Deharbe’s Catechism, which I was taught from an early age, begins thus:

Q: Who made you? 

A: God made me.

Q: And why did God make you?

A: To know him, to love him, to serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in the next.

It was originally written in German in the mid-19th century by the Jesuit Catholic priest, Joseph Deharbe, and was widely translated and circulated.

In my youth, I was content to remain within the boundaries of this literal interpretation of the Catholic religion and its accompanying joys: the magic of the Christmas season that marked the birth of our savior, Jesus Christ; the delight of Santa Claus coming down the chimney to leave presents under a Christmas tree; the joyful, cleansed feeling after a Saturday-afternoon confession followed by Sunday-morning communion. And, on the other side of the ledger, I survived the fears of a Roman Catholic upbringing: guilt for sin, whether mortal or venial, fear of consignment to purgatory, and, worst of all, the threat of eternal damnation in hellfire.

I received the standard sacraments—Baptism, Confession, Holy Communion, and Confirmation. There is one missing—Extreme Unction, the sacrament administered to the dying, which, as a child, I mis-heard as “Extre-Munction.” I have another confession to make, in addition to the many that I made in the confessional. Ashamed of not having a sufficiently large number of sins when I kneeled before the priest, I would consult beforehand a Bible with an Appendix that contained an extensive list of sins and try to identify ones to which I could own up. Is it a sin to lie about one’s sins in confession? This was one of the first logical conundrums that I confronted in the Catholic religion at an early age. Later, I was drawn to others. For example, is it possible for an all-powerful God to create a weight that is so heavy that God cannot lift it?

I have described my religious background and familial history in two books, A Passage to Kenya [1] and Up and About in Nairobi and Bombay, [2] to which I refer the interested reader for further detail. Suffice it to say here that my ancestral family originated from the present-day Indian state of Goa on the west coast of the subcontinent, from which my paternal grandfather emigrated to British East Africa (later Kenya) at the end of the 19th century. At that time, Goa was a neglected colony of Portugal and emigrants left in large numbers in search of better opportunities. Goan families who emigrated to British East Africa were invariably Catholics, and their conformity to the beliefs and practices of this religious faith served to define the life of the community. My parents were an exception. As children, they had received the standard Roman Catholic upbringing, but, in adulthood, neither adhered to the strictures and structures of the religion. Nevertheless, they had my siblings and myself raised in the traditional fashion. That was my good fortune: to have a traditional upbringing within a particular religious faith in early life and, later, the freedom to make up my own mind about religion.

Sometime during my late teenage years, I ceased to be a practicing Catholic. In the Catholic vernacular, I had “lost my faith.” There is no escaping, however, the religious feeling with which Catholicism imbues its adherents. To this day, I find it hard to pass by a church, say in Rome, or a temple by the Ganges, or a mosque in Istanbul, without entering and exploring. And, while rejecting the belief system expressed in the opening text of Deharbe’s Catechism quoted above, I could still turn it into an excellent motto by which to live, by simply stripping it of its causal explanation (“God”), its underlying sexism (“him”), and its promise of future salvation (“forever in the next”) while retaining the poetry of the questions Who made you? And why? and the simple answer: To know, to love, to serve, and to be happy.

Departing from the faith, I was attracted to metaphorical interpretations of Christianity, for instance, the writings of Teilhard de Chardin and, later, Joseph Campbell. Aldous Huxley’s masterful 1944 anthology The Perennial Philosophy [3] opened my eyes to the understanding that mysticism is the foundation of all the great religions of the world. For instance, in an introduction to the Upanishads, the sacred texts of the Hindu religion, Juan Mascaro, [4] the renowned translator of these writings from their original Sanskrit into English, says:

“… when the sage of the Upanishads is pressed for a definition of God, he remains silent, meaning that God is silence. When asked again to express God in words, he says ‘Neti, neti’, `Not this, not this’; but, when pressed for a positive explanation, he utters the sublimely simple [Sanskrit] words: `TAT TVAM ASI’, ‘Thou Art That’. “

In other words, the sage initially says nothing, his silence intimating that God is no-thing! Pressed further, he simply repeats this assertion, saying in effect: not this thing, not that thing! Neither through imagination nor by intellectual means—visual imagery of any-thing, the poetry of human language, the precision of mathematical equations—can one grasp the true nature of God. Only a mystic, a guru, an enlightened being, is capable of doing so, and then only by becoming one with God.

