According to the dictionary on my Macbook, religion is “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods.” Religion is also defined as “a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance.”
I think of a religion as a set of answers to the great philosophical questions of life. “What is the meaning of life?” “Who am I?” “Where did the universe come from?” etc. Personal development provides clear answers to these questions. It also posits a superhuman controlling power: YOU.
A scientific religion…
Science initially explained away the need for gods of the rain and plants, etc. and then later explained away even the need for a clockmaker god. The power of science produced tremendous technology–from dramatically increased lifespan to travel to the moon. Science definitively answers the question “where did the universe come from?” with The Big Bang. All is matter. The universe is a bunch of stuff randomly bumping into other stuff that somehow combines into genes. These genes compete to spread themselves and evolve through random mutation to create humans. There is no purpose to it. There is no meaning in matter. Or as Nietzsche put it, “God is dead”–and we killed him with science.
Enter existentialism.
From Wikipedia: “In existentialism, the individual’s starting point is characterized by what has been called “the existential attitude,” or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.”
Most personal development books start out with a chapter on the rags to riches fairy tale of the author. A man is in the depths of despair, his life meaningless, spent mostly trying to avoid the anxiety of boredom. (I say “man” because most personal dev authors are men. Perhaps women more naturally intuit that our purpose lies in relating?)
The key moment in the turning point of the once down-and-out, overweight and depressed man is when he realizes his personal power to create his own life and reality. He realizes this as the meaning of life. This is the religious conversion event in the life of the personal development prophet, the moment when the man dies and the uberman, the god-man, is born. He now knows the answer to the big three questions of life:
Where did the universe come from?
The Universe came from an exploding ball of matter and light. It is without absolute meaning.
What is the meaning of life?
Life is ultimately meaningless. You must create your own meaning through constant and never-ending improvement in the pursuit of your goals, aligned with your personally chosen mission.
Who am I?
I am a god of my own reality with unlimited power to shape my personal destiny how I choose.
Reborn a god.
The angst of responsibility for creating meaning transforms into the exhilaration of freedom as the prophet of personality finds ultimate meaning in the pursuit of his personal goals. Developing personal power, he becomes as a god–infinitely capable of creating anything he wants. His supernatural charisma wins over others to his mighty cause as he converts the weary and aimless with the “good news” of personal achievement.
The prophet begins to run into limits to his “Unlimited Power” as doubts creep in both internally and from others that perhaps he is not a god, after all. His techniques lead to some results, but often not as great as promised. Even when a devotee experiences personal achievement, the meaninglessness remains. Since the alternative is a meaningless world of matter and selfish genes, or denying science in a fundamentalist regression, the prophet redoubles his efforts in sustaining the illusion of infinite ability to create and control his world in order to maintain a sense of meaningfulness.
Addicted to achievement.
The prophet encourages those who feel despair on the path to push themselves harder to achieve more. The Kingdom of your Own Personal Heaven is Near! The devotee–following his guru’s instructions for personal liberation from suffering and entry into his personally constructed Heaven–adamantly pursues his own personal goals in service of his own personal purpose statement. He cultivates desire for his goals, praying daily to become his own god-man, to awaken his giant within. He believes in and worships his Personal Power–for what other power could there be in this world of mere matter?
The devotee pursues superhuman powers in order to stave off the lurking anxiety–the alienation from nature, from others, and from disowned parts of himself. The more meaninglessness he feels in his goals of worldly achievement and isolated success, the more he throws himself into their pursuit. For the alternative is despair, the despair he experiences whenever the boost of “motivation” deflates from the last tape, book, or seminar; the despair he experiences immediately after achieving a goal, which he quickly escapes by setting a new one, maintaining his illusion of personal godhood in his Sisyphus-like pursuit of the impossible.
Out of control.
The Giant Within he seeks is his own personal godhood. It is the uberman, the superhuman YOU that is promised as the ultimate liberation from this world through the infinite power to create it as you wish. God is dead, but the idea of the ultimate has simply been turned into the ultimate inflation of ego. It is a religion born of science, of our tremendous ability to control the wild of nature.
But just as we are experiencing global environmental crises that we cannot control, we find that we cannot control our inner nature without severe side effects as well. The more control we exact over the biological environment, the more we contribute to the problems that could destroy civilization. Similarly, the more control we exact over our own lives, the farther we travel from the true happiness of just being.
A call to evolution.
It’s time we smashed the false idols of the religion of personal development. We are not gods, we are humans. We do not have–nor we will ever have–unlimited power nor unlimited potential. We suffer, we die, we are not in control.
But let us not stop with the false idols of personal development–let us smash the false idols of “objective” science as well. Science did not stop with Newton. Modern physics admits irreducible uncertainty as fundamental to our understanding of the universe. No theory of mathematics can include itself, which implies that the Universe can not be absolutely ac-counted for in numbers, and therefore neither in science. The observer affects the observed, therefore objectivity is a myth. Particles are entangled across “time” and “space.” We are completely and totally interconnected and not separate from the Universe as passive observers at all. Separation was a myth all along–just as the ancient religions all said.
Perhaps there is meaning in the universe, after all. Perhaps it does not depend on there being a spooky otherworldly absent father to make it meaningful, nor does it require denying the scientific method and it’s conclusions, nor does it require being personally powerful.
Perhaps the existence of the universe is itself magic. Perhaps the fact that you are reading these squiggly lines and experiencing something is mysterious. Perhaps evolution itself is sacred.
Perhaps that which is infinitely powerful and important was right in front of your eyes the whole time.