie at the bottom of every genuine achievement and constitute its kernel come into being. Thus only what is inborn is genuine and sound: if you want to achieve something in business, in writing, in painting, in anything, you must follow the rules without knowing them.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena [26]

In Daoism, the term for the highest manner of existence is "wu-wei." Sometimes this is translated as "non-action" or "inaction," but this is a misnomer. That is why I prefer to leave it untranslated. What wu-wei is better translated as is non-"intentional" action or non-"artificial" action. The idea is that whatever is best should somehow or another feel natural. We should never have to "force" ourselves to do what is right. This is not to say that every instinct we have is automatically correct. But when truly enlightened and living in a moral way, our good actions should all be spontaneous and naturally flowing. The famous metaphor in the Dao De Jing is of water: it flows naturally without forcing itself one way or the other, it adapts to and reflects what is around it, and yet the power it exerts can be larger than anything. When we authentically dwell, this is the true state of the human being.

f. Sensuality, Fertility, Compassion

Himiko (1974) by Shinoda Masahiro

The way that can be spoken of is not the constant way;
The name that can be named is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.
Hence always rid yourself of desires in order to observe its secrets;
But always allow yourself to have desires in order to observe its manifestations.
These two are the same but diverge in name as they issue forth.
Being the same they are called mysteries, mystery upon mystery -
The gateway of the manifold secrets.
Laozi, Dao De Jing, Verse 1 [27]

Tremendous indeed is the occult influence of sex-love upon the evolution of organic life. Love and glory, fidelity, emulation, resolution, beauty, strength, and courage are directly inspired by sex-passions.
Ragnar Redbeard, Might Is Right or The Survival of the Fittest [28]

Eroticism, sex, is one of the most moral parts of life. Eroticism does not kill, exterminate, encourage evil, lead to crime. On the contrary, it makes people gentler, brings joy, gives fulfillment, leads to selfless pleasure.
Walerian Borowczyk [29]

Many organized religions have adopted as part of their doctrine a deep-seated fear of sex and sensuality. This is one of the worst things about them. It is fundamentally in opposition to our nature not only as human beings, but as lifeforms in general. One of the greatest things about Japan as a country is that it has never had a societal fear of sex and sensuality in its history, even after integrating Buddhist teachings into its national worldview. The view in Japan has been since time immemorial that sexuality is at its core a good thing. And not just because it creates children and thus ensures the continued existence of society, but because it is simply in itself something that brings joy, pleasure, and peace.

In even the oldest records of Japan, there are prostitutes as an essential part of society. And they are spoken of with honor and reverence. To them, ensuring that sexual release and thus fulfillment of desires happens to a reliable degree is one of the foundations of a functioning society. In fact, before the Meiji Restoration, miko (shrine maidens) at shrines even worked as sacred prostitutes and would perform sexual favors for worshippers. Sexuality was so holy and good that it was thought to be close to the gods. There are many other societies in the ancient world that did similar things. Herodotus describes it as commonplace in Babylon, for example.

It's not certain to what degree sacred prostitution was really practiced in Greece and Rome proper, but there is no doubt that they saw sexual desire and godliness as related. Why do you think they always depicted their gods as physically beautiful, and often nude, human beings? Centuries'-worth of Christians have tried to castrate the Greco-Roman conception of their love-gods. But this is merely so that they can try to pretend that Christianity is the natural outgrowth of the ancient Greco-Roman world and not fundamentally in opposition to it. Never forget that Cupid is EROS. The Greeks may have had many words for love, and that they could distinguish between a purely physical love and one on a deeper, spiritual level, but they saw ALL of them as gifts to cherish from the great goddess Aphrodite. Romans even had a special celebration in their families when their son had his first nocturnal emission. They saw it as a sign of his maturity and entering into manhood, and thus as a thing to celebrate!

Of course, there can be a dark side to sexuality. Rape and infidelity, for example, happened in the ancient world as well, and were frowned upon. There is also a tradition in many societies where special seers, prophets, etc. abstain from sex in order to put more focus towards spiritual matters. But that doesn't mean that the activity is bad. Sex is like eating or sleeping. A good and healthy appreciation of good-tasting food is great. But gluttony is not. A good eight hours of uninterrupted sleep is great. But sleeping in the middle of class or work is not. Sex is different from these in that humans can still survive without it, but I think it is part of the same natural human drive. And some limits to sex are set in nature. STDs exist for a reason: they are nature's way of letting us know when too much is too much. Masturbation is similarly evolutionarily beneficial: it improves the quality of sperm and keeps population growth in check. All in all, sexual desire and fulfillment is just one part of life among many, often good, sometimes bad, and always to be judged in relation to a balanced whole.

