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December 22 – Relating to God: Part 5- Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 4: The Self That is Found

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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 a manifestation of the cosmic uplifting of all things, the energy of God working within us.  This week we will see in more detail how Rogers observed the finding of this inner core and participated in the person’s emerging ability to cooperate with it.

What Rogers Saw 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 himself changes, becoming more realistic in views of self

– He becomes more like the person he wishes to be, and values himself more highly

– He is more self-confident and self-directing

– He has a better understanding of himself, becomes open to his experience, denies or represses less of his experience

– He becomes more accepting in his attitudes towards others, seeing others as more similar to himself

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 the client experiences as he becomes more aware of himself and increasingly ready to cooperate with energies of his life.  He saw the following things happening in such a person:

– Feelings evolve from being remote, 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 his behavior in relationships, the danger perceived in relationships is lessened

The Person that Emerges From Psychotherapy

In general, Rogers saw the maturing person as

– Increasingly open to his experience, which permits him to become less defensive

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

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

– Increasingly able to function more completely

So against the Freudian belief that man is basically irrational, and that his 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 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 his therapist is very like that seen as mature love between human persons.  Rogers comments,

“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 problems 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 the “Teilhardian Shift” (29 Nov-11 Dec, 2014)), which itself comes from the 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 evolution” can be interpreted as seeing everything “in the process of becoming”, since each step in evolution comes from something to 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, we can expect the same dynamic to be working in our lives.  Every day offers us the opportunity to grow from the someone we are to a someone new.  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 search for the ‘Secular Side of God’

December 8 – Relating to God: Part 5- Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 3: Finding Self

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December 8 – Relating to God: Part 5- Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 3: Finding Self

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how psychology evolved from Freud’s analysis and diagnosis to a guided inner search for the authentic self and hence can be seen as a secular meditative experience.

This week we will explore one of the pivotal practitioners of psychology to see how this guided inner search can unfold.

Carl Rogers

Dr. Carl Rogers was one of the psychologists who was key to the evolution of psychology from Freud’s analysis and diagnosis to a very personal level of psychotherapy which focuses on the personal search for self.  Rogers was one of the earliest psychologists to depart from the then-traditional viewpoint that sees the therapist as a clinically objective analyst, sitting above and against the analyzed, translating the patient’s feelings and actions into terms derived from Freud such as libido, ego, superego and so on.  His goal was to uncover hidden motivations and use that the clarity of such insights to motivate clients to change their behavior. Rogers takes a decidedly different approach.  He speaks of his perspective in the introduction to his book, “On Becoming a Person”:

“It is about a client in my office who sits there by the corner of the desk, struggling to be himself, yet deathly afraid of being himself- striving to see his experience as it is, wanting to be that experience, and yet deeply fearful of the prospect.  I sit there with that client, facing him, participating in that struggle as deeply and sensitively as I am able.  I try to perceive his experience, and the meaning and the feeling and the taste and the flavor that it has for him.  I bemoan my very human fallibility in understanding that client, and the occasional failures to see life as it appears to him, failures which fall like heavy objects across the intricate, delicate web of growth which is taking place.  I rejoice at the privilege of being a midwife to a new personality- as I stand by with awe at the emergence of a self, a person, as I see a birth process in which I have had an important and facilitating part.”

Obviously this is quite different from the relationship that Freud formulates, as can be summarized by Rogers’ understanding of the role of the therapist: “How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?” instead of, “How can I diagnose, treat, cure, or change this person?”  The goal of both approaches is treatment of the individual, but the methods are clearly different.

Rogers believes that “change appears to come about through experience in a relationship”.   Rogers states his overall hypothesis: “If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change, and personal development will occur”.  The therapist’s role changes from “analyst” to “facilitator”.  His approach changes from seeing the self that will be found as “dangerous” to seeing it as “a reliable base for human growth”.

