One of the most important jobs of religion is to hold us when shit hits the fan. To provide us with reference points, community, and skills for sustaining ourselves – through hardship, through suffering, through the confusion that springs out of all our lives.
But religion isn’t up to that task for most of us anymore. Since the 1800s, belief has declined.
Alain de Botton, in “The School of Life,” puts it like this: “When belief went into decline in northwestern Europe…many commentators wondered where humanity would…find the guidance that religions had once provided. [Where would humanity find ethics, self-understanding, purpose, or consolation in despair?] One answer… came to the fore: Culture. Culture could replace scripture.”
But, as Botton continues, culture isn’t up to the task.
We have art, movies, literature, philosophy, museums – but none of these are designed to hold us through the kind of existential crisis that we face when managing cataclysmic change, seeking meaning, or facing death.
What Do We Need Instead?
We have brilliant research into nature, technology, warfare. But we can barely avoid blowing ourselves up, because we hardly know anything about what happens inside of us.
I love movies about exploring deep space for the first time.
And if there are two humans in the movie, the whole theme 80% of the time ends up being how stupid and erratic humans are. And then they blow each other up before they get anywhere.
From a cultural perspective, we can FEEL it. We’re told to get a job, make money, buy stuff, die. There is no feeling, no meaning, no tools for holding the suffering and confusion that life will inevitably contain.
We need to learn what it takes to live a life that feels good on the inside. And that means understanding our patterns, our hidden needs, and our felt reality.
We need a way of learning to know ourselves and love ourselves, to find ethics and purpose, and to hold ourselves through pain, suffering, and despair.
And we need to study it with the same intellectual curiosity, experimental vigor, and open-minded flexibility that we bring to our philosophy, material sciences, and building projects.
Triangulating Emotion
One of the most important, and underappreciated skills needed to understand our emotions and why they do what they do is triangulation.
We need to understand where they are and how they work “in three dimensions”. But they are transient, hard to see, and difficult to describe.
If we are trying to understand an object in deep space – something that is absolutely real and there, but untouchable – the best strategy is triangulation.
We take multiple images of the object from different points. The differences in motion help us understand how it moves, its properties and relationship with other objects, and what it’s made of.
Having multiple languages for addressing human emotion and experiences does this job for our inner state. One language can pick up nuances that another flattens. Combined, we get a clearer picture.
What Happens When We Don’t Understand Ourselves
Imagine that you accidentally touch a hot pan on the stove and burn your hand. You immediately jerk your hand back, and maybe put it in some cool water.
But you know that the burning is done. You just have to tolerate the pain, treat the wound, and take care of it until it heals.
In contrast, imagine you touch a hot pan while blindfolded – after being spun around in a strange kitchen.
You have no idea what caused the sudden, searing pain. You don’t know why it hurts. You’re disoriented, confused. You aren’t sure what to pull away from – you could touch it again at any time. You don’t know what to do to make it feel better, much less where the nearest cool water is. And you’re also questioning all your life choices that led you to this terrible moment.
Plus, the wound is worse cause it isn’t treated in time.
This is what happens when you don’t understand emotions or their underlying needs.
A minor injury becomes a huge source of suffering:
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It’s wrapped in uncertainty. Will it happen again? Why did it happen? Where am I, and how did I get here, and where exactly is the source of the pain?
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It creates fear of worse injury. It could be anywhere! What even happened? Am I dying?
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You don’t know how to treat it. You can’t find or stop the source, or properly assuage it, before it gets truly bad.
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It makes the unknown seem a lot worse than it is. Because you’re left confused and in pain with all these lingering questions, you end up with a trauma response, rather than dealing with the thing properly.
This is also an example of triangulation. If we look at the same emotional event from different angles, we can start to see it in space. What caused it? Why was it so bad here but not there? What made it better or worse?
This is where ancient systems of meaning come in: runes, astrology, tarot.
All are ways of looking at a problem from different angles, to triangulate what is actually happening internally/emotionally/contextually, what isn’t happening, why, and what we could do instead.
Belief is the Wrong Approach
The cultural failure that has tainted many of these systems of meaning-making is not the systems themselves. It’s the idea that we need to “believe in them” for them to work.
Magical thinking is a normal developmental phase in children. According to the APA (American Psychological Association), magical thinking is “the belief that events or the behavior of others can be influenced by one’s thoughts, wishes, or rituals. Magical thinking is typical of children up to 4 or 5 years of age, after which reality thinking begins to predominate.”
