“Belief in this world” — which we might define as faith that this world and what we do in it is genuinely significant — was a paramount value for Gilles Deleuze, who thought that we are at risk of collectively losing such a belief.
Today, when the prospects for human flourishing are threatened from all sides (do I need to enumerate any examples?), and those for human existence itself appear to be diminishing rapidly, it seems difficult to either express or feel such a belief in this world. Beliefs in another world — one nourished either by religious imagination or by some science-fictional faith (in artificial intelligence, space travel, et al.) — beckon, as they have in the past.
On the understanding that action can be cheap, and that right action always starts from feeling, I sometimes ask myself a variation on the question “What would Jesus do?” I ask: what would Jesus feel? What would the Buddha feel? And the answer I give myself is: boundless love for this world. Love for every suffering, feeling being.
But then I wonder: was there not a certain nihilism in each of their responses to the world — in Jesus’s willingness to die for a cause, a cause known only to him at the time, and that in retrospect has led to a lot of confusion; and in Siddhartha Gautama’s desire to extinguish desire, to pierce its veil so as to escape it altogether? Whatever their motivations, a religion based on love of this world, and love of this universe, requires belief in this world, belief in the genuine sense of taking it to be real, the actual substance and (only) arena of our most deeply felt lives. And that’s, perhaps, where their followers have often failed.
“This world,” “this universe”: it’s clear to me that no living entity, restricted as we are in our capacity, can know the entirety of either the world or the universe, except maybe in moments of mystic expansiveness. That’s why so many of the known religions distinguish between this world and another, an ideal world of our imagination, or beyond our imagination. But the feeling of boundless love is something we can experience and cultivate, and even pass on to others. And that to me seems boundlessly worthwhile. I think some of the greatest gifts in human history — the best art and poetry, the greatest acts of compassion and bravery — have come from this feeling.
I haven’t come up with a better term for this feeling than just that: “boundless love for this world.” For the only world we can know, live, and add to with our actions. The world we can move and be moved by. That to me is a belief, a faith, that is secular as well as sacred, immanent as well as transcendent. It is within our capacity and it takes us beyond our capacity. It calls for a radical openness to that which we cannot encompass or contain, but can feel and touch. And it is what makes life worthwhile in any circumstance.
It comes to us more easily in situations that are unmotivatedly fulfilling. (Like the feeling I had yesterday while walking through Warsaw’s beautiful, slightly rewilded urban parks.) But it can be found anywhere if we allow it. And then it can be shared.
Photo not from Warsaw, but from a visit to the Monte Palace garden in Funchal, Madeira