Rogers believes that

 “The individual has within himself the capacity and the tendency, latent if not evident, to move forward to maturity.  In a suitable psychological climate this tendency is released, and becomes actual rather than potential.  He sees this potential as evident in his capacity to understand those aspects of his life and of himself which are causing him pain and dissatisfaction.  This is an understanding which probes beneath his conscious knowledge of himself into those experiences which he has hidden from himself because of their threatening nature.  As a result, the person who emerges tends to reorganize his personality and his relationship to life in ways which are regarded as more mature.”

Further,

“It is my hypothesis that in such a relationship the individual will reorganize himself at both the conscious and deeper levels of his personality in such a manner as to cope with life more constructively, more intelligently, and in a more socialized as well as a more satisfying way”.

So against the Freudian belief that man is basically irrational, and that his impulses, if not controlled will lead to the destruction of others and self, Rogers sees 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 constructive and trustworthy, as the person matures he will become more creative and live more constructively.

The Next Post

Having established the perspective of seeing the basic human self as constructive and trustworthy, Rogers went on to observe how these characteristics precipitated positive changes in the lives of his clients.  Next week we will see how he saw such growth taking place.

November 24 – Relating to God: Part 5- Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 2: The Transition

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Today’s Post

Last week we opened the subject of psychology as offering a secular approach to meditation: finding god by finding ourselves

–          Recognizing God as the agent of the upwelling of complexity in Cosmic evolution

–          Becoming aware of this upwelling in our own personal evolution

–          Finding God by finding our fundamental selves.

We saw how Freud was the first to address this undertaking in an objective, secular and empirical manner (as opposed to that of the intuitive and  scriptural).  We also saw how, while offering a magnificent array of new concepts, and working empirically, Freud’s psychology nontheless leads to a very negative understanding of our basic selves.  Meditation, even via psychology, can be very dangerous indeed, since it shows our basic selves as highly unreliable, even untrustworthy.

This week we will address an opposite approach to psychology which emerged in America in the last century.  This different approach, while also based on the empirical perspectives and methods of science, found a core of the human person completely orthogonal to Freud.

From Freud to Existentialism

(This topic is covered in much more detail in the Post of Feb 13, 2014, “Love from the Existential Perspective”, which is included in the Blog “The Phenomenon of Love”.)

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 in a way which mirrored the objective approach of science.  His treatment of human irrationality is unmatched. However, with his underlying materialism, misogyny and overall pessimism he was definitely pessimistic 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 manifested in the reciprocal exchange of this energy between individual persons.  They sharply disagree 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 schools of thought sharpens further when they are applied to human relationships at the social level.

As psychiatry and psychology continued to develop in Western science, many of the negative aspects of Freud’s thinking began to be reevaluated and modified as the increasing participation of Westerners in psychoanalysis created a large body of empirical data which could be analyzed to support or disprove the propositions which originally formed the basis for Freud’s thinking.  The relation between the analyst and the analyzed evolved as well, with the increasing educational level of the middle class, the acceptability of psychology by religion, and the emergence of expectations on the part of those undergoing analysis.

The Pioneers of Existentialism

In the nineteen forties and fifties, several psychologists emerged with a distinctively different and positive understanding of the human person and the dynamics of his 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, the empirical data that science also brings into the picture unfolds the understanding of the human person on a deeper and broader level.  This deeper understanding assumes that it is possible to have a ‘science of man’ which does not ‘fragmentize’ him (by breaking him down into Freud’s compartments) and thus destroy his humanity in the process of studying him.  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.  Psychology was moving from analysis and diagnosis to guided inner search.

Psychology 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 this primal force which rises within us.

Ashley Mongatu believed that as a consequence of humanity’s unique evolutionary history, which requires us to be  highly cooperative, human drives are oriented in the direction of growth and development in love and cooperation.  He believed that what we are born for is “to live as if to 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, and not irrational and capable of destruction as Freud believed.  Their clinical experience led them to recognize that the innermost core of man’s nature, in 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 to help us find this inner self, then help us learn to cooperate with it.

