The Only Certainty Given To Man

There was a time, however, when I was as naïve as the rest of them. During the nine-year period when I lived the life of a free-lance Franciscan, what spoke within me (to be sure, under certain recognized and definite conditions) I accepted as, and frankly called, “the voice of God.” And to this I tended to pass all responsibility. I myself was but a soldier under orders. As such, my whole obligation was to do faithfully what I had found myself commanded. If people did not like things I did, my inclination was to tell them that they should present their objections not to me but to God.

In the fall of 1929, however, this kind of life in me began to break up. There then intervened that period of devastating skepticism of which I have written in a previous chapter. It was a time of strong resurgence on the part of my reasoning mind. I doubted everything that I had once so firmly believed. I questioned even those assumptions on which had rested my sense of peace and security in the face of the universe, my certainty of direction in life, and all the position of influence among men that had come to me through nine years of strenuous experience. I asked what men knew, or ever had known, or could know, about this universe in which our lot is cast, about any ultimate reality or any absolutes. What reason was there to think that the yardstick of our human values had any reference to such things? Where was the evidence that the universe was rational, or had a purpose, or was guided and permeated by love—in particular, by any special love toward man? What was the evidence of the “moral order in the universe” that the preachers love to talk about? To be sure, for ages men have talked about these things as though they were sure, as though certainty were not only possible but actually achieved. They have even declared that “God” (by which I suppose, whatever else they mean, they mean “ultimate reality”) was “spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable, in his being wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.” 

They have talked about God, and to this day they talk about him, in the churches and everywhere, not only thus in general, but more in particular—about the “plan of God for salvation,” even about the “plan of God for the salvation of China.” They talk about him as though they had hobnobbed with him since they were schoolboys together, talk about him until I grow nauseated with the hearing of their talk. And now, when they begin, there commonly arises in my mind the picture of two bullfrogs pulling themselves at daybreak from the depths of their little pool, which was the only world they really knew, and lifting themselves up onto their hind legs and with an air of great wisdom discussing together why the sun comes up, and what it is, and whither it goes. As though they ever could know.

And what more can man know about ultimates and absolutes? These big words he uses to talk about them—“infinite,” “eternal,” “unchangeable,” “truth”—what are they but a means by which man hides, even from himself, the fact that he does not know about such things, and cannot know about them—that knowledge about such things simply is not given to man. Most men believe because without believing they could not live. They would go into a panic at the thought of undertaking, amidst uncertainty all around them, to make sure of their course in life by a certainty and a strength that they found only inside themselves. Their beliefs about ultimates are an unconscious device by which they hide the inscrutableness of existence from their own eyes, and hide from themselves, also, the fact that they are hiding, the fact that they are afraid and weak, and are running for cover.

But my search for reality was pitiless. I was willing, I thought, to pay any price. I wanted no fool’s paradise, nor any saint’s. I could not stand the thought of buying peace at the cost of honesty. My search might lead me to a region where life would be more austere and more stark. That I should not mind. But if there were, amid the shifting sands of human existence, any rock that so ran down into the very foundations of the universe that it could be counted on to withstand any storm that all the fury of the elements might hurl against it, then I wanted to find it. Was it to be found in the mystical experience?

So now this also came under my critical eye. I had read some psychology: I now read more. I was resolved that my mind should be free to examine and to criticize any side whatever of my total experience.

So now I gave it free rein with the mystical. I ventured to look behind the scenes. I undertook to separate the “raw stuff’ of my experience from any interpretation that I might have put upon it. Admittedly there had long been that within me which, in the deepest stillness of my being, always spoke to me, and, in the face of any situation, told me very explicitly just what I should do. But I said to myself, “What is this that has spoken? If it is not God, what is it? And what value does it have? Or reliability? Or authority?”

Thus I asked myself. And this asking, and the thinking I did in consequence, had its effects. I suppose, for one thing, I am somewhat less of a mystic than I might have been. This thing of pulling up your roots to examine them is not entirely wholesome. But being the kind of man I was, and living in an age like ours in which every value, standard, and practice is being challenged, criticized, experimented with, and more or less widely rejected, until there is almost no certainty left, I simply could not afford to go on building my house without subjecting the soundness of my foundations to every test within the reach of my capacities and my resources. And this test I made. I had to make it. And I am glad that I made it.

I may be less of a mystic than I might have been. But my having made sure of the ground under me may enable another man to go farther than I can now. And, in any case, what mysticism I have, I am sure of. I may not be flying so high, but there is less chance of my being brought down altogether. I already have faced the worst. I have no reason to fear light—any light. There is nothing at which I am afraid to look, full and straight. Prove to me that what is commonly called “God” does not exist: ultimately, it would not disturb me. I believe that I am prepared at any time to cast all that I need to say about the mystical experience into terms of psychology. Moreover, let me add that even now I rather avoid using the word “God” for the simple reason that to different people it has such vastly different meanings that there could be no certainty about what people would be taking me to be saying. But let no reader of mine, on this account, take it into his head that I am any atheist. If he could but peer into my heart and sense the communion there between my innermost being and That-Which-Is-Beyond-All-Words, he would perhaps realize that I have within me the counterpart of all the God that any man ever has had as a matter of his own firsthand experience.

In short, if there was any one thing that came through the fires of my prolonged skepticism more unscathed than another, it was my mystical experience. I believe that in this a man comes the nearest to bedrock that human existence can reach. Here he can find what will create rock, and give him firm footing amidst, and through, any situation whatever. Where everything else is uncertain, he can be certain in himself. And, though my understanding of the experience is now quite different, and although I claim for what speaks in the deepest stillness of my being neither absoluteness nor infallibility, nevertheless what spoke to me before speaks to me still, and now as before I undertake to obey it as implicitly as a child. For reasons that I shall state in due time, I undertake to obey it as though it were both absolute and infallible, even though I definitely believe it to be neither. In short, the mystical experience remains the center of my life. For me, it is not a device by which to escape from reality, but the best means by which a man may see quickly and surely what he should do in the world, so that he can do it with all his powers. I hold to it not for any agreeable feeling that may accompany the experience, but for the more sustained and consistent certainty that it brings, and for the greater wholeness that it leads toward. Even in its simpler manifestations, I see it as a means to personal integration, direction, and increased power.

-excerpted from “Which Way Western Man” by William Gayley Simpson