The spirit of the valley never dies.
This is called the mysterious female.
The gateway of the mysterious female
Is called the root of heaven and earth.
Dimly visible, it seems as it it were there,
Yet use will never drain it.
Laozi, Dao De Jing, Verse 6 [30]

Sex is just one way in which the sacred masculine and feminine make themselves manifest. Whether you call them yin and yang, active and passive, or whatever else, all phenomena need a healthy balance of the two to function. This is why in Ur-Shintou there are complimentary, but distinct roles for both males and females in worship. Abrahamic religions destroyed the place of the sacred feminine in worship and ritual. As such, it is no wonder that sex is so despised in their worldview. Because it is a way to balance and peacefully intertwine the feminine and masculine.

At its core, sex is a physical manifestation of compassion. Prostitution is fundamentally a caregiving profession, like nursing. And the best prositutes will be full of compassion and love. Because they are making people very happy. Basically, Ur-Shintou is pro-sex "work", because it is one of the most original and holy "works" along with hunting, craft-making, etc. in making a harmonious society. The Ur-Shintou view sees sex as just one of the many callings that people can aspire to in order to make the world a more compassionate and loving place. Compassion is an important thing to foster in the Ur-Shintou mindset, as it is in almost every major religion. But it does mean something very different from them in that it considers our sensual experiences as very important and fundamental to who we are.

g. Impurity, Taboos, Purification

A lot of edgy kids are drawn to "paganism" because they seem to think it's a free-for-all that will let you do whatever you want, unlike those Abrahamic religions with all their rules and regulations. While it's true that Ur-Shintou does not have specific prohibitions, there are absolutely taboos, impurities, and the necessity to become pure and clean.

Many of the particulars when it comes to these things are dependent on the particular culture. Remember, Ur-Shintou places a lot of emphasis on the EXTERNAL. And that is the kind of thing that I can't make overarching descriptions of. In Japan, you have to wash your hands and mouth before entering a shrine in order to cleanse yourself. Salt is another thing that confers great powers of purification in the Japanese worldview. There is a complex system of divination in Japanese Shintou as well. But these things will vary depending on what part of the world and culture you are in. The great thing about Ur-Shintou is how varied and particular it is. Because it is inherently connected to the land, it will be as varied as are the many lands on the earth.

But there is some room to talk about internal purification as well. A mind that is angry, that is resentful, that is selfish, that is self-doubting, that is full of trepidation, etc. will radiate out negative effects. None of this means that you have to deceive yourself or deny your emotions and "pretend" to be happy. It just means that you have to understand and interpret the many horrible things in the world without letting them deny you of your own tranquility and peace. One of the great ways to train yourself to do that is through meditation, which cuts away at everything that is non-esesntial. There are many kinds of meditation and they are all effective in different ways.

Note, however, that this doesn't mean that the only way to have an authentic spiritual experience is by being solemn. One of my favorite things about Japan is that you can go into a cosplay store and buy a costume that looks exactly like the outfits that their miko (shrine maidens) use, and that no one finds this insulting. I think it is a sign of true authentic spirituality when what is holy can mix with what is fun. It was exactly the same in ancient Greece. There was no "taking the lord's name in vain" in their society. Allusions and references to their gods and their spirituality punctuated every element of their lives, from the noble to the mundane. Relating even the "base" elements of your life to the spiritual is actually the most embodied, active, genuine kind of spirituality there is. And none of it robs spiritual practices of their gravity and solemnity in their more ritualized and formal manner.

h. Conservation, Tradition, Ancestors

The Profound Desire of the Gods (1968) by Imamura Shouhei

As the oldest and most original form of spiritual practice, Ur-Shintou is fundamentally conservative. And I don't mean that in a political sense. I mean it in the most literal sense of the word. It is about conserving. That isn't fundamentally opposed to change. Change is inevitable in the world. But as a spiritual practice we have to draw on and keep alive what is valuable from the past so that we have connections to our ancestors. This was incredibly important in societies whose traditions were passed on orally. And some of the traditions we have today in places like Japan and some indigenous American tribes, for example, are truly ancient.

