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November 26, 2020 – Jesus In The Context of Evolution

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      The Word becomes Flesh in universal complexification

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks we saw how the understanding of Jesus, as depicted by Paul, the synoptic gospels and John, represents an evolution of the understanding of Jesus which an be perceived as both ‘divine’ and ‘human’.  Jesus, the teacher of wisdom becomes Jesus, the Christ, who was ‘exalted by God’ due to his sacrificial act, and finally to Jesus, the human manifestation of ‘the Christ’, who was so integrally a part of God that ‘he’ had coexisted with ‘him’ through eternity.   As we will see, this evolution continues further as Christianity begins to understand God as ‘triune’: the ‘trinity’.

Today we will begin to put these insights on Jesus into the perspective of our search for the ‘Secular Side of God’.

The Second Dimension of Duality

As we have seen, the concept of ‘the Christ’ undergoes a distinct evolution in the New Testament.  The synoptic gospels depict Jesus as a teacher who believed that he was living in the end of times, and insisted on preparation by way of correct moral behavior.  Paul, while not denying this humanistic portrait of Jesus, summarized and expanded on his teachings (for example, in his treatises on Love and the Fruit of the Spirit), and goes on to see him tasked with and rewarded for the sacrifice required for reconciliation of sinful man with judgmental God.  The claim to divinity, in Paul’s mind, comes about as God’s ‘exaltation’ of Jesus as a result of completion of this task.  Jesus is born a human, but raised to a divine level by God because of his sacrifice.

John goes one step further, as he identifies Jesus as the human face of the fundamental basis by which creation was effected.  Jesus, as ‘the Christ’, had always existed, along with God, and collaborated with God in the act of creation.  From this perspective, God can be seen as the ‘creator’ and Jesus as the ‘navigator’.

On the surface, these two facets of Jesus, the human and the divine, appear as just another type of duality, along with body/soul, this life/the next, good/evil, in which two opposing and orthogonal concepts are juxtaposed and contrasted, requiring ‘cognitive dissonance’ on the part of the believer.  In the ‘atonement’ theory, for example, Jesus is placed into history by God to re-establish the connection between God and his creation that God intended, but failed due to Adam’s ‘original sin’.  In argument against the ‘theory of atonement’, Richard Rohr notes:

”The ‘substitutionary atonement theory’ of salvation treats Christ as a mere Plan B. In this attempt at an explanation for the Incarnation, God did not really enter the scene until God saw that we had screwed up.”

In the “cosmic Christ” insight of John that we saw last week, Jesus, as the Christ, is ‘co-substantial’ with God, and therefore had always been somehow involved in the creation process.

These two theories are, on the face of it, orthogonal.   The first posits a somewhat ‘deistic’ God whose creation process ends with the appearance of man, and man is a finished product free to turn against ‘Him’.  In the second, the ‘cosmic Christ’ is an agent essential to the raising of man’s understanding of God, becoming manifest in human history as God’s continuing presence in human existence.

The history of Christian theological development includes many disagreements among leaders of the early church on how Jesus could be man and God at the same time, with many different ‘heresies’ debated.  Was Jesus ‘only’ human, ‘only divine’ and appearing in human form, or both at the same time?

The final solution, that Jesus was indeed God and man, was presented as a ‘mystery’ to be believed, not to be understood.  Essentially, although it could not be explained, it became an article of faith, requiring a sort of ‘cognitive dissonance’, and as such introduced yet another duality.

We have seen how many such dualities can be resolved through application of our secular principles of reinterpretation, and this one is no exception.  As we have seen, many of the opposing concepts associated with God, such as those addressed in earlier posts, can come into coherence, and the dualities healed, when we understand God as the ‘ground of being’.  Once God is understood as active in both the principles of being (physics, chemistry, biology) and the principles of becoming (increasing complexity), we take a step toward seeing God’s presence reflected in every manifestation of reality.  In the same way we should be able to re-look at the person of Jesus.

Making Sense of Jesus

Thomas Jefferson was one of the first secular thinkers to attempt such a relook.  Jefferson understood that the teachings of Jesus, stripped of their supernatural and miraculous content, had much to offer the construction of a secular set of laws which could underpin a new nation.  In doing this, Jefferson was one of many who attempted to ‘articulate the noosphere’ by ‘reinterpreting religion’.

As an eighteenth century Deist, of course, Jefferson’s ideas of God were limited to ‘source’ but without recourse to the nineteenth century findings of Physics and the emerging science of Natural Selection that would later inspire such thinkers as Maurice Blondel and Teilhard.  Without these insights, he could not conceive of this ‘source’ continuing on after an initial creation, much less as an active agent which powers the increasing complexity which would eventually manifest itself in the human person and serve as a confirmation of his belief in the equality of the human person.

With the insights of Blondel and Teilhard in hand, however, we can begin to understand God as not only the ‘source’ but the ever-active ‘agent’ of a universe which comes to be over long periods of time.  This agent powers evolution, first through the complexification of matter, then through the appearance of ever more complex living entities, and eventually to the appearance of conscious entities which are aware of their consciousness.

As history has showed, it’s not enough to be aware of our awareness, we must also seek to understand it well enough to cooperate with whatever it is that powers our being to be able to move our evolution forward.  To be able to continue to move forward, we must both understand the ‘laws of the noosphere’ and learn to cooperate with them.

And this is where Jesus comes in.

The Next Post

We have seen in the last two weeks how the person of Jesus has been depicted in the Christian ‘New Testament’, and how this depiction changes over the three (Paul, Synoptic Gospels, John) groups of texts.  Next week we will take a look at how this emerging portrait of Jesus can be seen in light of our search for the Secular Side of God

November 12, 2020 – Jesus

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November 12, 2020 Jesus

                From the earliest perspectives

Today’s Post 

Last summer we took a first relook at religion from our secular perspective, viewing it as a potential tool for making sense of things and thereby as a resource for managing human evolution.  We followed this with a look how John Haught, employing Teilhard’s hermeneutic, suggested how science and religion could evolve toward a synergism in which the best of both could emerge from conflict to collaboration.

We earlier addressed traditional Western concepts of God, and saw how the concept of a ‘God’ can be reinterpreted by a secular perspective into the recognition of and cooperation with the ‘cosmic spark’ as it can be seen to be active in each particle of the universe, and therefore also in each of us.

Last week, we saw that this reinterpretation does not necessarily contradict the underlying kernels that lie at the basis of traditional Western expressions of belief.  In fact, we saw how such secular reinterpretations can be seen to resolve many of the dualities that are embedded in traditional religious tenets.  In doing so, it also begins to recover those religious insights which are relevant to human life.

This week, we’ll continue to focus our inquiry into the cornerstone tenets of Western theology, moving  beginning with the subject of Jesus, the basis of Christianity.

Christianity’s Dualities

We have addressed many of the manifestations of ‘duality’ that appear in Western theology, as found in Judaism, Christianity and the Greek influences on the continuing evolution of Christianity.  Dualistic concepts such as body/soul, this life/the next, sacred/profane, divine/human, good/evil and many others can be found in much of the evolved theology at the heart of Western religious thinking.

Such instances of duality can also be found in both the scriptural references to Jesus (the ‘new’ testament) and in the theological development which has continued to unfold as Christianity assimilated Greek thought and became established as an agent for stability in the Roman Empire as it expanded into Northward into Europe.

These threads of duality have persisted during the evolution of the West, and can still be found in the appearance and inevitable branching of the new science of psychology.  These traces were highlighted in our history of psychology, which pointed out how Freud’s dystopian theories of ‘the self’ were heavily influenced by the Christian Protestant duality which saw ‘man’ as both the ‘image of God’ and  ‘sinful by nature’.  We also saw how branches of mid-twentieth century psychology leaned towards a more positive basis, in resonance with the more positive of these two Christian perspectives.

These contradictions can still be seen today in the ongoing tension between Protestant fundamentalism and mainstream liturgical expressions of Christianity, as well as the wide divide between the extremes of liberal and conservative politics.

