At The Root Of Everything
Today’s Post
In the last several weeks we have approached the idea of a secular side to God, identifying a ‘ground of being’ without recourse to the traditional precepts of Western religion. At the same time, we have seen how reinterpreting traditional Christian concepts in the light of Teilhard’s insights into universal evolution have brought the kernels of belief in these venerable concepts to the fore. Finally, we looked at how Science and Religion, humanity’s two major belief systems, could extend their distinctive insights into a collaborative approach to the single reality in which we live.
And last week we saw how John Haught outlined a path for these two belief systems to become more harmonious, and hence more helpful to our search, in the approach which he termed, “anticipation”.
This week we will move to the next step of this ‘reinterpretation’ by addressing the ‘Root of Everything’
What’s At The Bottom of It All?
Our approach to the ‘ground of being’ has assumed the perspective of Teilhard with his highly comprehensive understanding of the process of evolution in the coming-to-be of the universe. This perspective simply recognizes evolution as proceeding along an axis of increasing complexity over time. Teilhard was one of the few thinkers to see how this process, essential to the fourteen or so billion years which precedes us, still continues in us: in our personal development as well as the development of our species.
He, as well as other thinkers such as Jonathan Sacks, Maurice Blonde and Karen Armstrong, saw the history of religion as the evolving search for the basis of this cosmic agency as it is manifest in personal human life. As we have seen, this basis of personal life manifests itself as a branch of the cosmic ‘axis of evolution’ as its sap rises through living things.
The Common Threads of Religion
All of the evolving threads of religious thought emerged across the multifaceted evolution of cultures and societies as they evolved their understanding of the roots of reality from a coarse animism and a necessary adjunct of the state. Karen Armstrong, in her book, “The Axial Age” sees this evolution reaching a tipping point with the paradigm shift seen in the period of human history from 900-200 BCE. As she puts it,
“For the first time, human beings were systematically making themselves aware of the deeper layers of human consciousness. By disciplined introspection, the sages of the Axial Age were awakening to the vast reaches of selfhood that lay beneath the surface of their minds. They were becoming fully “self-conscious”. This was one of the clearest expressions of a fundamental principle of the Axial Age. Enlightened persons would discover within themselves the means of rising above the world; they would experience transcendence by plumbing the mysteries of their own nature, not simply by taking part in magical rituals.”
“…they all concluded that if people made a disciplined effort to reeducate themselves, they would experience an enhancement of their humanity.”
Effectively, to paraphrase Armstrong and reflecting Teilhard and Sacks, evolution was becoming aware of itself. Humanity was moving from its evolutionary critical point of ‘awareness of its awareness’ to its ontological critical point of ‘awareness of the principles of awareness’. This step of “plumbing the mysteries of their own nature” was effectively a step toward understanding the ‘ground of being’ as the principle of what would later be understood by science as ‘evolution’. While the theory of evolution as we know it today was still thousands of years in the future, nonetheless in the ‘Axial Age’ human persons embarked on a path that recognized the role that human choice played in both personal maturity and the evolution of society.
The fact that the stream of human inquiry has since bifurcated into the manifold strands found in religion and science only illustrates the value of recognizing, understanding and cooperating with the underlying mechanisms which propel our evolution. But at the root of it all, such understanding is necessary if we are going to continue to (paraphrasing Dawkins) “raise the world to an increasing level of complexity”.
Teilhard labels this effort as ‘articulation of the noosphere’. He saw this articulation as requiring two basic insights:
– the ‘noosphere’ (the milieu of organized human thought) is structured by ‘laws’ by which evolution proceeds in the human species
– such evolution cannot proceed unless we understand and cooperate with these ‘laws’ in the same way that we are learning to understand and cooperate with the laws of physics, chemistry and biology.
We can see religion, therefore, as the long, rambling, frequently contradictory and many-faceted attempt by the human species to identify these laws and attempt to apply them to human life. Or, as Karen Armstrong puts it, “…to experience (growth) by plumbing the mysteries of (our) own nature”. Just as we have come to see evolution as proceeding along the axis of rising complexity, we can now begin to see religion as the attempt to articulate the dimensions and continuation of this axis, marked by the success of its statements in continuing the rise of evolution through the human.
To understand religion, therefore, is to identify among the diverse threads which can be found among its manifold and often contradictory forms those statements of belief that, when practiced, move us onto a more complete “enhancement of our humanity”. This in turn will lead to a society which better fosters such a grasp.
If we’re going to understand religion as an approach to ‘making sense of things’ in a way that helps us to understand things from the integrated perspective of Teilhard and Haught, and hence as a ‘signpost’ to a future in which we activate our potential, we must learn to see in it those insights which aid in such an understanding.
The Next Post
Next week we will continue our process of reinterpretation of religion by looking at religion as an ‘articulation of the noosphere’. How can religious thought help us to better understand reality so that we can better negotiate our passage to the future?