When most of us hear someone talking in public about the value of religion in their lives, especially if it’s not our religion, we usually roll our eyes, avoid getting involved in the conversation, and file them away under “hysterical religious zealot” for future reference—they’re probably trying to convert people.
It’s difficult to discuss religion or spirituality in a rational way unless you are satirizing it, which is why many intellectual discussions of the subject tend to resort to scorn. But the inherent difficulty—and hence rarity of serious discussion—lies in addressing a necessarily irrational concept within a logical construct. Religion is not rational; whenever it tries to be, it usually fails miserably and ends up being mercilessly lampooned for its hypocrisy and illogical rationalizations.
Religion and spirituality are fundamentally about justifying the irrational; about trying to gain a sense of security within an unavoidably insecure existence; about finding the faith to walk blindfolded through the minefields that are our lives. There’s nothing rational about it.
If someone were to ask me, I would not describe myself as a religious person. In the same breath, though, I would probably contend that I am spiritual. Religious entails religion, which connotes ritual and dogma, which I shy away from. To me, spirituality is much more personal—almost exclusively so. Whereas religion is institutionalized and thus often static, spirituality, at an individual, intuitive level, can always be evolving.
I’ve been raised loosely following Jainism. I say loosely because I’m not particularly well versed in Jain history, philosophy, or ritual. This is not because I ever rebelled against it or rejected it when I was younger, I just never really learned much about it growing up.
Jainism is not a common religion as it is. In India, there are only roughly 4.5 million Jains, and in North America maybe 70,000. It is seen as a strict, austere religion, even in India, and self-denial often plays a major role in its practice. Nonviolence (ahimsa) is the most fundamental concept, and Jains must show compassion for all living beings. All other beliefs, more or less, radiate from this central principle.
For most of my childhood, though, the primary manifestation of this compassion was in our strict vegetarianism; I really didn’t know how else I was supposed to act differently from others. So being a Jain basically meant eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch when I was in grade school while my friends ate turkey sandwiches and hamburgers.
I grew up in a community and within a school system that was almost exclusively white and Christian. Among all the red-blooded, meat-eating, church-going kids I grew up and went to school with, I was a dark-skinned, vegetarian, godless anomaly. And while this environment was never outwardly hostile towards my religious beliefs (beliefs that were always rather nebulous to me, anyhow), I usually kept them to myself unless someone asked about them—usually a mother of one of my friends, whose house I had gone over for dinner, after I announced that I was vegetarian and would be fine just eating the salad, thanks. Even then, half the time I’d make up answers to more specific questions I didn’t know, fairly confident that with such an obscure religion, no one could possibly call my bluff. And so began my invention of my own version of Jainism.
As I grew older, I often found myself troubled by my value system, mainly because I remained unclear on what it really was as dictated by my religion. I never took matters of conscience lightly, and I often agonized over whether I should feel guilty about joining in on certain “normal” adolescent behaviors with my friends: your garden-variety peer pressure anxiety. I realized that it wasn’t a very Jain society I was growing up in.
But my intuitive conscience, whatever its source, continued to win out, and I continued to feel more and more different from most of my friends as a result; not because of anything I did, but rather what I didn’t do. Whenever asked to justify my decisions, though, I ran into the problem of rationalizing again. I’m still terrible at explaining why I don’t drink, for example; it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and no matter how hard I try, it sounds overzealous. So the easy (though not entirely accurate) response is that “it’s a religious choice,” because Jainism does forbid drinking. In reality, it’s less Jainism than instinct.
Jainism—or at least my version of it—has become increasingly intuitive to me. Practically speaking, I usually cannot fast as much, or be as strict about my diet as Jainism calls for; I cannot avoid killing insects when I’m driving on the freeway; I cannot go to a Jain temple to pray and meditate as often as would be desirable. Instead, I use the framework as a guide, but interpret the specifics as I intuitively see fit. I follow the spirit of the religion insofar as I understand (and occasionally invent) it, which is why I prefer the label of spiritual to religious.
But I don’t have a static set of beliefs, which is why I don’t think I fully embody Jain beliefs or would fully embody any other religion’s beliefs (I have the same problem when people ask me my political affiliation). Jainism has undeniably been a—perhaps, the—major influence on my value system, but I do have personal reactions that I suspect are sometimes hypocritical to Jain Dharma. And my beliefs are still evolving. Instead of having to constantly reinterpret a religious dogma to avoid a crisis in faith, I would rather rely on my own personal intuition—influenced, but not dictated, by religious beliefs—when evaluating something I find myself ambivalent about. Is animal testing justifiable? Do I support military aggression under certain circumstances?
When I feel lost, I can usually find guidance through introspection; when I have trouble understanding events in my life, my first instinct is to seek answers within myself. And in truth, I still make the most important decisions of my life intuitively, often irrespective of how rational they are.
In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, in the Jacobellis vs. Ohio decision, wrote about defining the term ‘hard-core pornography’: “I shall not today attempt to define further the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”
Though admittedly a questionable analogy to use, that’s pretty much how I feel about my version of Jainism. I know it when I see it. As a consequence, I also feel much less like a hypocrite as I attempt to embody my beliefs, whatever they are.
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Originally written in December 2001 & published on thesala.com.
http://thesala.com/episode04/01.html
Sunday, December 16, 2001
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