And, as we shall see, another dimension of duality also rose as Christianity began to develop a ‘Christology’, a philosophical approach to understanding Jesus from the universal perspectives of Paul and John, and how this new dimension was to give rise to the idea of a “Trinity”.

What Do We Know Of Jesus and How Do We Know It?

The actual dates of the life of Jesus are not certain, and the first person to write about him seems to be Paul, some years after Jesus’ death.  All the other authors of the ‘New Testament’ seem to have come later, so it seems that no one who wrote of Jesus actually knew him but depended on stories which were prevalent in the many new gatherings which sprung up after his death.  Not much seems known about these different ‘churches’ other than that they represented a very diverse collective memory of Jesus and his teachings.  Much of the diversity found in these churches reflected the dualities already present in the legacy Jewish scripture, (known by Christians as ‘Old Testament’ and by the Jews as ‘The Torah’), but many new dualisms emerged with the new thinking introduced by Christianity.

The ‘stories of Jesus’ that glued these early communities together all reflected the legacy dualisms of their Jewish heritage, such as:

  • Was God responsible for evil or was the source of evil elsewhere?
  • Was God’s creation ‘good’ or ‘evil’?
  • Was God a ‘loving father’ or a ‘vengeful judge’?
  • Was The Torah “God’s Word”, and hence to be followed literally, or a collection of human insights to be refined by latter teachers, such as Jesus and Hillel?

The emerging Christian religion introduced new dualisms, such as:

  • Was Jesus God? Man?  God and man?
  • What, specifically, was his relation to God? Faithful follower?  Offspring?  Co-creator?
  • Was he ‘killed by God’ to atone for human sins and thus restore ‘fallen’ man to angry God?
  • Is belief in Jesus necessary for salvation?
  • Are only Christians saved?
  • Will he ‘come again’? How?  When?

The letters of Paul to the early churches clearly show the diversity of belief that had appeared in the few years between Jesus’s death and Paul’s writing.  He consistently critiques beliefs found in the new churches, and his New Testament ‘letters’ contain instructions for ‘correct’ interpretations as well as summaries of Jesus’ teachings.

The First Perspective: The Synoptic Gospels

The first three ‘gospels’, stories of Jesus as formally accepted (‘canonical’) by the Christian church, are known as the synoptic gospels.  Thought to be authored first by Mark, then Matthew and Luke, they seem to have been written some few years after Paul.  They depict Jesus as a Jewish man who was not considered to be more than a man during his lifetime, who offered often unpopular interpretations of the law of Moses (the Torah), ended up on the wrong side of the law, was condemned for political treason against Rome, was tortured and put to death by crucifixion, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.

The synoptic gospels often depict Jesus as a ‘millennialist’, who predicted that God would soon intervene in human history and establish a kingdom on Earth, which would be led by the ‘Son of Man’.

Bart Ehrman, in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, notes that the ‘miraculous’ depictions of the synoptic gospels, such as the virgin birth, healing the sick and resurrection, are not uncommon in the many myths of the ancient world.  They appear in many stories of other ‘God Men’ born to virgins who ascended to heaven.  He notes that such stories would have been familiar to the early Christians.  He goes as far as to suggest that these events in the synoptic gospels were proclaimed by the post-Jesus church to overcome the shame of the nature of Jesus’ execution as a common criminal, and to appeal to those who would have been familiar with these myths.

However, for all the commonality of the Jesus story with other such stories, Ehrman documents how Paul introduced a facet which is entirely new: that of ‘the Christ’.

The Next Post

The writings of Paul and the authors of the synoptic Gospels offer a picture of Jesus which emerged shortly after his death.   However, the writings of Paul introduce a perspective on Jesus that is only vaguely addressed in the synoptic gospels.  Paul’s writings open the door for a perspective of Jesus that will take the new church’s impact on human evolution far past that suggested as a ‘holy man’.

Next week we will address Paul’s new idea, and how his perspective was expanded significantly by the Gospel author, John, and then further evolved as the new church began to develop its ‘Christology’

November 5, 2020 – Rethinking the ‘Attributes of God’

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What can be said about God from this reinterpreted perspective?

Today’s Post

Last week we began to look at how God can be understood from the secular but integrated perspective suggested by John Haight, which finds God as the critical agency of the unfolding of the universe.  This week we will address some of the traditional characteristics ascribed to God as Christianity evolved under the influence of Greek philosophy and offer a reinterpretation from the perspectives of Teilhard, Blondel, Sacks, Haught and Rohr.

These traditional characteristics surface examples of the ‘dualisms’ discussed last week.  As Jonathan Sacks observes, they exist to a lesser extent in Jewish thinking, which doesn’t speculates less on the nature of God and more on how ‘he’ is present in human affairs.

While this understanding is one of the clearest threads in the ‘Old Testament’, it led to many dualities (God ‘as he is in himself’ vs ‘God as he is to us’) that arose as Christian theology evolved under the influence of Greek thinking. Sacks sees such ‘other-worldliness’ as a factor in the failure to experience God in the here and now, and hence contributing to the decreasing sense of relevance in religious teaching seen in today’s Western culture.

Immutability and Divinity

A teaching of traditional Christianity is that God is “Being itself, timeless, immutable and incorporeal”.   Augustine goes on to interpret the statement ontologically, seeing God as “that which does not and cannot change”.  Aquinas, in his metaphysics, sees God as “true being, that is eternal, immutable, simple, self-sufficient and the cause and principal of every creature”.  These teachings, although not in themselves antithetical to our secular perspective, have nonetheless led to the understanding of God as ‘supernatural’ and ‘external’ in contrast to ‘natural’ and ‘intimate’.

Sacks sees these traditional interpretations as the “God of Aristotle, not Abraham and the prophets”.  For example, In reference to the Greek translation of God’s self-identification to Moses as, “I am who am”, Sacks contrasts the Jewish translation as, “I will be where or how I will be”.  This inclusion adds a ‘future tense’ omitted in the Greek translation, and pivots the perspective from objective to subjective.  Sacks contrasts the Jewish reluctance to conjecture how God is apart from ‘his’ creation against the increasing Christian tendency to treat God objectively.  In the Jewish perspective, therefore, God is open to a future manifestation, and not bound by that understood thus far.  It is not that God changes in this approach, but that our understanding of God changes as our capability to understand evolves.

As Sacks points out, the concept of the ‘purely spiritual’ does not exist in Judaism, which rarely speculates on the nature of God.  The insight that God ‘will be’ is less a statement about God’s evolution than it is about our evolving understanding of the ‘ground of being’ as it is manifest in our lives.

The more secular insights of Blondel and Teilhard go a little further, and are more in line with the essential thinking of Augustine and Aquinas.  As God can be found in the sum total of forces that, as Dawkins claims, “..  eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence”, God is not only not supernatural, but as the ‘ground of being’, is supremely natural.   In being so, ‘he’ is therefore so intimately involved in evolving reality as to be virtually inseparable from it.

John Haught addresses this intimate involvement:

  “Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.”

Omnipotentiality

This traditional teaching asserts that God is ‘all-powerful’, and hence can do anything that ‘he’ desires.  It forms the basis for the dualism at the root of much atheistic criticism:  if God can do anything ‘he’ desires, and if ‘he’ is ‘good’, then ‘he’ should be able to correct all the bad things that are so obvious in reality.  This points to all the suffering that can be seen, both human-caused and ‘acts of nature’ such as droughts, sickness and genetic evils.  It asserts that the only conclusion possible is that either God causes evil (in which case he is not ‘good’) or that he is powerless to stop it (in which case he is not ‘all-powerful).

Both Sacks and scriptural scholar Bart Ehrman (‘God’s Problem’) acknowledge that traditional Western religion does not offer a solution to this dichotomy.  In the story of Job, As Ehrman points out, all the traditional treatments of evil are addressed, but in the end none are held up as ‘the answer’.

Sacks goes on to address further the duality in such assertions of ‘God’s power’.  If we assume that God does not create evil, then we must assume that it comes from somewhere (or someone) else.  Assuming a second source, of course, moves belief from monotheism to polytheism.  Sacks points out that both threads of thought can be found in scripture, and that a tendency toward seeing an independent source for evil is one of the bases for dualism.  He sees the danger of such a dualism very strong in human history, with our ever-present tendency to demonize our opponents, which so often has led to victimization in the name of moral superiority.  The Nazi “Final Solution” is one of the most striking examples of this thinking, and such trends are troublingly present in contemporary American politics.

