Salvation

Salvation

Author: 观复·钧天

  Salvation is an activity in which people, dissatisfied with their material or spiritual condition, pursue a higher material or spiritual state. It begins with an awareness of the need to save oneself. During that process, the external power of “salvation by others” can either advance or obstruct it. The result is deliverance, and the highest state of deliverance is awakening: recognizing that things have always been as they are, that free will is as it is, that the natural environment is as it is, and that the course of history is as it is.

  Viewed from within finite time and space, salvation is indispensable and runs through the whole of human existence. Humanity confronts the infinite with the finite: finite time and space face infinite time and space; finite perception faces infinite vastness; a finite system of knowledge faces an infinite one. In Free and Easy Wandering, Zhuangzi writes, “Small understanding cannot reach great understanding; a short life cannot know a long life.” The small cannot comprehend the great, whereas the great can contain and understand the small. Human beings continually pass from the small into the great, approaching facts and truth one step at a time. The human awareness of self-salvation is a kind of “rational fatalism.” Humanity fails in confronting fate because of “the contradiction between finite and infinite knowledge.” In this sense, every act of salvation is a process of moving toward the infinite, shedding delusions, and drawing nearer to facts and truth.

  Yet humanity also regards itself as the most intelligent of all beings in the Universe, and there is something moving in the way we advance toward the infinite. We do not march proudly and triumphantly, because the future cannot be fully known. Nor are we sorrowful and dejected, because people always possess an upward spiritual drive. The condition is closer to a mixture of sadness and excitement at knowing that we are entering an unknown infinity, while also knowing that all of it may or may not be so. We cannot know whether we will succeed. We therefore walk on naturally, onward into the infinite.

  Beyond desire, there are spiritual needs that distinguish humans from animals. These needs differ in level, but the most basic ones are shared to some extent; only the ways in which people satisfy them vary. Some say that spiritual needs are social and psychological needs. Strictly speaking, that is not accurate. They do contain a social element and a diachronic one. They also carry a degree of personal subjectivity, as in the need for art. Some people are interested in music, some in painting, and others in sculpture. None of this obscures the fact that humanity’s most basic spiritual needs are universal. They have existed throughout human history and are present in everyone. People in every era face these needs at different levels, including you and me. What satisfies them? Facing them directly; obtaining what can satisfy us; and awakening—recognizing our own needs, understanding the needs themselves and how they may be met, and grasping our lives through thought and being. Zhuangzi and his celebrated Free and Easy Wandering and “Zhuang Zhou Dreams of Being a Butterfly”