God as the voice in our heads. (Part 5)

God as the voice in our heads

Part 5: Daemons – an analogy for our relationship with God?

Philip Pullman, in his, “His dark materials” books, has created an alternative metaphysical world. It is, of course, just a story, but I think it might help us to think about the relationship with God that I am examining through the idea of “the voice in our heads”. I cannot claim that I have heard a definitive statement from Philip Pullman of his own view of the alternative world that he has created, and, no doubt, different people will have different understandings. However, I will work on my own interpretation of what he is saying as I try and make sense of it.

So, my understanding is that Philip Pullman rejects God. I believe that he regards religious faith as a negative force in society, and religious beliefs as simply false, which we would do better to leave behind. In this respect, he has the exact opposite point of view from my own. Nevertheless, in his stories, he has created an alternative metaphysical world – I’m not quite clear on the correct terminology to use here, as he seems to me to have created a material version of the metaphysical and spiritual. The particular point of interest for me is the idea of a daemon. My reading of it is that your daemon is the embodiment of the essence/personality/ “spirit” of the person – but rather than the daemon being part of the metaphysical sphere, where, traditionally, a person’s soul has been thought to reside, it is an incarnate form of “your spirit” and so resides in the material world. The key point is that we are able to have a relationship with our daemon, and this relationship is something that we treasure beyond all else. This strikes me as presenting a useful analogy for thinking about God.

Thus, we seem to be in a similar position to my view where we are able to have a conversation with “the voice of God” / independent person of God, where we are, in one sense, having a conversation with ourselves, but, in a crucial aspect of the matter, we are also having a conversation with “someone else”, or, at least, with “someone” who is not “just us” and who certainly is not under our control. A daemon has a deep sympathetic understanding and ultimately intimate relationship with the person of whom they are their daemon, and this seems to echo my understanding of my relationship with God. I think I am right in understanding Pulman’s world in saying that our daemon is “someone else” – although inextricably linked to the person. (In Pulman’s books, your daemon can be separated from you, in an act of terrible violence, and the person does not actually die – so it’s not like removing someone’s heart – but they are inconsolably wounded to be apart from their daemon.) Your daemon is the very closest of friends – the very essence of ourselves but with a degree of independence from ourselves and so able to direct us to act differently to how we might have acted if we had simply been “on our own” So, is God our daemon? I mean this in the sense of, “Does God act in the same manner as a daemon?”.

We have to acknowledge that there is still the issue of whether or not God exists independently of our minds or only as an aspect of our own mind. Traditionally, of course, he is an independent agent, though I am willing to consider how God might be thought of if he wasn’t – or within the scepticism that is inescapable because we can never know for sure (in this life) if God is “a real person”. Philip Pullman’s stories are, of course, fiction, but within those stories, daemons are definitely an existing part of reality. Is Pullman using the idea of the daemon as a metaphor for the human spirit or essence of the person? Therefore, perhaps he would say that, although the daemon certainly is a separate reality from the person in his books, he would say, “Well, of course, you’re not meant to take it literally. I (Philip Pullman) can use the idea of a daemon because I’m writing fiction, but really I want to help us to think about how we relate to ourselves”. Nevertheless, it sounds as though Pullman does mean us to take daemons literally – that they exist in the world as an additional entity to the person of whom they are their daemon.

Either way, your daemon is a very overt and effective way of enabling you to “have a relationship with yourself” which empowers you to “step outside of yourself” – just a little, for your daemon is always by your side, but sufficiently independent to enable you to hear an alternative point of view about your own life – from someone who has utterly intimate knowledge of you, and who loves you to the utter most – and this love is mutual. I feel sure that in a world where daemons were real and not fiction, that your daemon and yourself would use language like, “I am yours and you are mine”. This is precisely the sort of language that people use when they are enfolded in the love of God. Of course, in religious thought, God is a universal reality for all and offering a relationship to everyone, whereas in Pullman’s fictional world your daemon is personal to just one individual. However, it strikes me that his idea of a daemon does throw some light on a person’s inner relationship with yourself in our world.

It seems to me that the life of faith is a process of developing the effectiveness of this voice to be a positive force in our lives. Whether the voice of God exists because God is, as traditionally understood, an independent, personal agent, and we have met him, or it exists because we have created and nurtured this voice for ourselves – and, remember, it’s impossible to tell the difference between these two cases – then this voice is the deepest, most beneficial reality in our lives, and the best thing we can possibly do in life is to live in relationship with this voice.