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

In religion as well, especially in the Protestant Christian tradition, our culture has been permeated with the concept that man is basically sinful, and only by something approaching a miracle can his sinful nature be negated.  The whole problem of therapy, as seen by this group, is how to hold these untamed forces in check in a wholesome and constructive manner, rather than in the costly fashion of the neurotic.

In contrast, the existentialists believed that the reason for this negative belief by many psychologists lay in the fact that since therapy uncovers hostile and anti-social feelings, it is easy to assume that this proves the deeper and therefore basic nature of man as 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 a man’s personality is the organism itself, which is, in addition to self-preserving, also social and capable of perfection.

The Next Post

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

November 10 – Relating to God: Part 5- Psychology as Secular Meditation- Part 1: The Beginnings

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Today’s Post

Last week we showed how Teilhard’s description of his meditation can be seen in terms of the secular search for Karen Armstrong’s ‘immortal spark’: that essential agent of cosmic evolution which manifests itself at our core.  While Teilhard inevitably takes the tone of Western religious tradition, we saw how his approach to meditation is nonetheless secular at its base.

Today we will carry this one step further: to look at how meditation, the traditional religious search for self, has led to a practice entirely devoid of religious belief: psychology.

The Appearance of Psychology 

(This topic is covered in much more detail in the Post of Feb 5, 2014, “The Evolution of Love From the Perspective of Psychiatry and Psychology” which is included in the Blog “The Phenomenon of Love”.)

The rising tide of the way that human persons began to experience themselves in the emerging awareness of the uniqueness of the human person also molded the form that this thinking was taking.  Human evolution has seen a movement from ascribing events to activities of the divine to attempts to understand them as phenomena in the natural world.  This movement gave rise to the empirical approaches of science.  Initially constrained to the physical world, this approach eventually began to apply itself to the human person himself, based on clinical observation instead of intuition and biblical interpretation.

Sigmund Freud pioneered this new scientific mode of approach to understanding the human person   He applied the new methods of science to the  making and testing of hypotheses of human growth and relationships. He was virtually the first major thinker to describe the human nature which underlay sexuality (and therefore relationships) in objective, secular terms.

In Irving Singer’s comprehensive analysis of human relationships, “The Nature of Love”, he comments,

“Like other thinkers of the time, Freud sought to explain the human condition in terms of the rationalistic concepts that science was uncovering.  He proposed a completely new lexicon and analytic approach to understand the nature of “affect”, which includes all of what we normally call feelings, emotions, sensations, “intuitive” and “instinctive” dispositions, erotic attachments, hatred as well as love, and also kinesthetic impressions of any kind.  For that job we require a totally different type of methodology.”

Historically, some thinkers, such as Plato, Plotinus and Augustine, had generally proposed a positive interpretation of reality, believing that what is ultimate in reality sustains, even conforms to, human ideals; while others, such as Lucretius, and Hobbes came to see the universe as neutral, even hostile, to such optimistic assumptions.  Freud falls into this second, pessimistic, category.

Singer contrasts these two perspectives, showing the duality of thinking which results from this dichotomy:

“”Philosophers have often tried to reduce the different senses of the word “love” to a single meaning that best suited their doctrinal position.  To the Platonists, “real love”, being a search for absolute beauty or goodness, must be good itself; to the Freudians love is “really” amoral sexuality, though usually sublimated and deflected from its coital aim.  The Platonist argues that even sexuality belongs to a search for the ideal, and otherwise would not be called love in any sense.  The Freudian derives all ideals from attempts to satisfy organic needs, so that whatever Plato recommends must also be reducible to love as sexuality.”

Freud In An Oversimplified Nutshell

Freud’s thinking provided a monumental, unprecedented and unified approach to understanding the human person and the relationship between persons.  Like Teilhard’s finding of the ‘personal core’, Freud understood the person as an entity possessing a certain “life force” which empowers him to survive and procreate and is at the center of his being.  He saw this force, identified as ‘libido’, based on sexual instinct, as the ultimate agent of human growth.