"Ancestor worship" is by no means an exclusively eastern phenomenon. If we understand "ancestor worship" in the true meaning of the word, it was absolutely practiced by the Greeks and Romans. The problem is that this word "worship" is defined in a very narrow, Abrahamic sense. The Greeks and Romans HONORED their ancestors, and there's really no difference in honoring and worshipping in Ur-Shintou. This is related to the Confucian concept of "filial piety." In the western world, the word "piety" has essentially been appropriated to only refer to the relation of man to god. But it means something more broad in the pre-Christian world: honoring/worshipping/remaining faithful to your ancestors, your parents, your teachers, your elders, your gods, etc. This old use of the word occurs again and again in Virgil's Aeneid to refer to its central hero as "pious Aeneas." And it is important to be like Aeneas and honor our ancestors and to find activities that tie us to them even after they have departed.

Himatsuri (1985) by Yanagimachi Mitsuo

Of course, while Ur-Shintou prizes peace and harmony, sometimes conflict is going to happen with modernizing forces. We should always try for peaceful coexistence, but there are some times when you unfortunately have to resist actively and forcefully (but hopefully never violently), like when it comes to preventing development on certain sacred pieces of land. For indigenous tribes in the Americas, this is unfortunately an old and yet ongoing story.

i. Decentralization, Voluntarism, Non-Compulsion

Belief is like love: it cannot be compelled; and as any attempt to compel love produces hate, so it is the attempt to compel belief which first produces real unbelief.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena [31]

We did the work we had to do, but the rest is not up to us. It's up to the Great Spirit that lives in all things. So we don't concern ourselves with the number of people that we target, as long as our intentions are in harmony with the universe and with the Great Spirit that lives in all things.
Ilarion Merculieff [32]

There will never be an Ur-Shintou pope. The spiritual practice is against all forms of universalized globohomo. It has to be tied to certain pieces of land, the practices and history of that land, and the people who live there. As such, it is inherently decentralized. Ur-Shintou is a spiritual practice of the tribe, of the village, of the household, etc. Of course, there can be communication between the groups that practice it and larger-level standards. There will also be no Ur-Shintou evangelism. I am telling you what I like about it and why I think it's such a beneficial way to see the world, but don't despise anyone for not joining. Everyone who discovers it has to do so spontaneously and based on their own authentic spiritual awakening.

In short, it has to be non-compulsory. This also means that secularism in political affairs is almost always preferred. We should never have laws that force people to obey our spiritual practice. In fact, this robs the practice of its legitimacy, because it turns people into captive practitioners instead of authentic ones. This should make Ur-Shintou an easy "religion" to exist in modern, secular societies since it will not press its views on others, so long as it is given a reciprocal space.

The purpose of Ur-Shintou is to conserve and to learn from ancestral wisdom. So the instinct should always be against change. But there might be some cases where it is necessary. For example, I don't expect or encourage Ur-Shintouists in Mexico to recreate the Aztec ritual of human sacrifice. But I think it would be good to "act out" sacrifices instead, even down to something like faking a stabbing and pulling out fake guts if need be. In Japan, similar things are done. There is a longstanding tradition of exorcising one's sins into a doll and throwing it in a river to be cleansed. But now the dolls are made of paper so that they can decompose more easily and not clog up rivers with trash. This is how it should be done: as close to the original as possible, but only changing what goes against Ur-Shintou principles in the modern age.

4. Spirituality Without Superstition: Sacred Play

The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.
Roger Scruton [33]

Now, I understand that what I say may sound very woo-woo to a lot of people. Most secular people in modern societies refuse to believe what doesn't have good empirical evidence. Most of the time, that is a good thing. We don't make advances in science otherwise. But I want to remind you that Ur-Shintou is not a practice that makes metaphysical proscriptions. Abrahamic religion might be in fundamental conflict with science because its holy text says that the world is 6000 years old or that human beings didn't evolve from earlier primates. But a religion like Ur-Shintou can actually be very compatible with science, because so much of it is EXTERNAL and not constrained by specific metaphysical claims.

