Pure Motives and the Dark

Love of truth is part of spirituality. We don't always know how to fully include it.

My mother tells me I never lied, as a small child. It was not, she says, that I knew that lying was wrong and chose not to do it. Very few small children understand that lying is wrong, and in my mother’s telling I was not an exception. It was simply that I found it hard to understand that people could lie. Not only did I not tell lies but, my mother says, if I was in the room you could always tell when my friend was lying, because I would stare as if my friend had grown an extra head.

I cannot really remember this for myself, but I think, just barely, I can recall the moment that it fully dawned on me, not only that other people might lie, but that I could potentially choose to lie, myself. Specifically, I can recall quite innocently and fervently vowing not to use this capacity, not ever. The reason I can recall this vow is that it exists, as a small echo, in the memory of the moment when I broke it.

I was five years old, and there was a gap in our fence that led to a little lane that only had room for pedestrians. Secret behind a stand of bamboo, that fence gap was a discovery, all my own, of a hidden way to access a forbidden place. I stepped through. Of course I did. Then I stepped back. I kept on visiting that gap in the fence, and eventually I showed it to my little sister. Until, one day, as my sister and I came back from behind the stand of bamboo, our mother asked where we had been, and I felt a stab of fear, and lied.

I cannot actually remember the words I used. I think I mumbled them. I think I said something like “We were just behind the bushes.” I don’t even know for sure if it was technically a lie — although it may have been — but I do know that I was consciously and deliberately trying to conceal the truth, for bad reasons. The reason I remember this is that I felt wrenchingly guilty about it for years afterwards.

My sister, meanwhile, hadn’t processed what we were doing as wrong in the first place, and, over my mumble, cheerfully pulled our mother over to see the gap in the fence. Our mother wasn’t even mad.

The guilt faded eventually. Indeed, as I have gotten older, I have become less rigid about lying. I’m okay with small social white lies; perhaps even a few grey ones. Given that it was mumbled and indirect and without harmful consequences, it’s possible that a lie along the lines of my very first lie wouldn’t even faze me, these days. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Even when some dishonesty is socially expected, attention to the truth can bring unexpected benefits. I remember a goodbye card for a teacher who I considered to be of uneven teaching skill. Better than the average social studies teacher, but social studies was usually a bit dull, in my experience. I didn’t feel that I could write “Thanks for being a great teacher!” or “I always loved the classes you taught!” like all my classmates did, so I had to write something else. Instead of writing “You weren’t bad” or “Some of it was nice,” I wrote, truthfully, that I had liked his wide-ranging class discussions.

I later learned that he was really touched by what I had written. I’m glad. He deserved to feel good about those class discussions. Maybe it wouldn’t have been wrong to write the expected polite lie, but by writing a truth I was able to turn something perfunctory into something personal. The truth often does this.

Indeed, most polite lies are, in their own way, admissions of a lack of intimacy. Sometimes it is right to withhold ourselves, but I appreciate the way that discomfort with an untruth can push me into a little more connection.

There’s also something important about being honest with yourself. This isn’t quite the same as being moral, I suppose, in that a person can honestly know they are being selfish and yet still do it. But a lot of personal flaws are built on self-deception, and the same careful parsing of motives that is essential to socially realistic honesty can transfer naturally to other moral quandaries. Care for the true isn’t exactly the same as care for the good, but the overlap is substantial.

There are esoteric versions of honesty, too. I think of actor’s honesty as being the idea that, on stage, even as you portray something unreal, you can nevertheless be giving something true. You can, if you choose, expose your heart. I love that. It’s a standard I always aim for, when performing.

Sometimes, in discussions of religion, this kind of artistic resonance with the spirit of a thing is posited as “another kind of truth,” potentially in competition with, y’know, the real kind. But when performing the kind of art where literal truth is not expected, that competition between truth-types falls away completely. To be truly honest you must also have a sincere sense of the spirit of what you’re saying. If you remove all expectation of literal truth, then the part where you convey from the heart your best sense of what you’re saying is just the aspect of everyday honesty that remains.