The title of Aldous Huxley’s anthology is a translation of, the great 17th century German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Latin phrase philosophia perennis, a mystical assertion of an absolute identity between the immanent conscious Self of a human being (“Thou”) and the transcendent reality of the universe (“That”). Indeed, even within a more secular literature, one finds echoes and re-echoes of the perennial philosophy, for example, in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali.

I was also drawn to the teachings of Buddhism, the pantheism of Spinoza, and the writings of Kierkegaard. I read Will Durant’s and Bertrand Russell’s well-regarded histories of Western philosophy. The works of C.G. Jung made a deep impression, especially Memories, Dreams, Reflections, [5] his 1963 memoir written late in life. And it was during this period that I wrote most of the poems that I later gathered into my book Three Faces of God and Other Poems. [6]

These interests, in turn, motivated my extensive travels across the Indian subcontinent in an exploration of its religious traditions and temple sites, resulting in my Reminiscences of an Ex-Brahmin: Portraits of a Journey through India, written in 1996. [7] Why did I visit temples during that time? As I wrote:

“Not for the architecture, else the strongest impression would have been left by the temples of Tanjore and Rameswaram with their magnificent gopurams. Not merely to satisfy curiosity about the form of worship or belief. No, I think that, for me, temples have themselves become idols [more accurately, symbols]. As the Indian sages teach, the seat of worship can only lie within the deepest recesses of the human heart. Yet, what is external, can serve as an aid to achieving that deep and inner concentration, which is, in turn, the prerequisite for all true worship.”

Gradually I came to understand the nature of symbolism. How the spiritual enlightenment of the founders of the world’s major religions is premised on the perennial philosophy, and how their mystical insight, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unimaginable is subsequently transformed by the founder’s disciples and adherents into an elaborate symbolic structure, a human creation built from words and bricks, leading over time to the codified texts—images, icons, gospels, rituals, written laws—and to houses of worship, the churches, temples, mosques of organized religion. Symbols are the fundamental currency of humanity! Thus, within the Hindu religion, we have the Trimurti—Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer—a conception of the Godhead made even more subtle by the postulate that each of these three aspects contains within itself the essence of the other two. Roman Catholicism has an alternative, more personalized conception of the Trinity—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Mahayana Buddhism offers the wonderfully peaceful images of the meditating Buddha, marking an evolution of Buddhism from its earlier, austere Hinayana form, which adhered more closely to the original spirit of its founder, Gautama Buddha. And, of course, we have the pantheon of earlier Gods that have served the human religious impulse in the more distant past—Jehovah of the Old Testament, Zeus and the various other Gods of Greece and Rome, Thor and Odin of Northern Europe, and so on.

In marked contrast to their common rooting in the perennial philosophy, the major religions of the world differ greatly from one another in their codified systems of beliefs, rituals, and rules of conduct. Buddhism emphasizes non-attachment, Christianity emphasizes devotion and love, and while Islam would seem to be an exception to the symbolizing rule owing to its strict injunctions against the use of images and icons to depict God and his prophet Mohammed, the religion simultaneously prescribes a draconian form of observance known as Sharia law.

Symbolism, as noted above, is the very hallmark of the human species, the source of both strengths and weaknesses. For me, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain by the eminent anthropologist and neurologist Terrence Deacon [8] and Charles S. Peirce’s “Theory of Signs” (included in Buchler’s The Philosophical Writings of Peirce) [9] were eye openers. They led me to the realization that the Cartesian dictum “I think, therefore I am,” which has provided the inspirational basis for the entire scientific enterprise of the past four centuries, is best understood and stated with greater specificity as “I think, symbolically, therefore I am, experientially.” And, in the modern era of the digital computer, this governing dictum has been expanded to “I compute, algorithmically, therefore I think, symbolically, therefore I am, experientially.”