Our secular approach, which sees the action of God in the thread of increasing complexity that rises in universal evolution, approaches the issue of power quite differently.  As God is not perceived as ‘a person’, much less an incredibly powerful potentate, God’s ‘power’ lies in the inexorable lifting of the universe to Dawkins’ “present complex existence”.  In order to become what it is possible for us to become, it is necessary for us to recognize and learn to cooperate with this very real universal force that lies at our core.

Omniscience

   This traditional teaching asserts that God is ‘all-knowing’.  It presents another duality: If God knows everything in advance, how is it possible for humans to have free will?  If he doesn’t know everything, and we do have free will, how can ‘he’ be God?

Our secular point of view does not understand God as a ‘person’ with ‘knowledge’ but rather as the ‘agent of person-ness’ which effects the eventual appearance of the ‘person’ in evolution.  In doing so, the ‘complexification’ of the universe is eventually manifested in the form of ‘person-ization’ with the appearance of consciousness now become aware of itself,

Our secular perspective continues along this same path.  As we saw with the clinical observations of Carl Rogers, cooperation with our legacy nature, the kernel of our persons, will always lead to our enrichment, our personal continuation of the ‘axis of evolution’.

Chance and Necessity

This brings up another perennial argument: that of the role of chance in evolution.  As Einstein has famously said, “God does not play dice with the universe.’  Although this quote was aimed at the indeterminacy of the theory of Quantum Physics, it has been used to support the theory of determinism promoted by Christian Creationists:  God intended the specific creation of humans.  Therefore, the question is asked, “If God intended humans, how can chance, with which we’re all intimately acquainted, play a part?”

Teilhard’s answer to this conundrum is that if evolution is to continue, it must continue along the fourteen billion year axis of increasing complexity.  Therefore such an observable phenomenon as increase in complexity can be expected to continue despite random events.  A distinct and relevant example can be seen in the history of our planet.

The Cretaceous–Tertiary (K–T) extinction, some sixty-five million years ago, is a prime example of the evolutionary continuation of complexification despite chance events. The K-T extinction ended the long (one hundred fifty million year) primacy of reptilian animals.  In this event, Earth is believed to have been struck by a very large asteroid, causing a giant cloud that ushered in a ‘global winter’ which the larger and more evolved reptiles, being cold-blooded, could not survive.

Archeological evidence clearly shows that the evolution of the dinosaur had resulted in a gradual enlargement of the brain cavity as a percentage of total body mass:  evidence of the ‘thread of evolution’ as it rose through the reptilian entities.  With their extinction, and the resulting enlargement of available ecological niches, the prevalent theory suggests that with the extinction of the dinosaurs the way was cleared for a rebound of evolution of mammals.  As we know, the rise of complexity (measured in increase of the brain cavity as previously seen in the dinosaurs) then re-continued in the mammals.

The asteroid collision was clearly a random, chance event, but not such as to derail the rise of complexity at the heart of cosmic evolution.

Transcendence and Immanence

  Traditional Christianity characterizes God as both transcendent and immanent.  From this perspective, God is both ‘above’ but somehow ‘involved’ with creation.  This characteristic has spurred much thinking since evolving Christianity, with its dualistic branches, understood God as both ‘supernatural’ (“timeless, immutable, incorporeal”- Augustine) and as deeply intimate with the ‘human person’ (“God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God in him”- John).  How is it possible to be both?

Jonathan Sacks, addressing the branch of belief which understands God as ‘supernatural’, cites the Christian theology of ‘atonement’.  He sees it as the theory that Jesus had to die to reconcile such a distant (supernatural) God to his immanent (natural) creation.  As Richard Rohr puts it:

“The substitutionary atonement “theory” (and that’s all it is) seems to imply that the Eternal Christ’s epiphany in Jesus is a mere afterthought when the first plan did not work out.”

This development of Christian theology stands in opposition to John’s statement about the nature of God:

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

John provides the basis for overcoming the dualities that were to rise as Christian theology developed under the influence of Plato and Aristotle.  He makes no complete distinction between the presence of God in the human and the presence of “God as ‘he’ is in ‘himself’”.

Gregory Baum sees Blondel’s understanding of the complete immanence of God as:

“It is impossible to conceptualize God as a being, even as a supreme being, facing us.  Since God has entered into the definition of man, it would be an error to think of God as a being apart from man and superior to him.”

   So, putting both God and ‘man’ into Teilhard’s integrated context of evolution permits an integrated understanding of both characteristics.  God, understood as the basis of the sum total of the manifold principles of universal evolution, is indeed transcendent.  From this insight, God ‘himself’ may be the underlying principle, but the play of these principles as experienced by us in our continued evolution is completely immanent.

If the insights of Teilhard (and the other thinkers that we have addressed) offer a way of reinterpreting the traditional Western religious teachings on the ‘ground of being’, how does this new light offer a way to rethink its cornerstone, Jesus?

Next Week

This week we have used the insights of Teilhard and others to rethink the prodigious teachings of Western theologians on the subject of God.

Next week will use these same insights to address the ‘secular side of Jesus’.

October 29, 2020 – A Relook at God

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Looking at God from the perspective of ‘anticipation’

Today’s Post

Over the past few weeks we took another step in our secular search for the ‘principle of becoming’, this time from the perspective of John Haught, who contrasts the legacy religious and scientific ‘Cosmic Stories’, but suggests a third, synergistic, insight into human life.  Haught suggests that what is warranted as we participate in the flow of human evolution is a spirit of ‘anticipation’: moving beyond the traditional approaches of science and religion to an integrated recognition of the uplift of evolution in human life.  As he sees it this uplift offers us an

“.. awakening to the coming of more-being on the horizon.”

   But if we are to understand Haught’s suggestion that we evolve our religious thinking from ‘analogy’ (traditional religion) to ‘anticipation’, what needs to change in our legacy approach to religion?

Several weeks back we looked at approaches to reinterpreting religion, and applied them to an understanding of God that could be approached in human experience.  But what about the traditional approach to God.  How must that change as well?

This week we will look into traditional Western religious lore, referred to by Haught as ‘analogy’, to sift its ore for the jewels of insight that it offers this exploration.

A Brief History of God

Conventional Western religion, expressed in the form of Christianity, has evolved the concept of God from Jewish insights found in the Torah to those most explicitly articulated in the Christian Western Scholastic tradition.  Thomas Aquinas is most associated with this theology in his association of Greek thinking with traditional Church teaching.  His “Summa Theologica” developed a ‘metaphysics’ which explained reality as an association between the divine creator (God) and ‘his’ creation, blending scripture, Greek reasoning and Western theological development.

From Jonathan Sacks’ perspective, this development reflects what he refers to as ‘dualism’.  A very basic dualism can be seen in the two parallel paths found in all the major expressions of religious thought.  Both of these paths can be clearly be found in both the Jewish scriptures (The Torah) and those of Christianity (the ‘New Testament’).

In one thread, creation is ‘good’:

  • creation (including humans) is destined for ‘one-ness’ with its creator
  • humans are reflections of the divine (‘in His image’)
  • God is ‘father’

In the other, creation is flawed:

  • It is separated from its creator (requiring divine sacrifice to reconnect)
  • humans are sinful at their core
  • God is judgmental and vengeful

In Christianity, this dualism can be seen in such things as the tension between concepts such as ‘love’ and ‘justice’, ‘damnation’ and ‘salvation’, ‘natural’ and ’supernatural’, and ‘this life’ and ‘the next’.

Once Rome capitalized on Christianity’s inclusive nature as a tool for social unity needed as Rome became an increasingly diverse empire, Christianity quickly became more legalistic than fraternal (another dualism).  Its dogmatic statements and rules for attaining salvation increasingly replaced Jesus’ ‘law of love’ with the Church’s ‘laws of salvation’.