Halfway through writing this piece, I noticed that Sam Harris has a book called Lying. It’s very short, and proceeds similarly to the observations I have made, above, about truth and the unexpected benefits thereof — minus the part at the end, about artistic honesty. Of course, it isn’t surprising at all that a New Atheist like Harris would feel this way. So much of the anger that powers New Atheism is about being expected to act respectfully towards something that claims to be true but — within the New Atheist viewpoint — clearly isn’t.

Occasionally I have encountered the view that New Atheists aren’t “real atheists” because they obviously hold something sacred; namely, they hold the truth sacred. Sometimes this is paired with the idea that belief in The Truth is a Christian value, and that must be where the New Atheists got it from. The latter claim seems unlikely, both because my own care for the truth seems as much independent of society as not, and because I find it hard to imagine a functional society with no care for the truth at all. The former claim is a little more valuable, but it only takes you so far.

It might be tempting to conclude that, if I hold something sacred, it should be possible to convince me that this sacredness has a source, which I should then believe in. On the other hand, the obvious “source” of truth is reality, so, congratulations, you’ve just accused me of believing in some sort of reality. Notwithstanding the existence of a variety of metaphysical arguments about the exact nature of reality, this hardly seems worldview-shattering on the face of it.

One could, of course, ask why I care about truth so much. Many instrumental reasons could be given, but I wouldn’t give them. It would require a very strong competing priority before I would need to give any answer beyond: I am quite happy to care about the truth, just because.

Still, there are some competing priorities that could test my affection. There might, hypothetically, be some kind of metaphysical speculation that would test my affection for the truth against the possibility that it is in some sense “true” that there is no such thing — make the truth fight itself, as it were. I have yet to encounter a fully convincing version of this, but my moral code requires that I be open to it.

Speaking of moral codes, I certainly have wrestled with the potential conflict between the true and the good; is it true that there is no such thing as good? I was raised as a fairly straightforward moral realist, though not with any kind of religion backing it up. I respect those who hold that viewpoint, but, speaking for myself, by the time I was twelve or so I kind of had to face the possibility that the moral component that I had heretofore considered to be an unassailable element of a rational worldview might in fact be nothing of the kind.

I have no idea how I would have dealt with that question, had I not spent the previous year patiently making my way through Sophie’s World, which packages an entire history of Western philosophy within a fictional storyline. As it was, the stomach-turning terror that I felt at questioning a concept dear to me was alleviated somewhat by the possibility that I might be experiencing existential angst, which would be a cool and adult sort of thing to be doing.

When I could bear to consider not having an objective moral truth to reference, I found that the resulting freedom was broad enough to still allow me to follow my own moral sense, if I wanted to. It might be absurd to follow a moral sense that could be a mere figment, but, if so, there’s no rule against absurdity. Nor, importantly, am I claiming anything untrue by acting as I choose.

If I had to pick one out of “truth” and “goodness,” I’d pick the latter. But I find that reaching for the good inevitably pulls the truth back in. I know there are people who reach that existential decision point and decide to take on a whole religious edifice instead of my slim thread of absurdity. I can’t do that; it would be too much like shutting my eyes permanently. I cannot always be staring into the terrifying dark, but I am not going to try to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Religious apologists sometimes claim that everyone has to submit to something, or else set themselves up as a God. I think it’s fair to say that I am submitting to something: to the true, to the good, to the motives that don’t crumble when I stare into the dark. I’m certainly not perfect at it, but learning how to change your mind about things you care about, without ceasing to care about them, is a submission worth practicing.

Since this submission has to pass through my own understanding of the truth, instead of simply accepting a religion and following it, I suppose some might claim that I have in fact set myself up as God. But in a secular age, where no single religion is the default, absolutely everybody is making a choice about whether and how to be religious. Each one of us, before we can submit to some other thing, must employ our own judgment in making the choice to submit to that other thing. There is no avoiding this.

Moreover, on an even deeper level, I don’t really feel I have a choice on how to approach this universal problem of foundations. The reason I so dearly cherish my existential freedom is precisely because I’m not free. We need freedom most when we are already constrained and thus cannot comply with a competing demand. I reject religious dogma because I am submitting to something more important.