Let me try to sketch this out. What is a "sacred" space? Is it a place where literal gods live and act in a higher, non-material way? Or is it a place that human beings just find particularly beautiful and sublime and want to maintain, the way we might designate a natural park? What are the "gods" anyway? Are they supernatural entities that live in things and work through them in a non-material way? Or are they simply elaborate metaphors and allegories that we use to express our reverence for natural phenomena? Well, in Ur-Shintou all of these positions are acceptable, because all of them are functionally identical at the end of the day! That is because, remember, it is primarily EXTERNAL. There is no obligation of certain metaphysical beliefs.

This is important because it means that the spiritual practice can continue to function as markers of identity and continuity in a culture. To put it bluntly, even if every person views it only as an elaborate LARP, it can still be one that is deeply fulfilling, fun, and meaningful. The best analogy I like to use for it is of leaving flowers on a gravestone. Now, very few people in our modern era believe, in a scientific sense, that flowers left on a gravestone will directly speak to the soul or ghost of the dead person. But the act still has meaning, if for nothing else than making manifest in a physical way your love and respect for that person. I believe there is value in viewing the world in some of the more "supernatural" ways that I've sketched above insofar as it doesn't contradict the findings of science, but at the end of the day Ur-Shintou doesn't hinge on "beliefs" to exist. And that is why it is so adaptable and tenacious.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) by Sergei Parajanov

I think there is even a good argument to be made for this trend among Abrahamic societies. It is pretty informative when you look at which countries (that aren't tiny islands) have the greatest percentage of Christians in their populations. The answer is places like Romania, Armenia, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Greece, Serbia, Georgia, etc. Do you see a pattern? None of them are majority Protestant! That is because Catholic and especially Orthodox Christianity both have much more ritual and "externality" to their worship! Therefore the religion thrives even into the modern day, because people find that kind of thing very culturally important. In comparison, majority Protestant nations secularize at an incredible rate. That is because they have no Ur-Shintou roots integrated into their religion. Protestanism is probably the most alien religion there is to the earth, even more than Islam which at least pays honor to the physicality of a certain place in the hajj and the orientation of the body when praying.

5. Enframing and Technological Control

Charisma (1999) by Kurosawa Kiyoshi

One of the difficulties in keeping alive these Ur-Shintou traditions is a landscape that is altered due to the increase in human pollution that has ramped up since the industrial revolution. I talked about that in the previous pillar. But we should also give some space here for what we might call the "spiritual" damage of technology. This is a much more complex and nuanced topic.

All distances in time and space are shrinking. Man now reaches overnight, by plane, places which formerly took weeks and months of travel. He now receives instant information, by radio, of events which he formerly learned about only years later, if at all. The germination and growth of plants, which remained hidden throughout the seasons, is now exhibited publicly in a minute, on film. Distant sites of the ancient cultures are shown on film as if they stood this very moment amidst today's street traffic. Moreover, the film attests to what it shows by presenting also the camera and its operators at work. The peak of this abolition of every possibility of remoteness is reached by television, which will soon pervade and dominate the whole machinery of communication.
Martin Heidegger, "The Thing" [34]

Martin Heidegger wrote these words in 1951. Just imagine how much more "collapsed" the world has become since then, espcially with the internet. His great point, as I take it, is that even though all the distances are closing, nothing feels particularly close. It rather all feels flat, impersonal, and "equalized." Because for some things to become near to us, other things need to be remote. I think this is a big problem with the modern world, and technology is to blame.

Now, I'm not a Luddite. I am making a website, after all. I have to be very thankful for the internet, because it was primarily what allowed me to become so informed about so many different topics and expand my horizons to such a degree. I'm a nerd and I like code. I like writing html. I like geeking out over keyboard switches and graphics cards. I like programs that do interesting things. And I really do believe in the power of technology to do excellent things like archiving human knowledge and history, connecting likeminded people, and stimulating creativity in ways that previous generations could never even imagine. Indeed, even our understanding of and relation to the past is dependent on technology. For example, advanced infrared photography via drones gives us the ability to do more accurate and therefore informative archaeological excavations than ever before. But there is no question that technology is capable of evil and has had some horribly negative effects on the human experience.

The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence. The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.
Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" [35]

I won't get into the ways that our minds are warped by algorithms, the ease of distributing misinformation, the way communities become isolated because peoples' social circles are increasingly digitized, the way even "creative" jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence, etc. That's not because they aren't important. But countless others have written about these evils more eloquently than I can. Instead, I want to call attention to something even more fundamental about technology: the way it changes our relation to the world and how things are "revealed" to us within it.