Sacks sees the dualism that could be found in Jewish beliefs becoming more pronounced in Christianity, as it began to incorporate elements of Greek philosophy.  As Sacks sees it,

“Christendom drew its philosophy, science and art from Greece, its religion from Israel”.

   In doing so, he saw it exacerbating the dualism that had its roots in Jewish teachings.

God, Reinterpreted

Our concept of the ‘secular side’ of God is quite obviously quite different from this conventional and traditional view.  Here are three examples:

–  As we saw earlier, in our reinterpreted view God is not ‘a person’.  Teilhard understood God is the basis for person since ‘he’ is the sum total of all the universal forces by which the universe evolves from a formless quantum of energy to the highly articulated and multifaceted reality that we see around us, including ourselves.  One of the threads of the tens of billions of years of universal becoming is that which eventually leads to ‘the person’.  Since that evolution produced the entity that we refer to as ‘the person’, person therefore is seen as one of many evolved universal characteristics.  As Gregory Baum relates Blondel’s insight

“God is not a super-person, not even three super-persons. That God is person reveals that man is related to the deepest dimension of his life in a personal and never-to-be reified way.”

Our secular perspective, therefore, reinterprets God from being ‘a person’ to the much more profound understanding of God as the personal facet of the ground of being.

–  God is not ‘supernatural’, if the term refers to something that exists outside, above and apart from nature.  In Teilhard’s view, God, as the underlying principle of complexity, is so woven into the energy of universal evolution as to be ‘co-substantial’ with it.  As Blondel saw it, there is no position that we can take which sees God as ‘there’ and we as ‘here’, since we require the evolutive action of God within us to be able to make the statement.  As we have seen over the last several weeks, our very growth as persons requires us to find that spark of ‘person’ that exists in us all, that we did not create, and which is given to us ‘gratuitously’, unearned.  Finding this spark is therefore the first step to finding God.

Finding God also involves the simple realization that what differentiates us from all other products of evolution is that humans have to become aware of what it is that got us to where we are, and how to cooperate with it, if we are to proceed further.

–   God is, in a very real, tangible and unsentimental way, ‘love’.  Once love is shorn of its emotional and sentimental aspects, it can be seen as the play of universal, integrative energy as it has manifested itself in the human person.  Just as entities at every stage of evolution have capitalized on this integrative energy to unite in such a way as to effect more complexity, so can humans capitalize on the energy of love in the same way to increase their individual complexity, to grow.

Such a God as we have come to in our search thus far, while being understood so differently in many ways from our legacy Western beliefs, is not necessarily antithetical to the beliefs themselves.  As we shall see, they can be re-examined for their relevance to human life and as such, ‘reinterpreted’.

The Next Post

Next week we will continue this reinterpretation by addressing some of Western religious teachings on God in the light of our secular approach.

October 22, 2020 – Religion As A Signpost to the Future

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‘Articulating the Noosphere’

 Today’s Post

Last week we saw how religion can be seen as an attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’, in which the ‘laws’ of our personal and cultural evolution are sought and by which we can assure our continued personal and cultural growth.   This week we will take a look at how such articulation at the level of religion slowly informs our cultural standards.

From Articulating the Noosphere to Managing Human Evolution

Society has long struggled to both understand the principles which underlie a ‘successful’ society and to codify these principles into what we now understand as ‘laws’.  As chronicled by Nick Spencer in his book, “The Evolution of the West”, religion’s role in this historic process has been dualistic.  In many cases it has found itself trapped in the perpetuation of its financial, hierarchic, legalistic and power scaffolding, and in other cases it has contributed to the fundamental concepts by which the delicate balance between personal and cultural civilization has successfully evolved.

Thomas Jefferson captured both arms of this dualism.   While his approach was to discard the ‘otherworldly’ aspects of the “Stories of Jesus” and focus on Jesus as a secular moralist, he nonetheless drew the basis of his understanding of human nature and personal freedom from these teachings.  The result, of course, was a cornerstone for a set of laws which has underpinned a truly ‘successful’ society.

Larry Siedentop, in his book, “Inventing the Individual’, traces the history of ideals that form the basis of Western values.   It’s not so much that these ideals are absent in Eastern thinking, but do not enjoy the primacy seen in the West.  He summarizes the ‘articulation of the noosphere’ as it has emerged in the West:

    • Each person exists with worth apart from their social position
    • Everyone deserves equal status under secular law
    • Religious belief cannot be compelled
    • Individual conscience must be respected

As Teilhard (and many others) have noted, the Western evolution of understanding of the person and society is becoming a standard embraced elsewhere:

“…from one end of the world to the other, all the peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them.”

   Johan Norberg, in his book, “Progress” documents in detail how this formulation, initially rising in the West, has made its way into many ‘developing’ countries.

The Perennial Philosophy

While considerable diversity and frequent contradiction is paramount among the threads of thought seen in the evolution of religion, Aldous Huxley saw common elements in all of them.  He defines the immemorial and universal ‘Perennial Philosophy’ which permeates all religions as:

“…the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.”

Translating this semi-theological assertion into the perspectives of our ‘Secular God’, we can see that this concept of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’ reflects the principle which powers the coming-to-be of the universe (the ‘world of things’) and that it is reflected in some way in the core of the human person.

Effectively, this ‘metaphysic’ points the way to the underlying activity by which we have come to be and the guidelines by which we successfully navigate our growth.  The Perennial Philosophy recognizes that there are basic dynamics of human existence which, understood and managed properly, will lead to increased completeness.  The religious and societal norms which have evolved, therefore, are our attempt to articulate these dynamics and the activities of understanding and management of them.  By definition, as we evolve as persons and as societies, we hope to evolve them in a direction which activates our potential.

Or, as Karen Armstrong puts it in her insights on the many streams of thinking which developed during the ‘Axial Age’:

“The fact that they all (the sages of the Axial Age) came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggests that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked”.

The theologian, Cynthia Bourgeault, puts it a little differently:

”I think it’s fair to say that all of the great spiritual paths lead toward the same center—the larger, nondual mind as the seat of personal consciousness—but they get there by different routes.” 

What’s the Alternative?

Successfully negotiating the continuation of our evolution goes beyond fulfilling our potential.  It is obvious today that human activity also has the potential of contributing to our extinction.  Finding and understanding the ‘laws of the noosphere’ also requires us to adapt to our ever-increasing population and the effects it has on the planet.  One example of the potential of such adaptation is acknowledged by John McHale in his book, “The Future of the Future”:

“At this point, then, where men’s affairs reach the scale of potential disruption of the global ecosystem, he invents precisely those conceptual and physical technologies that may enable him to deal with the magnitude of a complex planetary society.”

   It’s not just that we are in danger of destroying our planet, but that even more danger lurks in our ever-increasing proximity to each other.  As we increasingly compress, we are more and more at the mercy of our instincts to defend our space, to keep ‘the other’ at bay, to defend our territory and make sure we get our fair share.  Inventing McHale’s ‘conceptual technologies’ means to develop evolutional strategies that overcome this strong resistance to closeness.  Johan Norberg documents nine distinct examples of such strategy in his book, “Progress”.

In this area it’s essential to our continued evolution for us to “use our neo-cortex brain to modulate the instinctual stimuli of our reptilian and limbic brains.”

These ‘basic dynamics’ and ‘conceptual technologies’, therefore, are what is sought by humans in their attempts to ‘articulate the noosphere’.   Culling them from the enormous and often contradictory cluster of statements of beliefs that have arisen over the long evolution of religion is the main goal of the ‘reinterpretation’ process that is the focus of our search for ‘The Secular Side of God’.

Teilhard offers a concise description of the validity of a person’s belief:

“By definition, his religion, if true, can have no other effect than to perfect the humanity in him.”

The Next Post

So, if we believe that that all expressions of religious beliefs include some elements of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’, what remains is to address them in the light of the perspectives we have developed thus far, then reinterpret them to find such kernels.  Next week we will begin to apply our approach to the ‘Secular Side of God’ as we address the cornerstone of Christianity, Jesus.

