Monthly Archives: March 2019

March 28 2019 – What’s At The Root of the Pessimism?

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Today’s Post

Over the past few weeks we have been addressing the ‘Cosmic Spark’, the principle of ontological development of the universe by which it comes to be and continues its increase in complexity from the big bang all the way to the human-unique ‘awareness of consciousness.’  We have looked at this ‘principle’ as one which requires both recognition and cooperation if human evolution can be expected to continue.  Evolution is now in our hands.

We have traced awareness of this Cosmic Spark first through the attempts of religions and philosophies to ‘articulate the noosphere’, then through the rise of science as this articulation took on greater empiricism, then through how the pace of human evolution, as quantified by objectively measured and rapid increases in human welfare, has risen over the past hundred fifty years first in the West, then spreading rapidly through the ‘developing world’.

This is an astoundingly optimistic outlook, one which Johan Norberg, who chronicles such a viewpoint admits is difficult to share in the face of a steady drumbeat of a perceived ‘march towards the dogs’.  We have discussed this strange phenomena as can be found in the negative fibers in our Western religion, as well as the nihilism of Nietzsche and the failed police states, but there are others, more neurological in nature, which are more insidious and hence more dangerous, at work.

The Fruits of Negativity

One would think after reading Norberg’s nine specific measures of the phenomenal improvement in the human condition over the past hundred fifty years, a ‘microblink’ in the history of universal evolution, that there would be every reason to see ourselves, especially in the West but as emerging worldwide, as living in a true ‘Golden Age’.  The reduction in warfare, increase in life span, reductions in disease and hunger, and rapid reductions in poverty, all delineated by Norberg, present a powerful picture of ‘Progress’.  Rapid advances in technology make our lives more comfortable, and the explosion of communications links us together in a way that would have seemed to pure magic just a generation ago.

But an undercurrent of dissatisfaction beneath all this cannot be ignored.  Even the most casual subscriber to social media, or follower of disturbing political trends such as extreme Nationalism, hints of resurgence of racism, feelings of ‘unfairness’ and inequality, quickly realizes that there trends in society which generally work against the idea of a ‘Cosmic Spark’.

And of course, our propensity for more and better connectivity itself can be a ‘two-edged sword’.  Resentments that have been built up over the past seventy years have created the perception of inequality out of control, even among those who are well off.  How can I be ‘well off’ if there’s somebody out there better off than I, and look at the benumbing volume of data that pushes this in my face every day?

To some extent, the ‘egality’ of social media (amplified by our rapidly polarizing politics) has stripped the cover of ‘political correctness’ (once referred to as ‘politeness’) from social intercourse and introduced the ‘right to indignation’.  The image this conjures is unhappy persons sitting behind dimly lit, spittle-covered computer screens and hurling invective into a coarse, hostile but ever-welcoming neuro netscape.

But is there anything new here?  Can’t we find such invective in our holy books?  Haven’t prophets for centuries predicted our long, slow but inevitable descent toward ‘the dogs’, (even if the poet Jeanette Walworth could remind us, “The dogs have had an awful wait.”)?

It’s certainly true that the internet provides us with a megaphone of unprecedented size, scope and volume, as well as an anonymity which eludes consequences.    The imprimatur which validates our messages is simply the volume of ‘likes’ from the logosphere.  Memes survive in a sort of crude Darwinism in which ‘the fittest’ becomes the ‘most popular’, and the most popular is increasingly that pitched at the lowest denominator of human emotion.

So, what is actually new about this phenomenon, other than perhaps its technology-driven unprecedented size, scope and volume?  Further, why should it be considered more threatening to our continued evolution?

The Next Post

This week we continued our look at the ‘flip side’ of Norberg’s (and Teilhard’s) profound and well documented affirmations of ‘human progress’, which optimism, (if one is to believe in the rising tide of pessimism as found in today’s politics and social media) is not necessarily shared at large.

Next week we will look more closely at the truly unprecedented roots of this phenomenon.

March 21 2019 – Why Deny the Cosmic Spark?

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Today’s Post

Over the past several years we have been tracing the current of evolution as it continues its fourteen billion years of rise in complexity, most recently through our individual and collective lives.  Through the insights of Teilhard de Chardin we have been able to see how God can be understood as the name we give to basis for and the continued principle by which this journey continues.