In Freud’s thinking, the libido therefore is the energy that nourishes the self, and he identified the object of the libido as sexual union.  Therefore relationships that do not lead to sexual union interrupt the flow and replenishment of libido and lead to impoverishment of the self.  As Freud saw the self as initially focused on itself, this “narcissism” at birth represents a state to which the self always seeks returning.  “Nourishing the libido” therefore requires us to maintain our narcissism which is essential to our sense of self.

Freud believed that relationships required the person to “idealize” others, for the lover to transfer to his beloved an ideal that he has difficulty achieving within himself.  In his approach, we love that in the other person which we feel will compensate for our inadequacies, and thus we will recover the security of primal narcissism and maintain our libido.  The dependence upon relationships, in Freud’s approach, was therefore risky.  Failed relationships would undermine our libido and therefore diminish our self.

Further, Freud saw the force of libido as possessing an undercurrent of hate.  Freud therefore saw love as the mixture of ‘eros’ with “man’s natural aggressive instinct (the death drive)”, which is inseparable from it. In his words,

“Eros and destructiveness are intertwined within all erotic relationships.  Love is not at the basis of everything unless you add hate to it”.

While Freud definitely saw love as energy, and one which effects the uniting of human persons, the resulting unifications were potentially harmful to the person because they are predicated on a personal core which is not to be trusted.  Love is dangerous because we at our core selves are dangerous.

While Teilhard heard a voice from the bottomless abyss from which flowed his life: “It is I, be not afraid”, Freud would have heard a different voice: “It is ego, be very afraid”.

While Freud definitely understood the human kernel as energy, and one which effects the uniting of human persons, its complex love/hate constitution leads to relationships which could harm the person.  Due to this basic flaw in our basic core, not only does love fail to solve human problems, but causes them as well.

So Freud, while pioneering the objective secularism of science to study of the human person, nonetheless arrives at a position at odds to Teilhard’s proposition that the kernel at the core of the person is a trustworthy manifestation of the same agent of rising complexity afoot in the evolution of the universe.

The Next Post

Freud’s approach to psychiatry, like Luther’s approach to Christianity, burst upon emerging Western society and immediately began to ramify into parallel but radically different expressions.  In today’s versions of psychotherapy, American positivism has muted much of Freud’s pessimism, materialism and misogyny, and many of the newer approaches to psychology focus more on the relation between therapist and patient than upon the therapist’s skill in plumbing and labelling the labyrinthine depths of the patient.

In the next post I will outline such a different approach, and explore how it can be seen as a ‘secular version of meditation’.

October 27 – Relating to God: Part 4- The Steps of Secular Meditation

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard de Chardin described his journey into himself in which he, without aid of conventional religious thinking, begins to unfold the leaves of his being to find the bud, the kernel, of his person.  While overtones of Christian belief obviously color this description, this week we’ll take a look at some of the steps that he describes for their secular basis.

We will be exploring the idea of secular meditation.

The Steps of Teilhard’s Journey

The poetic nature and religious overtones of Teilhard’s description of his meditation belie the secular nature of the five basic steps he describes:

Step 1: Recognizing the facets of our person

“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 explores 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 grown as a protective skin to ward off the dangers of life?

Step 2: Accepting where we are

”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.”

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: Acknowledging our powerlessness

“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.

This is a difficult step for most of us.  As Teilhard puts it, “My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.”  Whatever skills I have learned, tactics that I have developed and beliefs that I have forged, I have no control over the basic person I am or the energy of cosmic becoming that flows into me.

Step 4: Accepting powerlessness

“My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.” “In the last resort, the profound life, the fontal life, the new-born life, escapes our life entirely.”

This step is even more difficult.  Beneath the trepidation of the many actions required of us in our daily lives is the fear of their consequences.  Will I be able to successfully deal with the consequences of my decisions without the armors of ego, self-centeredness and emotional distance?  Am I even able to predict the  consequences of my actions, much less survive dealing with them?  Ultimately, in spite of my profession, family and friends am I not alone?