However, symbols acquire semantic meaning only in the presence of human consciousness, the ultimate arbiter of our inner and outer reality and the most mysterious of phenomena. Herculean efforts, governed by the broadened Cartesian dictum, have sought to explain consciousness as a computational process, but they have generally veered toward explaining away consciousness as merely an epiphenomenon of the brain. On the other hand, research into human (and animal) consciousness as a natural biological phenomenon has become scientifically respectable in recent years and has indeed made significant progress in understanding the so-called “easier problem” of the psychological aspects of consciousness. This work was spearheaded by some of the most prominent scientists and philosophers of our day, in particular, Nobel Laureates Gerald Edelman and Francis Crick, Antonio Damasio, John Searle (and several others). But it is now generally agreed that they have failed to make a real breakthrough in what has been termed the “hard problem” of phenomenological consciousness.

Eventually, my explorations led me to my refuge in the “natural philosophy of organism” of four great philosopher-scientists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—Henri Bergson (1859–1941), William James (1842–1910), Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), and Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). Their profound philosophical insights greatly facilitate our understanding of the natural world and scientific efforts to unravel the mystery of consciousness. They reveal the fallacy of making algorithmic computation the foundation for an understanding of consciousness and why current doomsday prognostications, i.e., that advances in artificial, or computational, artificial intelligence (AI), in particular, ChatGPT, will soon make human and other species redundant, may be more than a little overblown. They also help to address the deep spiritual malaise of the present, which the novelist John Updike has aptly characterized as an “Era between Gods.”

In my recent book, The Nature of No – Thing, [10] I present a unified, harmonized, and intentionally poetic introduction to the writings of these four philosopher-scientists and their “natural philosophy of organism,” which lend support to the assertion that the broadened Cartesian dictum, as described above, must be reversed. Only through acceptance of a new governing principle, namely, “I am, experientially, therefore I think, symbolically, therefore I compute, algorithmically,” along with its wide-ranging implications, will the natural sciences be able to progress beyond their current focus on the physical or material world of “things,” and develop a deeper understanding of the phenomenological and psychological realms of nature—the world of “no – thing.” It is my belief that these four philosopher-scientists, Bergson, James, Fechner, and Whitehead, have also opened a new chapter in the search for a spiritual meaning in life, one that is not at odds with the findings of modern science. Indeed, we may be at the threshold of a new Copernicus-like scientific revolution that is premised on a reversal of the broadened Cartesian dictum.

The concept of “Elan Vital,” the wellspring for the splendiferous flowering of conscious life forms that we see all around us and the very heart of the natural philosophy of organism, was introduced by Henri Bergson in 1907 in his masterpiece, Creative Evolution, [11] for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize. For Bergson, things have happened just as though a great current of creative consciousness, interpenetrated with potentialities of every kind, had traversed inanimate matter to draw it towards organization and make it an instrument of freedom. He tells us that regarded from without, nature appears an immense inflorescence of unforeseeable novelty. The force which animates it seems to create lovingly, for the mere pleasure of it, the endless variety of vegetable and animal species. On each it confers the absolute value of a great work of art. Even if you disagree with these ideas and cannot adopt his method and his mindset, Bergson’s entire oeuvre can be read and enjoyed purely as great works of literature. No other philosopher-scientist of nature writes as beautifully and as imaginatively as does Henri Bergson. His writings have a spiritual dimension that is truly unique within philosophy and places them, perhaps, even within the written tradition of the great religions of the world. Bergson’s prose simply flows as though from a hidden spring of pure, crystalline water, it does not appear to be something axiomatically constructed by the intellect alone. It has a true non-Cartesian quality!  The overarching thesis of the natural philosophy of organism—“I am, experientially, therefore I think, symbolically, therefore I compute, algorithmically”—will henceforth be termed the Bergsonian dictum; and, again following in Henri Bergson’s footsteps, the name Élan Vitalism will be attached to doctrine of a religious nature that is premised on the natural philosophy of organism and the Bergsonian dictum.