This week we begin to look at ‘denial’ of the Cosmic Spark.  If it is, as Teilhard asserts, the essential element which has brought the universe into its current state of complexity, can we be assured of its continued presence in our personal and collective lives?

A Recap

This blog addresses the subject of God in ‘secular’ terms; that is without recourse to traditional Western (or Eastern) religious thinking.  This approach opens a fresh ‘hermeneutic’  to making sense of religion by finding ‘reinterpretations’ which square with what we are uncovering about reality through the methods of science.  It is not that religion is basically antithetical to science, but that reality is something that can be approached by both the empirical and intuitional modes of human thinking; the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brains.

In our journey, we have come to see both science and religion pointing to an evolution by which complexity rises over time, and how this complexity makes and remakes its products in ever increasing manifestations of complexity.  In such a way that in the latter phases of evolution, this increase in complexity shows up as increased awareness, consciousness and sphere of activity of the individual products.  Teilhard and many others (such as Johan Norberg) see these characteristics as evidence of increases in human ‘personness’ and ‘freedom’.

In tracing this thread first through the sequentially increasing complexity of pre-life (quarks, electrons, atoms, molecules) then into the much more complex world of cells, neurons, brains and consciousness aware of itself, we have become aware of a common thread which runs through the fourteen billion years of evolution that we are aware of.

We have seen how the earliest Christian teachings (especially Paul) grasped the tangibility of this thread (The ‘Cosmic Spark’) as it rises through our lives, but also how the more Greek Platonic influences tipped the scales toward an ‘outsider’ God, an “over and against of man”, as seen by Blondel.  The ‘intimate’ God, proclaimed by Jesus, articulated by Paul and expressed so eloquently and straightforwardly by John in his statement:

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”

is not as important to church hierarchy as the God of structure embraced after the Council of Nicea which insured the new Church’s place in the political scheme of things.

Over the past few weeks, we have also seen how such an insight as the Cosmic Spark nonetheless offers a hermeneutic for reinterpreting the basic message of Western Christianity: clarifying its message and deepening understanding of how it can be seen as the sap which flows in all limbs of this ‘tree of life’.  Further, we have seen how acknowledgement of it and cooperation with it not only is essential to continuing human evolution, but in doing so enriches our individual lives.

We have also been able to see, through the volumes of metrics offered by Johan Norberg, how in spite of our general clumsiness in recognizing and cooperating, we humans have become generally increasingly adept at increasing our collective evolutionary complexity.  As Richard Rohr puts it:

 “All of us, without exception, are living inside of a cosmic identity, already in place, that is drawing and guiding us forward. We are all (engaged), willingly or unwillingly, happily or unhappily, consciously or unconsciously.”

   Evidently, it is not necessary that we consciously and systematically uncover the action of the Cosmic Spark in human life to benefit from it.

Or is it?

What Could Hold Us Back?

In spite of our conscious or unconscious ability to move human evolution ahead, we have looked at the impediments that our society has developed which can get in the way.  We saw how a negative strand of thinking has entwined itself in Western Christianity that gives rise to a mistrust of this ‘Cosmic Spark’ and manifests itself in echoes of Luther’s belief that humans are ‘Piles of excrement covered by Christ’, and Freud’s belief that the fundamental nature of the human person is ‘dangerous’, and cannot be trusted.   Consequences of such negativity can be seen in our time in the arrival of the anti-personal regimes of Stalin, Mao and the Kims.

But surely in our resolute resistance to such anti-evolutionary currents, successful thus far in overcoming them, the battle is won?

Unfortunately, as even the most cursory examination of current social norms show, in spite of the tremendous increase of worldwide human welfare as documented by Norberg, general trust of these norms is becoming harder to find in those societies most enriched by it.   Trends in such things as recent elections and current social media show not only an increasing unease with our norms, but a downright prevelance of antisociality which works against cooperation.

History has clearly shown that the benefits of a society in which freedom and innovation prevail are phenomenal, with such benefits as decreases in infant mortality, extensions of freedom to all segments of society, reductions in malnutrition, warfare, disease and poverty.  In spite of such ‘hard’ data somehow a large segment of Westerners, where all these trends began, seemed called to be suspicious, even in downright disbelief, at these benefits.