Step 5: Trusting the ground of being

“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, 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 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 and more importantly cooperate with this inner source of energy so that I can be carried onto a more complete possession of myself?

Secular Meditation

There is nothing religious about these five steps.  The assumptions about the nature of the universe (The Framing of the Universe, parts 1-4, 11-23 June) 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 in the scope of scientific enquiry, it is also necessary for the process of evolution itself.  A universe without increasing complexity would not evolve.

Many readers will note the similarity between these five 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 five basic steps which emerge from 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”.

Relating to God: Part 3- Connecting

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the recognition of the ‘core of person’, and the realization that such a core was also a manifestation of the ‘immortal spark’ which connects us to the universal agent which ‘sustains and gives life to the entire cosmos’ was introduced 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.  Today’s post will begin to address this.

 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 ourselves 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, hence introducing this concept here might be seen as distinctively contrary to our ‘secular’ approach.  As we will see, however, paralleling Richard Dawkins, “the divesting of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries” works equally well for a method for the experience of God as it did for the definition.

We’ll start with the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin, who closely followed Maurice Blondel in understanding God as the ‘ground of being’.  Teilhard described in his book, “The Divine Mileu”, his own experience of meditation which 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.

  “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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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.

   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 unlikelyhood 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.”

In this short but very personal description of the journey into ourselves, Teilhard offers an outline of meditation that is ‘secular’ but addresses the full gamut of a personal relationship to the ‘ground of being’ that we call God.

The Next Post

This week we began to explore the undertaking of the missing piece of our exploration: the connection to God.  Next week we will look into Teilhard’s journey in some detail, and examine it for its secular components

Relating to God: Part 2- Opening the Door

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Today’s Post

Last week we began to think of God as the agent of the universal phenomenon of ‘rising complexity’ as such agent continues the process of evolution through the development of our person, and how the acknowledgement of and cooperation with this fundamental agent is necessary to our growth and fulfillment of our potential.

This week we will beg to address the idea of a relationship to this agent by taking a look at the many approaches that the ancient sages have taken in the search for this universal thread which runs through our lives.

The Search for the ‘Basic Spark’

Last week we saw that if Teilhard’s assertion is true that

“It is through that which is most incommunicably personal in us that we make contact with the universal“

then our search for God begins with a search for ourselves.  Most of the ancient sages, including Jesus, point to the belief that the most essential core of our being must be uncovered for us to attain our most authentic expression of being.  This isn’t necessarily the ‘happiest’ or ‘most powerful’ state, but rather one in which we are ‘more complete’ and more aware of and able to achieve our full potential as persons.

Karen Armstrong, in her sweeping narrative, “The Great Transformation” identifies several areas of common ground among the six lines of thought in four parts of the world that constituted a new understanding of God and Self in the ‘Axial Age’ (900-200 BCE).  She describes one of the earliest such insights in the Upanishads as:

“There is an immortal spark at the core of the human person, which participated in – was of the same nature as – the immortal Brahman that sustained and gave life to the entire cosmos.  This was a discovery of immense importance and it would become a central insight in every major religious tradition.  The ultimate reality was an immanent presence in every single human being.”  (italics mine)

Armstrong saw this emerging realization as

“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.”  (italics mine)

From our perspective as seeing God as the upwelling of complexity in evolution that leads to the ‘person’, we can begin to see how ‘plumbing the mysteries or our own nature’ is a primary means of connecting to the ‘mystery of all nature’.  It opens the door for a secular approach to “Finding God”.

Each of these six lines of thought (Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Monotheism in Israel and philosophical rationalism in Greece) brought their own practices to this undertaking.  Further, with the seemingly inevitable duality that emerges in each new philosophy (as addressed in 14-Apr What is Religion?  Part 6: Stability Part 2) many different and often contradictory practices emerged even within each of the lines.  Within Christianity, as we saw, the influence of Greek thinking led to seeing God as ‘other’, as opposed to an agent of being and growth at the basis of our person.