This sounds potentially mystical, doesn’t it? I am deeply suspicious of mystics. How is anyone supposed to credit a mystical experience that they did not, themselves, have? Especially when not all mystics say the same things and there’s no obvious way to choose between them. Yes, I am deeply suspicious of mystics, which is why it is so terribly inconvenient but also interesting that I am one.

I didn’t do it intentionally. A friend asked me why I didn’t just choose a religious framework, what with all of that existential freedom, and I was simultaneously trying to articulate why I couldn’t and also trying — in the spirit of openminded discussion, you understand — to properly think through whatever religion-adjacent notions my oddly strict set of constraints could perhaps allow, if I were to go back all the way to pure motives and the dark instead of taking any conclusions for granted.

I found something I didn’t expect. I found something I didn’t comprehend, and that’s weird, because most of the time you can’t really have a concept be perceptible to you, inside your head, without comprehending it. I didn’t exactly want to let go, but after a while I also sort of had to in order to not go crazy. Having it in my head was changing me in ways I couldn’t entirely keep up with.

My experience shares a fair few commonalities with other accounts of this sort of thing. It’s hard to articulate, for one thing. It made things feel intensely meaningful, as if the whole world was made up of stories that I couldn’t fully see; it took a fair bit of self-control not to attempt to complete that sense of meaning with stories invented on my own. I was kind of half-hallucinating for a few days afterwards, seeing unexplained meaning all of a sudden, or feeling watched.

There are also recurring themes in other people’s mystical experiences that I don’t fully recognise. I felt a strong sense of connection to other people, but not the overwhelming sense of being loved by God that Christians sometimes reference. Also, some people talk about these things happening in an instant or a moment, but for me it was pretty extended — I think perhaps a day or so. I was still lucid; it’s not like I couldn’t do other things. I just had this perception of the incomprehensible alongside everything else.

Perhaps most strongly, when I compare what I experienced with what religious authorities sometimes say, I feel the need to fiercely insist that every person who ever told me “just believe” or “stop pridefully trusting your own understanding” was wrong, wrong, wrong. For a start, I was perfectly capable of questioning what I was experiencing, even as it was happening. I didn’t have to be taking particular truth claims on faith in order to have a religious experience. And for another thing . . .

It’s not just that I could question it, while it was happening. It’s that I got there by questioning. If I was going into it expecting it to be a particular thing, I don’t think it could ever have happened in the first place. The possibility was too narrow to admit pre-specifications.

It’s quite nice, learning that I haven’t just been spiritually broken this entire time. I used to think I wasn’t spiritual at all, but now I think it’s just that any spirituality that asks me to start with “take these things on faith” or “don’t worry about whether this is really true” is going to lose me. My love of truth is my spirit, and there is no point in me trying to be spiritual if I have to leave my spirit at the door.

I worry about what happens when religion starts systematically leaving a substantial component of truth-seekers behind. Speaking selfishly, it’s been really nice getting to know my local group of liberal Quakers and having a religious community for the first time. I don’t like that our society might be leaving people out in the cold by failing to have a cultural understanding of spirituality that can incorporate an intense love of truth in a manner compatible with mainstream understanding.

It also cannot be good for a religious community to slowly shed its self-motivated, objectivity-loving questioners and fail to draw in more. You need people who are inconvenient in all the best ways, forcing problems into the light so they can be solved and reminding the powerful that they are beholden to truths that can’t be changed. I can see why it might be tempting to let some of those people slip away, but I really think there are places where the experiment is not going well.

This problem is far too big for me to solve. I can’t re-work a social imaginary by myself, and even if I could I can’t say what it would be helpful to change it to. So I’ll tell you the truth, as best I can, and that will have to do.

Many thanks to Jack Despain Zhou of

Tracing Woodgrains

for comments and encouragement on this post.

I have written previously about my turn towards a more explicit spirituality here. I will not be reproducing that post on substack, as I feel it belongs in the time and place it was written, but you are welcome to click through and read it on reddit.