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October 29, 2020 Jesus

                From the Perspective of Paul and the Synoptic Gospels

 

Today’s Post

 

Last summer we took a first relook at religion from our secular perspective, viewing it as a potential tool for making sense of things and thereby as a resource for managing human evolution.

Last week we began a second relook at religion, this time from the perspective as an attempt to ‘articulate the universe’ in such a way that we better understand the laws which guide the evolution of everything and how we can best work with them to insure not only our personal growth but the continued evolution of our species.

We earlier addressed traditional Western concepts of God, and saw how the concept of a God can be reinterpreted from a secular perspective into the recognition of and cooperation with the ‘cosmic spark’ as it can be seen to be active in each of us.

We saw that this reinterpretation does not necessarily contradict the underlying kernels that lie at the basis of traditional Western expressions of belief.  In fact, as we have seen in the previous posts on ‘God’, these secular reinterpretations seem to resolve many of the dualities that are embedded in traditional religious tenets.  In doing so, it also begins to infuse religious concepts with insights which are more relevant to human life.

In doing this, we also looked at the ‘Perennial Tradition’, which sees all religious expression as inclusive of such basic fundamental insights.

This week, we’ll begin to focus our inquiry into the cornerstone tenets of Western theology, beginning with the subject of Jesus, the basis of Christianity.

 

The Duality of Christianity

 

We have addressed many of the manifestations of ‘duality’ that appear in Western theology, as found in Judaism, Christianity and the Greek influences on the continuing evolution of Christianity.  Dualistic concepts such as body/soul, this life/the next, sacred/profane, divine/human, good/evil and many others can be found in much of the ‘holy scripture’ which underlies Western religious thinking.

Such instances of duality can also be found in both the scriptural references to Jesus (the ‘new’ testament) and in the theological development which has continued to unfold as Christianity assimilated Greek thought and became established as an agent for stability in the Roman empire as it expanded into Northern Europe.

These threads of duality have persisted during the evolution of the West, and can still be found in the appearance and inevitable branching of the new science of psychology.  These traces were highlighted in our history of psychology, which pointed out how Freud’s dystopian theories of ‘the self’ were heavily influenced by the Christian Protestant duality between ‘man as the image of God’ and ‘man’s sinful nature’.  We also saw how branches of mid-twentieth century psychology leaned towards a more positive basis, in resonance with the more positive of these two Christian perspectives.

These contradictions can still be seen today in the ongoing tension between Protestant fundamentalism and mainstream liturgical expressions of Christianity, as well as the wide divide between the extremes of liberal and conservative politics.

And, as we shall see, another dimension of duality also rose as Christianity began to develop a ‘Christology’, a philosophical approach to understanding Jesus from Paul’s universal perspective, and how this new dimension gave rise to the idea of a “Trinity”.

 

What Do We Know Of Jesus and How Do We Know It?

 

The actual dates of the life of Jesus are not certain, and the first person to write about him seems to be Paul, some years after Jesus’ death.  All the other authors of the ‘New Testament’ seem to have come later, so it seems that no one who wrote of Jesus actually knew him but depended on stories which were prevalent in the many new gatherings which sprung up after his death.  We don’t seem to know much about these different ‘churches’ other than that they represented a very diverse collective memory of Jesus and his teachings.  Much of the diversity found in these churches reflected the dualities already present in the legacy Jewish scripture, (known by Christians as ‘Old Testament’ and by the Jews as ‘The Torah’), but many new dualisms emerged with the new thinking.

The ‘stories of Jesus’ that glued these early communities together all reflected the dualisms of their Jewish heritage, such as:

  • Was God responsible for evil or was the source of evil elsewhere?
  • Was God’s creation ‘good’ or ‘evil’?
  • Was God a ‘loving father’ or a ‘vengeful judge’?
  • Was The Torah “God’s Word”, and hence to be followed literally, or a perspective to be refined by latter teachers, such as Jesus?

Then there were the new dualisms, such as:

  • Was Jesus God? Man?  God and man?
  • What, specifically, was his relation to God?
  • Was he ‘killed by God’ to atone for human sins?

The writings of Paul clearly show the diversity of belief that had appeared in the few years between Jesus’s death and Paul’s writing.  He consistently critiques beliefs found in the new churches, and his New Testament ‘letters’ contain instructions for ‘correct’ interpretations.

 

The First Perspective: The Synoptic Gospels

 

The first three ‘gospels’, stories of Jesus as formally accepted by the Christian church, are known as the synoptic gospels.  Thought to be authored by Mark, then Matthew and Luke, they seem to have been written some ten years after Paul.  They depict Jesus as a Jewish man who was not considered to be more than a man during his lifetime, who offered often unpopular interpretations of the law of Moses (the Torah), ended up on the wrong side of the law, was condemned for political treason against Rome, was tortured and put to death by crucifixion, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.

The synoptic gospels often depict Jesus as a ‘millennialist’, who predicted that God would soon intervene in human history and establish a kingdom on Earth, which would be led by the ‘Son of Man’.

Bart Ehrman, in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, notes that the ‘miraculous’ depictions of the synoptic gospels, such as the virgin birth, healing the sick and resurrection, are not uncommon in the many myths of the ancient world, and appear in many stories of other ‘God Men’ born to virgins who ascended to heaven.  He goes as far as to suggest that these events in the synoptic gospels were proclaimed by the post-Jesus church to overcome the shame of the nature of Jesus’ execution as a common criminal, and to appeal to those who would have been familiar with these myths.

However, for all the commonality of the Jesus story with other such stories, Paul introduces a facet which is entirely new: that of ‘the Christ’.

 

The Next Post

 

The writings of Paul and the authors of the synoptic Gospels offer a picture of Jesus which emerged shortly after his death.   However, the writings of Paul surface a perspective on Jesus that is only lightly addressed in the synoptic gospels.  These writings open the door for a perspective of Jesus that will take the new church’s impact on human evolution far past that suggested as a ‘holy man’.

Next week we will how this perspective, first posed by Paul, was expanded significantly by the Gospel author, John, and then further evolved as the new church began to develop its ‘Christology’.

October 15, 2020 – Seeing Religion from the Perspective of ‘Anticipation’

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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?

September 24, 2020 – ‘Love’ And The Ground of Being

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What does it mean to ‘love God?’

Today’s Post             

We have spent the past few weeks following Teilhard’s use of meditation from the finding of God to the use of ‘secular meditation’ (psychology) in finding ourselves.  We have followed this thread as it appears in the science of psychology, noting its evolution as ‘assisted secular meditation’, and saw how it can lead us to an understanding of the person that Kierkegaard believed “to be that self that one truly is” and in so doing, move toward ‘fuller being’.

This week we will address how relating to this universal ‘principle of being’ that manifests itself in us can be seen as ‘love’.  Now that we have identified how God, the principle of existence, can be understood as the principle of life within us, we can explore what it can mean to say that such a ‘ground of being’ can be ‘loved’.

A Relook at Love

In today’s culture, it would seem that few things are less tangible but more ubiquitous than ‘love’.  Our culture is rife with references to it: it is used to sell things, explain behavior, understood as a prompt to procreation, as fodder for poems and music, as themes to movies and books.  Nearly all these perceptions understand love primarily as an emotional, sentimental feeling.  Articulated thusly, it seems to offer a poor mechanism for connecting to the ‘ground of being’ that is active at the basis of our lives.

Even our Western religion has problems with it.  For many Christians, the emotional aspect of love far outweighs the ontological aspect: Love is more a sentimental ‘feeling good’ about God, Jesus, Mary and the saints than the facet of the universal energy which effects our growth as it unites us.

Teilhard notes that in the systematic and ever-recursive action of evolution, from the big bang to the human person, the same phenomenon can be seen:

Two entities of like complexity unite, and the product is an entity of higher complexity, and thus  greater in potential for union.

Teilhard’s ontological insight to this evolutionary phenomenon can be summarized as

“Fuller being from closer union, and closer union from fuller being.”