So, as it is easy to see, the path towards developing a connection to this inner source of life that is recognized by nearly all religions is not a simple thing.  Finding a way to do so without being bound by the scaffolding and facades which abound in the canons of traditional religion is a very difficult undertaking.

The Next Post

This week we began to address the search for God as an active, immanent agent of our personal life.

But this does not answer the second part of our question: what does it mean to say that we can have a ‘relationship’ with such a God?   Having now seen how we are connected to God by participating in this cosmic upwelling of complexity, next week we will address the undertaking of such a relationship.

Reinterpreting God- Part 4, Is God a Person?

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Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the phenomenon of ‘personization’ in evolution, recognizing that the evolution of the person is a natural outcome of the increase in complexity that can be seen in, and indeed is necessary to,  the unfolding of evolution.

This week we will continue this topic of personization in light of our working definition of God:

“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”

Personization and God

Although we began our inquiry on God with a statement from Richard Dawkins, he doesn’t go too much further before he states the basis of his belief that such a God as we posit here cannot possibly be reconciled with traditional religion.  He quotes Carl Sagan:

 “If by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God.  This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.”

Of course, Sagan is right.  Once we limit the laws governing evolution to those found in the Standard Model of Physics and Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection, both Sagan and Dawkins are spot on.  However neither of them acknowledge that limiting evolution to those influences found in Physics and Biology prohibit the fact of evolution at all.  It is only through inclusion of the agent of increasing complexity that the forces identified by Physics and Biology begin to account for the observed phenomenon of evolution.  As we have pointed out previously, a universe without complexification would not evolve.

However, Dawkins is correct in one respect: the definition we are considering and the six characteristics of our outline in the post of July 21, as stated, do not yet point to a God suitable for our personal relationship.  It is indeed ‘emotionally unsatisfying’.  To find this missing piece we must return to the characteristic of personness.

From the point of view that we have presented thus far, God is not understood as a person, but as the ground of person-ness.  Just as the forces of gravity and biology in the theories of Physics and Evolution address the principles of matter and life, the additional force of ‘increasing complexity’ addresses the increase in complexity which powers evolution and thus leads to the appearance of the person.

Teilhard offers an insight on this issue

“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 (becomes human) in him.”

So, from Teilhard’s vantage point, the starting place for a personal approach to God, a ‘relationship’, is the recognition that this ‘axis of evolution’ which has been an agent of ‘complexification’ for some 14 billion years is not only still active in the human, but is the same axis that accounts for our ‘personization’.  Humans are not only products of evolution which have become ‘aware of their consciousness’, but specific products, persons, who are capable of not only recognizing but more importantly cooperating with this inner source of energy that can carry them onto a more complete possession of themselves.

This unique human capability of being aware of the energy of the unfolding of the cosmos as it courses through our person, empowering our growth and assuring our potential for maturity, is neither earned nor deserved.  It has the same ‘gratuitous’ nature as gravity and electromagnetism: it is woven into our warp and woof.  We can neither summon nor deny it.  Our only appropriate response to it is to recognize it and explore the appropriate response to it.

Teilhard commented both on our cosmic connection and our cooperation with it:

  “It is through that which is most incommunicably personal in us that we make contact with the universal. “

“Those who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves born by a current towards the open seas.”

So, Is God A Person?

We have seen how Teilhard understands the concept of ‘person’ from both the concept of God as evident in the agent of complexity and the concept of the human person as an evolutionary product.

But to answer the question, “Is God a person?”, we return to Maurice Blondel.   As part of his objective to reinterpret Western theology, he posits that:

“Every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life.”

Resonating with Teilhard, Gregory Baum paraphrases Blondel:

“The statement that “God Exists” can therefore be reinterpreted to say that “Man is alive by a principle that transcends him, over which he has no power, which summons him to surpass himself and frees him to be creative.”  That God is person means that man’s relationship to the deepest dimension of his life is personal”. (Italics mine)

So, in answer to the question, Baum goes on to state:

“God is not a super-person, not even three super-persons; he is in no way a being, however supreme, of which man can aspire to have a spectator knowledge.  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.”