Today, we see trends in our politics in which we are encouraged to mistrust those Democratic norms which have thus far carried us to such unprecedented levels of human welfare.  Why now, after such a hard-won plateau of welfare, should such anti-evolutionary thinking become prevalent?

Who are we?  Are we indeed untrustworthy carriers of the evolutionary genes which are capable of raising our complexity (read our innate capability to grow as whole human persons)?  Is there anything to Teilhard’s profound trust in the Cosmic Spark, or has this bubble, risen for fourteen billion years, only to burst in our inadequate hands?  Is human nature, as asserted by Freud and Luther, really untrustworthy?  Was there a golden age when we were, as some thinkers claim, ‘one with nature and free from sin’, or is our unease simply the result for looking, for the first time, at the cosmos and recognizing its vast potential?

Richard Rohr reflects both the siren song of the past and Teilhard’s great confidence in the future when he states that

“Paul offers a theological and ontological foundation for human dignity and human flourishing that is inherent, universal, and indestructible by any evaluation of race, religion, gender, sexuality, nationality, class, education, or social position. He does this at a time when perhaps four out of five people were slaves, women were considered the property of men, temple prostitution was a form of worship, and oppression and wholesale injustice toward the poor and the outsider were the norm. “

   But that still leaves us with the question, “Why, with all the evidence of improvement in human welfare, why do we still cling to a pessimism that is capable of eroding the underpins of evolution from beneath us?  Where does what seems to be such an upwelling of mistrust come from and how can it be dealt with?  Is this just another ‘duality’, or is there something more deep-seated and hence more insidious at work?

The Next Post

This week we began a look at the ‘flip side’ of Norberg’s (and Teilhard’s) profound and well documented affirmations of ‘human progress’, which optimism, (if one is to believe in the rising tide of pessimism as found in today’s politics and social media) is not necessarily shared at large.

Next week we will look more closely at this phenomenon.

March 14 2019 – How Does the Cosmic Spark Contribute to Quality of Life?

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Today’s Post

    Last week we continued our look at the ‘Cosmic Spark’, that thread of becoming which is at the heart of the universal evolution towards increased complexity as it rises through the human person.  Recognizing that referring to this aspect of ‘cosmic becoming’ as ‘divine’ does not square with the secular aspect of God that we have focused on (thanks, responders), I am now referring to it as the ‘Cosmic Spark’.

This week we shift our focus from the need for discovery of and cooperation with this agent of evolution in the human, to its ‘effects’.  While acknowledgement of it is at the heart of Thomas Jefferson’s assertion of the ‘equality of all men’ and thus necessary to our successful mode of societal government, what happens in our lives as we become more aware of it and adept at cooperating with it?

Quantifying a ‘Good Life’

Our history is rife with prescriptions and proscriptions for human behavior.  All societies contain lists of such acceptable behavior, and the criteria for acceptability is some combination of behavioral norms that most frees the individual to produce for the society without undermining the production itself.  The assumption in all cases is that ‘what’s good for society is good for the individual’, and in some cases, ‘what’s good for the individual is what’s good for society’.

But how can we objectively define ‘what’s good for the individual’ other than that which is good for the society?  We can easily make such generalizations such as ‘freedom is good’ and ‘we must all get along’, but how much freedom, and in what areas?  Is it possible to objectively quantify a ‘good’ life?

As we have seen previously, the Apostle Paul is very adept at summarizing the teachings of Jesus as found in the three ‘synoptic’ gospels available to him.  We have seen how Paul’s organization of Jesus’ concepts into ‘virtues’, for example, can be seen to fall into three categories of ‘stances’ or attitudes we can take for a ‘fuller’ life.

As Jesus says, “I come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.” (John 10:10).  More germane to this week’s subject, Paul does the same for abundance as he did for virtues, summarizing what he sees as Jesus’ insights into ‘what is good’ for the human person.

Paul listed those attributes of life that he saw as deriving from a life informed by the Theological Virtues, and his list is a good start to describing ‘abundancy’ as an underling principle of ‘goodness of life’.  These attributes are summarized in his ‘fruit of the spirit’, which in our secular reinterpretation can be seen as attributes which the human person takes on as he becomes aware of the Cosmic Spark and becomes adept at cooperating with it.