   Science observes this phenomenon as active in the evolution of simple matter from the first bosons to the very complex molecules which constitute the building blocks of life.  The theory of Natural Selection assumes but fails to explain the continuation of this rise of complexity in living things.  Not only does complexity continue to rise in living things, it does so at a much higher rate.  This can be objectively traced in the evolution from simple cells to the neurons which underpin the human characteristic which we call ‘consciousness’.  Without such a fundamental principle of existence, evolution as we know it would not be possible, and the ‘stuff of the universe’ would remain forever at its initial featureless state.

Love As The Energy Of Evolution In The Human

Science documents an example of this upwelling of complexity in the ‘K-T’ event, some 65M years ago.  In this event, the fossil record shows the most evolved species on the planet as reptilian.   This record shows an increase in brain capacity in the later reptiles.  After their extinction, the flow of increased complexity, active in the reptiles for millions of years, began to rise anew in the increasing evolution of mammals.  This phenomenon is echoed in the assertion by Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science, that

“If the tape of evolution were rewound, it would result species different from those seen today.”

    As we have seen, we can hardly expect such a powerful and inexorable upwelling of complexity, acting and increasing for over fourteen billion years, to stop with the human person.  There is every reason to see this agency of evolution as just as active in humans today as it has been throughout the history of the universe.  If we concur with Teilhard that humans are “evolution become aware of itself”, the question remains: how can we see it as active in our lives?

Teilhard observes that evolution proceeds via the ‘activation of energy’.  The unions of evolutionary products that raise the level of complexity do not occur in isolation: they are influenced and effected by the wash of energy which pervades the universe.  Atoms are unified by the strong and weak atomic forces, complex atoms by the fusion of simple atoms by gravity, atoms evolve into molecules under the play of chemical forces.

These energies are manifold, and different types of energy come into play at different rungs of complexity.  For example, gravity was unable to have an effect on evolution until particles acquired mass.  This effect precipitated the gravitational compaction of Helium and Hydrogen atoms into stars which in turn effected complex atoms and enabled molecules.  The forces of chemistry were mute until the arrival of molecules.  And the forces of love could not play their unifying role until the entities of evolution became conscious.  Love, therefore is “the latest manifestation of this energy which effects human ‘complexification”.

Seen through Teilhard’s eyes, the increasing complexity of living things results in the phenomenon of consciousness.  This subjects entities to the influence of energies so subtle as to be immeasurable yet so powerful as to energize the ascent of complexity to a level which is ‘consciousness aware of itself’.

The Action of Love

Teilhard addresses how this new manifestation of cosmic energy plays out in human relationships

In a nutshell, he saw that our personal evolution, our personal growth, is the manifestation of the continuation of ‘complexification’ in the human species.  Teilhard sees this complexification as occurring in two basic recursive steps as we engage in the process of ‘become persons’.

He refers to the first step as ‘ex-centration’, in which we become more aware of our environment, and of other persons, and begin to lose the self-centeredness that framed our infancy.  As we become more adept at this, we become more open to others, and are able to allow our relationships to mature

We saw three weeks ago how Carl Rogers observes the evolving characteristics of maturation in therapy.     Rogers echoes Teilhard’s ‘ontological’ insight into love when he states that

“Change appears to come about through experience in a relationship”.

   As our relationships deepen, we can become aware of the regard which others hold for us, which in turn offers us a clearer, more objective and more holistic vision of ourselves.

This results in the second step of ‘centration’, in which we become more ‘the person that we are’, and less ‘the person that we thought we were’.  And as we saw with the clinical observations of Dr. Rogers, we can become the more authentic and less centered person that we are capable of becoming.  As we become more adept at self-management, the more we are able to engage in deep, personal relationships.  Thus the cycle continues in a convergent spiral, increasingly focused on deeper maturity through closer relationships by which we enable deeper maturity.

Teilhard sees this convergent spiral acting within us as

“Fuller being from closer union.  Closer union from fuller being.”

 This spiral of ex-centration and centration has another effect as well.  Even as we are changed in a love relationship, this same evolving union changes those who we love even as it is changing us.  Each cycle has the potential of raising the ‘abundance of life’ (as described by Rogers) of the individuals involved.

Thus love, understood now as more ontological than emotional, is indeed a powerful force for our continued evolution.  As we grow, we become more able to love and thus more complete as persons.  As we become more complete, we are able to love more deeply.  As in the case of every step of evolution from the big bang to the present, we as entities unite to effect an entity which is more capable of uniting and in doing so thus becomes more ‘complex’.

Loving God

So how does this approach to human love and evolution lead to a relationship with this universal force, which is active in us?  What does it mean to say that we ‘love’ the ‘ground of being’?  How does Teilhard’s recursive dynamic of love play out in our relationship with God?

In the past few weeks we have been exploring how our recognition of this inner agent of evolution is only the first step.  In order to flourish and grow, to evolve, we must learn not only to be aware of it but how to cooperate with it.  We must learn to trust it.

If we take Teilhard’s two-step process as basic to the activation of the energy of love, the answer is simple.  As Rogers points out, and nearly all religions teach, all personal growth requires a loss of ego, the ‘false self’.  It is always necessary for us to understand what beliefs, practices, and fears are part of the scaffolding, the shell, that we have erected in ourselves to protect us.  The act of trusting that we can survive the disassembly of this scaffolding requires our belief that the person who will emerge will not need them.

This inner trust is not something that another person can give us, it can only be accepted, and then only if we can acknowledge that it is innate, granted to us as our birthright, unearned and inextinguishable.  This inner realization is our connection with ourselves.  It can only be described as our love for ourselves, and hence is a love for the source of ourselves.  Such love isn’t necessarily an emotional state, but is more the recognition, the confident belief that the energy of the universe flows through us, trustworthy, gratuitous and ever-present and the decision to trust and cooperate with it.  It is the energy of the universe made manifest in human life, patiently awaiting our participation. .

To love God therefore is to love ourselves, not in the vernacular of western culture as a superficial emotional or sentimental state, but to recognize, value and eventually learn to trust the principle of life as it is allowed to change our lives.

Thusly seen, God isn’t a supernatural person who requires our adoration, but the recognition of the action of such a universal force in each of us is clearly expressed by Teilhard as he tells of

 “…hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:

              “It is I, be not afraid.”

Even more to his point, he tells of what can happen such recognition arrives 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 he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him.”

The Next Post

Having seen how God can be understood, even recognized, even ‘loved’, as the sum total of all the forces of the universe brought to bear on that which effects us as beings which are conscious of our consciousness, we can go on to take a look at how such an understanding of God can be found in a reinterpreted version of the most basic precepts of the Western systems of science and religion.

September 10 – Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 4:

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The Self That is Found  

Today’s Post

Last week we saw in some detail how the approach developed by Carl Rogers was applied in his ‘guided inner search’ (our ‘secular meditation’) and how it resonated with Teilhard’s insistence that the personal core within us was an individual manifestation of the cosmic uplifting of all things, the energy of the ‘first cause’ working within us as within all things.  This week we will see in more detail how Rogers observed the finding of this inner core as he participated in the client’s emerging ability to cooperate with it.

What Rogers Found in His Clinical Experience

In Rogers’ clinical experience, he conducted many psychological surveys in which he observed the following changes taking place in his “clients” as they undergo therapy:

– The individual becomes more integrated, more effective

– Fewer of the characteristics are shown which are usually termed neurotic or psychotic, and more of the healthy, well-functioning person

– The perception of self changes, becoming more realistic

– They become more like the person they wish to be, and value themselves more highly

– They are more self-confident and self-directing

– They have a better understanding of themselves, become open to experience, deny or represses less of their experience

– They become more accepting in their attitudes towards others, seeing others as more similar to themselves

Rogers saw the role of the therapist as “facilitating” these changes, fostering them by way of offering the client a relationship in which the client can feel safe enough to discover the value of the person that Kierkegaard believed “to be that self that one truly is”.