Likewise, much of self-help, metaphysics, and religion is influenced by the inverse – the belief that unseen or unquantified events in the world can influence our thoughts in unexpected ways.
In other words, many people feel like astrologers are asking them to believe in something magical, an unseen force.
And they feel required to choose:
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Accept wholesale whatever the astrology says is true, in alignment with their “belief” in it.
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Reject it all out of hand, to focus on physical reality and measurable outcomes alone.
Both are wrong.
The Middle Way
In many ways, both positions – unquestioning belief and dismissive rejection- fail to truly understand or engage with the evidence at hand.
If you tell a scientist that the parentage of a species of tomato, for example, influences their tolerance to a certain fungus, he doesn’t just “accept your wisdom”. Likewise, he’s not going to just completely reject all ideas of genetics.
He’s going to test it. And find the nuanced truths instead.
Notice how he doesn’t just say, “Oh, all tomato genetics lead to fungus tolerance” or “These tomatoes are now immune to all fungus!”.
He’s going to test specific fungi, specific tomato species, under specific conditions, and make specific conclusions.
That’s the attitude we need for testing systems of meaning-making, but the bar of truth is in a different place.
Emotional Truth Is Individual
Here’s the problem. Much of our science deals only with things it can see, measure, and replicate.
But emotions can’t be seen, are hard to measure, and are so complex that replication is no easy task.
What this means in practice is that, while someone else can point out the patterns, you have to do the work of stress-testing them in your own life.
You have to navigate by feel.
And that’s not easy when we haven’t always learned what feelings to look for or how to recognize them.
But that is the work.
Testing the Invisible
Like scientists, our best path forward is to become very aware of our own beliefs and biases, truly try to understand these different modes of thought, and test to see if they bear experiential truth in our lives.
There are many fields of awareness that appear to exist outside of our typical modes of living. And both unquestioning belief and uncritical dismissal are wrong.
Take evidence of crop circles, ghosts, near-death experiences, reincarnation, extrasensory perception, cryptids, and unexplained phenomena.
All are outside of the “typical” worldview. They represent the edges of the known. They are proven by rare, unreplicable, unmeasurable phenomena.
But that doesn’t mean there is nothing there to know. It just means that our typical modes of knowing, proving, and explaining haven’t caught up with them yet.
Phenomena that repeats, for thousands of people over many cultures for many years, can’t all be “shared illusion”. Unless we can prove that too – and we can’t.
Likewise, though, unquestioning belief in every sighting of lizard people, rude poltergiests, or Bigfoot is a sure path to confusion and disappointment.
No more than we would believe every mad scientist in a white coat ever to do an experiment, we have to use our brains and engage critically with the evidence.
Being Open-minded, Curious, and Aware
To properly engage with any of these fringe systems of meaning, we need the proper mindset.
First, we must be open-minded enough to actually learn the best version of what the evidence has to offer.
No more than it would make sense to reject, say, the idea that humans have landed on the moon cause you saw one conspiracy video, you have to collect a range of good sources and weigh them before you can make a call.
For emotional intelligence, many of these sources are internal. You must sit with your own feelings, your own experience. You need to go have experiences, while being aware of the need to attend to them, before you can really judge whether something is true for you.
Second, you must also be aware of your own tendency to psychological bias. It feels safer to accept something as a whole, or throw it out as a whole, than to mine it for useful bits and judge them individually.
Third, you need to try to apply it in your own life, just like you would apply a new lotion (on a small spot of skin to make sure it doesn’t give you hives). Make small experiments to see what works.
Finally, you need to evaluate the evidence, decide if it fit, and form new hypotheses. Maybe this idea didn’t make sense if I see it this way, but what if I think of it like this instead? Then test again.
The Role of Systems of Meaning Today
Symbolic systems of meaning – runes, tarot, astrology – are a goldmine for understanding the exact kind of emotional problems we are dealing with in the world today, the painful, frightening, and urgent ones that culture would prefer not to take on.
They have existed for hundreds and thousands of years, through multiple cultures, and they provide both a language and a framework for understanding many of the core emotional experiences of human life.
But if we are going to use them, we have to adapt the same scientific mindset that has worked so well for studying the lifecycles of tomatoes and fungi and apply it to triangulating the lifecycles and structure of our inner life.
If we can approach with a framework of curiosity and skepticism (questioning), if we can experiment and apply these ideas and feel okay leaving those that don’t work for us, we have a whole depth of language available to begin to understand ourselves in the world.
And to triangulate the patterns and pain that prevent us from doing what we want to do most.
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