So much falls into place and our worldview becomes so much richer when viewed from the standpoint of Élan Vitalism. It has provided me with my own version of the Q&A opening of Deharbe’s Catechism, as presented at the start of this article:

Q: Who made you? 

A: Élan Vital made me.

Q: And why did Élan Vital make you?

A: To know, to love, to serve in this symbolic world 

     and to be happy with Élan Vital forever in duration.

 And, for prayer, I am content with a simple mantra that I often find myself saying at the morning hour: Élan Vital, Creative Impulse of the Universe, in duration I am, experientially, therefore I think, symbolically, therefore I compute, algorithmically. Amen.

This then is my personal doctrine, which has replaced the Roman Catholicism of my youth, and I am content to stop here. But if we allow our imagination to roam, we can go so much further.

Élan Vitalism is extensive in its implications:

  • it provides a bridge to the perennial philosophy, the foundation for all the world’s religions;
  • it validates the goal of “enlightenment” within the mystical tradition of these religions—the experience of the “ocean” being poured into the “drop,” of the “whole” becoming contained within the “part”…
  • … also providing an explanation for the genius of rare individuals within other spheres—art, music, mathematics;
  • consciousness is recognized as a widespread phenomenon, yet, simultaneously and paradoxically, contrary to our usual logic, consciousness is unitary; it is one and not many, it exists only in the singular, but manifests itself in a myriad ways;
  • there is a duality between matter and consciousness, one cannot exist without the other, they are opposite sides of the same coin—and whosoever has heard of a one-sided coin?
  • it invalidates much of modern philosophy, which reads like it was written by ChatGPT;
  • it suggests that science creates only symbolic models, which are very effective for our practical needs and are refined over time, rather than universal laws;
  • it opens a window on the scientific study of psychic phenomena, for example, synchronicity, telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, and so on, that are currently sidelined or even considered illusory by today’s scientists ….
  • … and it could even provide the basis for a new religion.

To make an analogy with the evolution of Christianity, I would describe Gustav Theodor Fechner as akin to a Prophet of the Old Testament, Henri Bergson as the Messianic-like founder of a religious doctrine that is not at odds with the discoveries of modern science, William James as Bergson’s John the Baptist, and Alfred North Whitehead as Bergson’s St. Paul. I have become convinced that these great philosopher-scientists point the way out of our present spiritual wilderness—John Updike’s “Era between Gods”—toward a new view of the universe and our place within it. [12]

 

NOTES

[1] Nazareth, J.L. [2017], A Passage to Kenya: A Historical Collage of a Unique Time and Place, CreateSpace, North Charleston, South Carolina, USA.

[2] Nazareth, J.L. [2018],  Up and About in Nairobi and Bombay: A Self-Portrait of My Early Days in Kenya and India | hc:41149 | Humanities CORE (hcommons.org)

[3] Huxley, A. [1970], The Perennial Philosophy, Harper & Row, New York, NY (first published in 1944).

[4] Mascaro, J. [1965], The Upanishads, translated from the Sanskrit and with an Introduction, Penguin Books, Baltimore, MD, 12

[5] Jung, C.G. [1961], Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Recorded and Edited by Aniela Jaffe, Vintage Books, New York, NY.

[6] Nazareth, J.L. [1986],  Three Faces of God and Other Poems | hc:49021 | Humanities CORE (hcommons.org)

[7] Nazareth, J.L. [1996], Reminiscences of an Ex-Brahmin: Portraits of a Journey through India | hc:49545 | Humanities CORE (hcommons.org) , 18

[8] Deacon, T.W. [1997], The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain, W.W. Norton & Company, New York and London.

[9] Buchler, J. [1955], The Philosophical Writings of Peirce, selected and edited by the author and with an Introduction, Dover Publications, New York.

[10] Nazareth, J.L. [2025], The Nature of No – Thing: Reflections of an Algorithmic Scientist on an Era between Gods, Atmosphere Press, Austin, Texas.

[11] Bergson, H. [1998], Creative Evolution. Dover Publications, Mineola, New York (first published in French in 1907).

[12] My thanks to my sister, Jeanne Hromnik, whose editorial expertise and overall acumen helped to improve this article significantly from an earlier, unabridged version.