Most of what I argue is directly influenced by Martin Heidegger's prescient but obscure essay "The Question Concerning Technology." The essay is as difficult as it is fascinating, so I will not even try to do it full justice here. But I will do my best to capture the most important lessons that it conveys. In it, he argues that "technology" in the sense of tools that are designed to accomplish certain tasks has existed for as long as human beings have. However, he maintains that the technology of the modern era is something fundamentally different in that it has the power to completely change how things "reveal" themselves to us. In the technological age, things come to reveal themselves as "standing-reserve."

The driver sat in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath [36]

This can best be sketched out by some examples. We might think of a hydroelectric plant as little more than the logical conclusion of a water wheel, or a wind turbine as a scaled-up and modernized version of a windmill. But Heidegger maintains that these are fundamentally different. The water wheel or windmill work WITH the forces of water or wind and allow them to reveal themselves in a way that is natural and "subservient" to nature. That is, they allow them to reveal themselves "as they are." Compare that to a hydroelectric plant or wind turbine, which "challenge" nature in a "calling-forth" and "unreasonably" force it to turn its air and water currents into abstracted energy.

For Heidegger, this completely changes how we view the world around us. It means that we no longer take the water as water, the wind as wind, or the soil as soil, but everything as "standing-reserve." We view the whole world only as something to be extracted, to be used, to be measured, and to be made to stand at order before us. It's important to note that this is something much more wide-ranging than simply a message against the reckless over-use of the earth's resources. The biggest object of his ire is a hydroelectric plant, which we would think of as an ideally "clean" and "renewable" energy source. The point is that even if we had miracle technology that allowed us to use only renewables to ensure a beautiful, stable climate forever more, this would still be viewing everything in nature as something to manipulate for our own ends.

Le quattro volte (2010) by Michelangelo Frammartino

Now, you might object and point out that certainly the peoples of the pre-modern world had viewed the earth as "standing-reserve" at least some of the time. For example, a medieval peasant would have still had to have a certain amount of crops at the end of the day, and this would have been omnipresent in his mind when he looked out at his fields. This is certainly true. The problem is not really with viewing the earth as standing-reserve. The problem is with what Heidegger calls "Enframing." What does this mean? Essentially, his problem is that the technological view of the world as standing-reserve has dominated and "enframed" everything. Basically put, it conceals all the other ways in which things can reveal themselves.

The medieval peasant was still ultimately subject to the seasons of the year, the cycles of day and night, the irregularities of the weather, etc. He was ultimately much more a PART OF the process than a MANIPULATOR above and apart from the process. In our modern era, however, the new apparatus of technology separates us from all these processes of the earth and thus turns our experience of it into an experience of standing-reserve. For example, a powerful river instead becomes a supply of energy for a hydroelectric plant. The open, fertile plains instead become speculated as potential crops to sell in order to turn a profit. Even the most gorgeous, untouched piece of wild nature becomes turned into a commodity for the tourism industry. Indeed, even our enjoyment of "unspoiled" nature is mitigated by "Enframing." The enjoyment of "unspoiled" nature becomes predicated on the fact that it has not yet been taken up and used. Our conception of its beauty is bound up with the fact that it is not yet standing-reserve, or rather standing-reserve that is still left alone. This is a kind of filter which distorts our understanding of something more immediate and "primal."

When man, in his way, from within unconcealment reveals that which presences, he merely responds to the call of unconcealment, even when he contradicts it. Thus when man, investigating, observing, pursues nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve.
Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" [37]

I've mostly been talking about wild nature as an example, but Heidegger's concern is all-encompassing. Indeed, for him, the logical endpoint of the technological worldview would be to turn anything and everything into standing-reserve. We would even start viewing our fellow human beings as standing-reserve. There is a wry line in the text calling attention to how what used to be called "personnel" departments are now called human "resources!" And because, in his view, Dasein (the human being) only comes into existence on the basis of the world around it, the end result is only that man comes to see and understand even himself as mere standing-reserve.