Rogers used the results seen in his clinical experience to delineate the steps which clients undergo as they become more aware of themselves and increasingly ready to cooperate with the energies of their lives.  He saw the following things happening in such a person:

– Feelings evolve from being remote and un-owned to fearlessly experienced in the immediate present

– Experiences evolve from very remote and meaningless to immediate, and as an acceptable referent for accurate meaning

– Congruence between experience and awareness becomes more complete as experience becomes safer

– Communication becomes clearer as the internal connection between feelings, experiences and awareness improves

– Problems become recognized, understood and owned

– As experiences are perceived as a trustworthy guide to behavior in relationships, the danger perceived in relationships is lessened

The Person that Emerges From Such  Assisted ‘Secular Meditation’

In general, Rogers saw the maturing person as

– Increasingly open to experience, which permits less defensiveness

– Increasingly “existential”; living more fully in each moment, in touch with experiences and feelings

– Increasingly trusting of his own organism, able to trust feelings and experiences

– Increasingly able to function more completely

So against the Freudian belief that human persons are basically irrational, and that their impulses, if not controlled will lead to the destruction of others and self, Rogers saw the human person as capable of becoming freer, less defined by the past and more open to the future as he grows.  Since the basic nature of the human person is now seen as constructive and trustworthy, as he matures the person will become more creative and live more constructively.

The relationship that Rogers sees as necessary between the client and therapist is very like that seen in the mature love between human persons.  As Rogers asserts, echoing Teilhard,

“There seems every reason to hypothesize that the therapeutic relationship is only one instance of interpersonal relations, and that the same lawfulness governs all such relationships.”

Every human relationship touches on some aspect of the characteristics that Rogers identifies in the process of “becoming a person”.  In all relationships, from the most intimate to the most fraternal, such skills as management and expression of feelings, owning of experience, congruence between experience and awareness, clarity of communication, responsibility for behavior and honesty manifest themselves in patience, empathy and tolerance.  In all relationships, when we are welcomed into an accepting environment, we are able to move a little closer to “being that person that we are”, and when we welcome another in the same way, their own “becoming” is invited.

Existentialists and Teilhard

The new perspective pioneered by the existentialists can be seen in the light of Teilhard’s insight into

the human person as a product of evolution.   This insight itself comes from the emerging concept of general evolution in human thinking precipitated by the scientific discoveries of Cosmic “size”, “duration” and “unfolding”.  To begin to understand everything as “in the process of evolving” can be interpreted as seeing everything “in the process of becoming”, since each step in evolution comes from ‘something’ becoming ‘something new’, and the new something which results is more complex than its precedent.

Since the human person can be seen as simply the latest manifestation of this fundamental cosmic process, Teilhard asserts that we can expect the same dynamic to be working in our lives as well.  Every day offers us the opportunity to grow from the ‘someone’ that we are to a ‘new someone’ that we can become.  The new aspects of our person which emerge, if this growth is authentic, are consistent and congruent with the forces of the universe.  They are well articulated by Rogers and consistent with the positive expectations of the existentialists.

The Next Post

Next week we will recap where we have got to in our ‘Secular Search for the Core of Personness’ o,  In our vernacular, ’ Secular Meditation’.

August 27, 2020 – Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 2

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The Transition

 Today’s Post

Last week we opened the subject of psychology as offering a secular approach to what the mystics have been practicing for millennia: finding God by finding ourselves.

  • Recognizing God as the agent of the upwelling of complexity in Cosmic evolution
  • Becoming aware of the presence of this upwelling in our own personal evolution
  • Finding God in our search for our fundamental selves.

We saw how Freud pioneered this undertaking in his objective, secular and empirical manner (as opposed to that of the religious intuitive and scriptural-based approach).  We also saw how, while offering a magnificent array of new concepts, and working empirically, Freud’s psychology nonetheless seemed predicated on a very negative assumption of our basic selves.  To him, meditation, even via psychology, can be very dangerous indeed, since it shows our basic selves to be highly unreliable, even untrustworthy.

This week we will address an orthogonal approach to psychology which emerged in the last century.  This different approach, while also consistent with the empirical perspectives and methods of science, assumed a core of the human person which was radically different from Freud. 

From Freud to Existentialism

As we saw in the previous post, Freud was successful in developing an integrated system of thought which objectively addressed the whole of human activity.  He pioneered the understanding of the human in terms of inner energies, motivations, stimuli and even “economies” that determine his development from birth to death, and did this while adopting the objective approach of science.  His treatment of human irrationality and sexuality is unmatched. However, his underlying materialism, misogyny and overall pessimism left him with a definitely pessimistic outlook on the human person’s potential for satisfying relationships and personal maturity.

But we can find agreement between Freud and Teilhard on several things, such as the existence of a personal core of energy which underlies human growth and relationships, and understanding love as manifest in the reciprocal exchange of this energy between individual persons.

They sharply disagree, however, on the nature and source of this energy, and the role that this reciprocal exchange could have in positive growth, maturity, and even creation of the person involved in its exchange.  The difference between these two perspectives sharpens further when they are applied to human relationships at the social level.

Freud’s thinking began to be reevaluated and modified as the increasing number of Western psychologists created a large body of empirical data which could be analyzed to support or challenge the propositions which originally formed the basis for Freud’s thinking.  The relationship between the analyst and the analyzed evolved as well, due to the increasing educational level of the middle class, the growing acceptability of psychology by religion, and the emergence of expectations on the part of those undergoing analysis.

The Pioneers of Existentialism

In the mid twentieth century, several psychologists emerged with a distinctively different and  more positive understanding of the human person and the dynamics of personal growth and relationships with others.  This approach generally became known as “existential”.  Their general methods became known as ‘counselling’, and adopted by religion as “pastoral counselling”.

   Rollo May understood the basic tenet of existential psychotherapy as “that which stands with scientific analysis as expressed in the genius of Freud”.  However, he saw the empirical data that science also brings into the picture as unfolding the understanding of the human person on a deeper and broader level than Freud.  This deeper understanding assumes with Freud that it is possible to have an objective ‘science of man’.  It does not, however, ‘fragmentize’ him by breaking him down, as did Freud, into compartments, and thus lose the grasp of the ‘whole’ in the tangled archipelago of the ‘parts’.  Unlike therapeutic interpretation as practiced in Freudian psychoanalysis (which consists of referring a person’s experience to a pre-established theoretical framework) ‘existential’ interpretation seeks to understand how the person himself subjectively experiences reality, then works with him toward actualizing his potential to become whole.

With May, psychology began to progress from analysis and diagnosis to guided inner search.  In doing so, it was emerging as assisted secular meditation.

Instead of focusing on psychopathology and what goes wrong with people, Abraham Maslow formulated a more positive account of human behavior which focused on what goes right. He was interested in human potential, and how it could be actualized.  He believed that each person has a desire for self-fulfillment; namely, the tendency for him to “become actualized in what he is potentially”.

As we have seen, this requires us to first find ourselves, and then cooperate with the primal force which rises within us and in which lie our potentialities.

   Ashley Montagu believed that as a consequence of humanity’s unique evolutionary history, in which

We are required to be highly cooperative to survive, human drives are oriented in the direction of growth and development in relationship and cooperation.  He believed that what we are born for is “to live as if life and love were one”.  Like Teilhard, he subscribed to the belief that evolution rises along an axis, and that we are located, both as individuals and society, on that axis.

These pioneers believed that the core of human personality is positive, not irrational and weighted toward destruction as Freud believed.  Their clinical experience led them to recognize that the innermost core of man’s nature, at the deepest layers of his personality, the base of his “animal nature” is actually positive, basically socialized, forward-moving, rational and realistic.  They saw the goal of psychology as first helping us find this inner self, then helping us learn to cooperate with it.

In scientific circles, however, this was a difficult concept to accept.  In psychology, science’s first foray into the human psyche, Freud and his followers presented convincing arguments that the id, man’s basic and unconscious nature, is primarily composed of instincts which would, if permitted expression, result in incest, murder and other crimes.

In religious expressions as well, especially in the Luther-influenced conservative Christian traditions, our culture has been permeated with the concept that the human person is basically sinful (Luther’s “piles of manure covered by Christ”), and only by something approaching a miracle can this sinful nature be negated.  The whole problem of therapy, as seen by these groups, is how to successfully hold these untamed forces in check, rather than have them emerge in the costly fashion of the neurotic.

