The End of Faith (40 page)

I do not mean to suggest, however, that these “interior” landscapes should remain
unexplored. Increasingly subtle appearances hold intrinsic interest for anyone who would
acquire more knowledge about the body, the mind, or the universe at large. I am simply
saying that to seek free- dom amid any continuum of possible disclosures seems a mistake, one that only the nondual
schools of mysticism have adequately criticized. What is more, the fascination with such
esoterica is largely responsible for the infantilism and mere credulity that attends most
expressions of spirituality in the West. Either we find mere belief, wedded to the hideous
presumption of its own sufficiency, or we are met by the fren- zied search for
noveltypsychic experience, prophecies of doom or splendor, and a thousand errant
convictions about the personality of God. But the fact remains that whatever changes occur
in the stream of our experiencewhether a vision of Jesus appears to each of us, or the
total- ity of human knowledge can one day be downloaded directly onto our synapsesin
spiritual terms we will be consciousness first, and only, and already free of “I.” It does
not seem too soon for us to realize this.

24 Whether mysticism entails the transcendence of all concepts is surely an open question.
The claim here is merely that the concepts that under- write our dualistic perception of
the world are left aside by mystics.