6. How to Safeguard the Fourfold

Sleeping Man (1996) by Oguri Kouhei

When and in what way do things appear as things? They do not appear by means of human making. But neither do they appear without the vigilance of mortals. The first step toward such vigilance is the step back from the thinking that merely represents--that is, explains--to the thinking that responds and recalls.
Martin Heidegger, "The Thing" [38]

They know what they are doing. We call it the Earth-based pace. They're slowing down to move at the rate of hearing Mother Earth. Going faster disconnects us from the relationship to Mother Earth. Another thing that it teaches is that we must take stock of what we have done.
Ilarion Merculieff [39]

Heidegger believes that the "crisis" of Enframing and the modern age where the gods have abandoned us is severe. However, he does not believe that all hope is necessarily lost. An analogy to Marx might help. Just as Marx thought that it was in the grip of the worst abuses of capitalism that communism would emerge, Heidegger believes that it is under the worst crisis of technology that we will have the opportunity to learn to resist the power of Enframing. [40] However, just like Marx's communism, it is not guaranteed. It requires us to be proactive. Heidegger believes that we need to engage in what is called "safeguarding." He is rarely explicit about what this consists of, but one thing he proposes is that great art and poetry is one the best ways to keep alive a view of things that does not turn them into standing-reserve. He does not believe that our future is completely set in stone. However, he believes that philosophy will not be the answer. He famously announces instead that:

Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poetizing, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering; for in the face of the god who is absent, we founder.
Martin Heidegger, "Only a God Can Save Us" [41]

Besides the creation and connoiseurship of great art and poetry (i.e. that which is full of yuugen), I have what seem like other good concrete things that we can all do to keep the holy fire stoked while we wait for the gods to return. But again, I want to reiterate: I am NOT the ideal "guardian." I am not living up to my own advice here. I have to be honest. But I hope you can learn from my mistakes and do better.

＊Align yourself with whatever natural cycles you can. Wake up when it gets bright, go to sleep when it becomes dark. Eat what is nearby and in-season. Grow your own food if you can. Pay attention to the progression of the seasons and their markers. This will help you start to recover a sense of awe and wonder towards the natural world.

＊Give thanks before eating. Give thanks before consuming products. You don't have to look at it as a supernatural thing. But taking that small moment to appreciate that you are taking something that has come out of the earth and required resources, you will become more aware of your relation to the natural world. Being frugal is a good thing. It gives you more freedom and autonomy, not less.

＊We are never going back to using windmills and water wheels to power everything. As I explained in my first pillar, new technology will be essential in mitigating our climate crisis. But we can take lessons from the old technology in terms of design. Our technology, buildings, products, etc. should "blend into" the environment around them, and not just in terms of being degradable. They should be OF their surroundings, not just plopped in the midst of them. And they should be built to last for generations and be passed down, not to be disposable and constantly replaced.

＊Travel less, but more meaningfully. For one thing, it's better for the planet and for the environment. But note that travelling less doesn't mean being insular. You should take advantage of how interconnected our world is by learning a lot about cultures all over the world and their history. But there is very little to be gained by visiting a country unless you have a very deep spiritual attachment to it. So gain that spiritual attachment first. That doesn't mean you have to stay put wherever you were born forever. Find out what kind of land has meaning for you and find a way to put roots there.

＊Start meditating. There are many kinds of meditation, but I'm a fan of the most simple, oldschool kind that there is: sitting in a comfortable position, doing nothing, and thinking nothing for at least 20 minutes. Even if you are a completely atheistic materialist, meditation is very good for you. It helps you have a clearer mind, a greater awareness of what is important, and a greater attention span.

＊Stop using social media. It destroys your attention span and dulls your sensitivity to beauty and meaning. That doesn't mean you have to cut out your awareness of what's going on in the world. You absolutely should stay informed. But be more structured and don't "doomscroll." Actually read the articles and take time to digest them.

＊If you are a Maori, an Ainu, or a member of another culture with a longstanding, native culture of tattooing, you may get them, for you have essentially been given "special permission" by the gods. Otherwise, I highly recommend not getting a tattoo. Your body is a gift given to you by nature and it is pure and beautiful. It is disrespectful to mutilate it unless it is part of a time-honored tradition that you have to be initiated into. The same goes for "weird" piercings. I don't hate anyone who has them though. It is their choice and I will not hold it against them.

＊None of this involves being separated or segmented from the rest of the world around you. By all means, continue to advocate for better environmental policy as I outline in the previous section. I don't think that "dropping out" and creating alternative communities needs to be separated from having influence in the larger community.