The ‘Fruit’ of the Cosmic Spark

The ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ is Paul’s term that sums up nine attributes of a person or community living ‘in accord with the Holy Spirit’.  Chapter 5 of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians lists them: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  Among the many attempts to objectively quantify the attributes of a ‘full’ or complete human life, these seem high on the list.

Love –  We have addressed the attribute of love several times in this blog, noting the significant difference between the traditional understanding of it as the emotion by which we are attracted to each other and Teilhard’s insight that it is a manifestation of the universal evolutive energy by which things become more complex, and hence more united over time in such a way as they become more complete.  By participating in love we become more complete, more whole.

Peace –  It is hard to imagine something more conducive to peacefulness than that the recognition that our efforts to grow more complete are underwritten by a universal energy which rises unbidden and unearned within us.  God, as Blondel understood ‘Him’, is on our side. Life, as it is offered to us as a gift, is guaranteed to be open to our strivings, welcoming to our labors.  As the Ground of Being is uncovered as our own personal ground of existence, it is understood more as father than as fate.

Patience – Patience becomes more than long-suffering teeth gritting endurance necessary for  ‘salvation’, but the natural acceptance of what cannot be changed in light of Teilhard’s “..current to the open sea” on which we are carried when we ‘…set our sails to the winds of life.”

Recognition of the Cosmic Spark within us, the ‘gifted’ nature of it, and confidence in where it is taking us, can instill a patience with the vagaries of life that was would have been previously considered to be naive.

Kindness – As an essential building block of both society and personal relationships, kindness is prescribed by nearly every religion as the ‘Golden Rule’.  Beyond this prescription is the natural emergence of kindness as a recognition that not only are we underpinned by the Cosmic Spark, but others are as well.  Treating others as we would be treated ourselves requires us to be aware of how our own Cosmic Spark is the essence of being by which we all reflect Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’.

Goodness –  Goodness, of course, is that tricky concept which underlays all the ‘fruits’ of Paul.  In Paul, as echoed by Teilhard, that which is ‘good’ is simply that which moves us ahead, both as individuals and members of our societies.  If we are to have ‘abundance’ of life, whatever contributes to such abundance is ‘good’.

Faithfulness – As we saw in our look at the Theological Virtues, faith is much more than intellectual and emotional adherence to doctrines or dogmas as criteria for entry into ‘the next life’.  Faith has an ontological character by which we understand ourselves to be caught up in a ‘process’ which lifts us from the past and prepares us for a future that while it might be unknown is nevertheless fully manageable.

Gentleness – As a mirror to ‘goodness’, ‘gentleness’, once we have become aware of the Cosmic Spark not only in ourselves but in all others, becomes the only authentic way of relating to others.

Self-Control – Self-control acknowledges that while we might be caught up in a process by which we become what it is possible to become, this process is dependent upon our ability and willingness to choose.  Being carried by Teilhard’s ‘current’ (‘Patience’, above) still requires us to develop the skills of ‘sail setting’ and ‘wind reading’.  The instinctual stimuli of the reptilian and limbic brains do not dissipate as we grow, but the skill of our neocortex brains to modulate them must be judiciously developed.

The Next Post

This week we looked a little deeper into how finding and cooperating with the ‘Cosmic Spark’ adds to the abundance of our lives.  .

Next week we will move on looking deeper into how denying the cosmic spark can not only leave us unable to taste Paul’s ‘fruits’, but can undermine our continued evolution.

March 7 2019 – What Part Does the Divine Spark Play At The Personal Level?

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Today’s Post 

   Last week we looked a little deeper into finding and cooperating with the ‘Divine Spark’, and addressed how through history to the current day, there are sociological strands active in our societies which would not only deny it, but actively work against it.

We also took a first look at how recognition and cooperation with the Divine Spark can overcome these negative trends, and thus insure the continuation of the enterprise of human evolution.

This week we will move on to looking deeper into how cooperating with this ‘divine spark’ is not only essential to the continuation of the advance of evolution in the human species, but to our own personal evolution as well.