In contrast, the existentialists believed that the reason for this negative belief, held by many psychologists even today, lay in the fact that since therapy uncovers hostile and anti-social feelings, one must assume that this proves the deeper and therefore basic nature of the human person to be unrelentingly negative.  Only slowly has it become evident that these untamed and unsocial feelings are neither the deepest nor the strongest, and that the inner core of human personality is the organism itself which is, in addition to self-preserving, also highly social and capable of perfection.

The Next Post

This week we saw how the basic tenets of psychology began to evolve in the twentieth century from seeing the personal core as ‘dangerous’ to seeing it as a positive and trustworthy basis for human personal growth and successful relationships.  Next week we will look in more detail at how one of the most pivotal Existentialists applied this approach and the results he recorded.

August 13, 2020 – Connecting to God

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Opening the Door

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the recognition of the ‘core of person’, and the realization that such a core is also a manifestation of Karen Armstrong’s ‘immortal spark’ which connects us to the universal agency which ‘sustains and gives life to the entire cosmos’ first appears during the Axial Age.  While this recognition may well bring us closer to a ‘Secular Understanding of God’, it still does not address how a relationship with such a God is possible.  This week we’ll open that door. 

Teilhard’s Seven Steps of Meditation

All religions include rituals that are intended to put us in touch with the ultimate ground of being, be it the Eastern Brahman or the Western God.  One practice common to most of them is ‘meditation’, the goal of which is both increased awareness of ourselves and of this ultimate life force which lies at our core.

Of course, while each expression may have the same goal of finding our “true” selves and this core, each brings its unique presuppositions to the practice.  As a result, the word ‘meditation’ often brings with it a presumption of some religious dogma or hermeneutic, hence introducing this concept here might be seen as distinctively contrary to our ‘secular’ approach.  As we shall see, however, echoing Richard Dawkins, “the divesting of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries” works equally well for a method for experiencing God as it did for the definition.

We’ll start with the insight of Teilhard de Chardin, who closely followed Maurice Blondel in understanding God as the ‘ground of being’.  Teilhard described his own experience of meditation in his book, “The Divine Milieu”. This description is independent (“divested of the baggage”) of most traditional religious assumptions, and demonstrates a framework for a ‘personal contact’ with God as we are exploring.

While overtones of Christian belief obviously color this description, we’ll accompany it with the secular basis of the steps that he describes.

Step 1: Recognizing the Facets of our Person

  “And so, for the first time in my life, perhaps, I took the lamp and, leaving the zones of everyday occupations and relationships, where my identity, my perception of myself is so dependent on my profession, my roles- where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates.”

   Here Teilhard begins with an exploration of the ‘scaffolding’ of his person: those influences which affect the development of personality: beliefs, faiths and fears.  How much of who we are and what we believe have we consciously accepted, as opposed to those facades which we have erected as a protective skin to ward off the dangers of life?

Step 2: Moving past the Safety of the Scaffolding

   “But as I descended further and further from that level of conventional certainties by which social life is so superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself.  At each step of the descent, with the removal of layers of my identity defined from without, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. “

  How can we begin to objectively see ourselves, steeped in our facades and scaffolding as we are?  What happens when we begin to recognize these facades and scaffoldings, and try to imagine the consequence of divesting ourselves of them?  How can we ultimately trust that what lies beneath is indeed ‘trustworthy’?  Upon what can we place our faith in our capacity for the ‘dangerous actions’ that we must undertake each day?

Step 3: Encountering the Font of Our Consciousness

   “And when I had to stop my descent because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and from it flowed, arising I know not from where, the current which I dare to call my life.”

Where does our life come from?  Every day we are barraged by stimuli from our instinctual brains, fears, elations, and ideas that arrive unbidden from what we refer to as our ‘unconscious’.   One philosopher refers to our life as “what happens while we were making other plans”.  How does that happen?

Step 4: Facing The Intangibility of the Font

   “What science will ever be able to reveal to man the origin, nature and character of that conscious power to will and to love which constitutes his life?  It is certainly not our effort, nor the effort of anyone around us, which set that current in motion.  And it is certainly not our anxious care, nor that of any friend of ours, which prevents its ebb or controls its turbulence.

    We can, of course, trace back through generations some of the antecedents of the torrent which bears us along; and we can, by means of certain moral and physical disciplines and stimulations, regularize or enlarge the aperture through which the torrent is released into us.”

While we might well recognize that there is a font from which flows the stuff from which we are made, it cannot be empirically articulated.  Whatever the source, it is beyond our grasp.

Step 5: Accepting Our Powerlessness Over The Source of Our Life

   “But neither that geography nor those artifices help us in theory or in practice to harness the sources of life.  My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.  Man, scripture says, cannot add a cubit to his nature.  Still less can he add a unit to the potential of his love, or accelerate by another unit the fundamental rhythm which regulates the ripening of his mind and heart.  In the last resort, the profound life, the fontal life, the new-born life, escapes our life entirely.”

In addition to our inability to rationally and empirically articulate this flow of life into us, we are also unable to control it.  Our only choice is to accept it, and come to enough appreciation of it that we are able to cooperate with it.

Step 6: Recognizing our Entwinement in the Fabric of Existence

  “Stirred by my discovery, I then wanted to return to the light of day and forget the disturbing enigma in the comfortable surroundings of familiar things, to begin living again at the surface without imprudently plumbing the depths of the abyss.  But then, beneath this very spectacle of the turmoil of life, there re-appeared before my newly-opened eyes, the unknown that I wanted to escape.

  This time it was not hiding at the bottom of an abyss; it disguised itself, its presence, in the innumerable strands which form the web of chance, the very stuff of which the universe and my own small individuality are woven.  Yet it was the same mystery without a doubt: I recognized it.”

Teilhard recognizes not only the source of life within us, but how this source is also interwoven into the ‘innumerable strands which form …the very stuff of which the universe and my own small individuality”

Step 7: Recognizing the Face of the Ground of Being

   “Our mind is disturbed when we try to plumb the depth of the world beneath us.  But it reels still more when we try to number the favorable chances which must coincide at every moment if the least of living things is to survive and succeed in its enterprises.

   After the consciousness of being something other and something greater than myself- a second thing made me dizzy: Namely the supreme improbability, the tremendous unlikely-hood of finding myself existing in the heart of a world that has survived and succeeded in being a world.

  At that moment, I felt the distress characteristic to a particle adrift in the universe, the distress which makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and of stars.  And if something saved me, it was hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:

                         It is I, be not afraid.”

How do I dare believe that whatever is at the source of my being, indeed of all being, it is nonetheless on my side?  How is it possible to see this ‘fontal’ life which pours into me at each moment as an individual instantiation of the general forces which have brought (and are still bringing) the universe into fuller being?  How do I dare trust that these forces, welling up over billions of years, will continue to well up in me.   How can I begin to recognize, trust and more importantly cooperate with this inner source of energy so that I can be carried onto a more complete possession of myself?

In this short but very personal and straightforward description of the journey into himself, Teilhard offers an outline of meditation that is ‘secular’ but addresses the full gamut of a quest for the ‘ground of being’ that is within us that we call God.

Secular Meditation

There is nothing religious about these seven steps.  The assumptions about the nature of the universe (The Framing of the Universe) that science and biology assert, once the phenomenon of increasing complexity is added, are all that is necessary to state them.  As these posts discuss, the addition of this phenomenon, while not a specific scientific theory, not only is necessary for inclusion of the human person into the scope of scientific enquiry, it is also necessary for the process of universal evolution itself.

A universe without increasing complexity would not evolve.

Many readers will note the similarity between these seven steps and the very successful “Ten Steps” of Alcoholics Anonymous.  The foundational step of exploring and learning to trust one’s self is at the basis of much of Western thinking.  Psychology, as we will see in the next few posts, can therefore be seen as ‘secular meditation’.

The Next Post

This week we explored Teilhard’s approach to meditation as a skill through which we can make contact with our ‘core of being’, and through this with God, and identified his seven basic steps which emerge in our general search for the “Secular Side of God”.

 

Next week we will take a look at how psychology can be seen as a form of “secular meditation”.