The Divine Spark As The Principle Of ‘Personness’

    Teilhard strongly asserts what happens when we realize the existence of the divine spark within us:

“..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

   Why should this be such a ‘decisive moment”?  In what way is it indeed ‘decisive’?

To answer we must consider what happens in the normal maturing process of the human person.  We begin as children at the center of our own universe, surrounded by attention and provision of our needs.  One of the first things that must happen as we grow toward adulthood is to become more aware of our environment, particularly in the form of other persons.  The complete human ‘gestation’ process is quite long compared to the ‘lower mammals’, but like them, it is initially more stimulated by the nurturing instincts of the mammalian ‘limbic’ brain. Unlike them, however, the development of intellectual maturity requires development of the skill of using the neocortex brain to modulate these emotional stimuli.  This modulation, the emergence of ‘objectivity’, is essential to ‘learning’ and inevitably incurs an increase in openness to the surrounding world, especially to other persons.

We have seen how, in Teilhard’s view of the world, love is also something that develops in the same way.  For love to be able to energize human growth (instead of just a lubricant to relationship), it must become more open to the other, whose reciprocation stimulates our own growth.  Teilhard refers to this recursive cycle of ‘humanization’ as excentrationfollowed by centration.

To Teilhard, love is the humanized manifestation of the energy of evolution.  It is the unique energy rising from the existence of the divine spark in each of us.  While not denying the limbic-tinged emotion that is undeniably present in human relationships, Teilhard’s grasp goes much deeper, seeing love as the essential energy by which we become what we can be, and how doing so contributes our small increment to the continuation of human evolution.

It is very common among all religions and most philosophies to value ‘selflessness’ over ‘egocentricity’, but in most cases it is valued for the social stability that it provides, or as a qualification for the rewards of the ‘next life’.  The recognition is very revolutionary indeed that when we undertake such an excentration-centration cycle in our life that we are cooperating with  ”a universal will to become and to be” that manifests itself in each of us and which is essential to continued human evolution.   Once realization of the existence of this Divine Spark begins to take place within us, our potential for the fullness of human becoming is increased.

The ‘Fruits’ Of The Divine Spark

How can we quantify such increase in potential?  What difference does it make that we awaken to such a possibility?

At the coarsest level, that of society, we have seen in quite a bit of detail of how human welfare has increased exponentially over the last two hundred fifty years.  In this same overview, we saw how the chronicler of such welfare attributed such explosive development to the rise in human freedom and improvement in human relationships.   We have also seen how the cornerstone of such freedom and relationships was based on Thomas Jefferson’s assertion of the basic ability of “the people themselves” as the “safe depository …of the ultimate powers of the society”.  And in the past few posts, we have seen how such an assertion is only possible if we assume the presence of the ‘Divine Spark’ in every human person.

Richard Rohr writes extensively on how one of the most important concepts of early Christianity, the idea of “God in Us”, has been superseded by Christianity’s rush to codify theology in Greek terms, and organize a structural hierarchy to insure its endurance.  Rohr refers to the many teachings of Jesus which refer to what was later understood as ‘The Christ’.  To be sure, these teachings are sprinkled among the many teachings which were understood as essential elements of the resultant theology and normative to church hierarchy, but Paul, the ‘great summarizer’ of Jesus’ teachings, stressed them.  It was Paul who highlighted Jesus’ teachings on Love, and on the ‘virtues’ (last week), but also Paul that first stressed not only the existence, but the universality of the Divine Spark:

“There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything” (Colossians 3:11)

  In spite of his insistence on this intimacy with God, not only the universal nature of the Divine Spark, but of its presence in each of us, came to be second to the more structural basis adopted by the church.  The church came to stress more a remote, judgmental God who required human sacrifice to reconcile himself to his creation than an intimate God of which John could say,

“God is Love, and he who abides in Love abides in God and God in him”.

And At The Personal Level?

But what about the human person ‘himself’?  Are humans just cogs in the machinery of evolution, whose relationships and freedoms are needed to insure the increase in human welfare?  Or is there some level of ‘payoff’ at the personal level?

The Next Post

This week we looked a little deeper into finding and cooperating with the ‘Divine Spark’, and it is active in each human person.

Next week we will move on looking into how acknowledging and cooperating with this ‘divine spark’ can make a difference in our individual lives.