The Next Post

This week we have seen how our working definition of God, while totally consistent with of Dawkins, is still open to the concept of God found in traditional Western theology, once it has been ‘stripped of its baggage’.  We have also seen how the element of ‘person’ is not compromised by our working definition once the potential for increasing complexity is understood as manifesting itself in the process of personness.

But this does not answer the second part of our question: what does it mean to say that we can have a ‘relationship’ with such a God?   Having seen how we are connected to God by participating in this cosmic upwelling of complexity, next week we will address how such a relationship can be achieved.

Reinterpreting God- Part 3, God and the Phenomenon of Person

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Today’s Post

Last week we addressed the uniquely Western concept of ‘the person’, and asked the question: “Given the perspective of Teilhard and science in general, how can the phenomenon of ‘person’ as understood in the West be brought into resonance with our working definition of God?”:

“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”

Is God a ‘person’?

This week we will address this question.

The Process of ‘Personization’

In Teilhard’s understanding of evolution, the ‘person’ is a product of evolution which emerges as an effect of increasing complexity over long periods of time.   If we are to understand God in terms of the definition proposed above, where does the characteristic of ‘person’ come in?

To Teilhard, the phenomenon of ‘complexification’ (increasing complexity over time) is essential to the cosmic upwelling that we refer to as ‘evolution’.  Once the agent of complexity is added to the scientific canon of forces as found in the Standard Model of Physics and Biology’s theory of Natural Selection not only does evolution as we know it become possible but this increase in complexity can be seen to lead to the advent of ‘personness’ as found in the human.

As any educated atheist would point out, isn’t this teleology?  In teleology, one reasons from an endpoint (the existence of humans) to the startpoint.  In teleology, for example, creation exists for the purpose of making humans.  Teleology therefore seeks to rationalize history in terms of what has emerged.  Teleology is frequently used by fundamental Christianity, which sees God as intending man as the goal of his creation.  This accusation was discussed in the post of April 15, 2015 “Looking at Evolution, Part 7: Natural Selection in the Human Person”. 

This post noted the statement by Stephen Jay Gould, noted atheistic anthropologist, who asserted that “rewinding the tape of evolution” would not necessarily result in the emergence of the human.  He believed that the many accidents which have occurred in history, such as asteroid impacts which, by effectively wiping out entire species, cleared the way for the rise of mammals.  He suggests that other, different, accidents would have had different outcomes, which would not have necessarily led to the emergence of humans.

We saw how Gould’s statement nonetheless reflects his belief that evolution would still have proceeded through any combination of such disasters, and would therefore have continued to produce new and advanced species, just not necessarily mammals.  It does not take into account that such continuation of life would have also have required a continuing rise of complexity in order to proceed.  Therefore, conditions permitting, evolution would still have had the potential to produce an entity of sufficient complexity to have been aware of its consciousness.

A different play of the tape of evolution which does not produce a human person is only part of the picture.  Recognizing that the creature which would have inevitably emerged could have been one endowed with some sort of ‘neurology’ which permitted consciousness is the other part.  This potential for ‘rising complexity’ to eventually lead to consciousness is a phenomenon of the universe itself.  While entities recognizable as ‘human persons’ may not be evolving elsewhere in the universe, the probability of the appearance of entities aware of their awareness is not insignificant.

Teilhard, therefore, sees the agent of complexity at work everywhere in the cosmos, and given the appropriate conditions, will raise its constituent matter to higher levels of awareness:

 “From this point of view man is nothing but the point of emergence in nature, at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself.  From this point onwards man ceases to be a spark fallen by chance on earth and coming from another place.  He is the flame of a general fermentation of the universe which breaks out suddenly on the earth.” (Italics mine)

Evolution, therefore, requires complexification, which results in personization.

So if God is to be understood as the ‘sum total of all forces’ (as proposed in our working definition), and the essential force is understood as that of ‘complexification’, then, among all the other forces (gravity, electromagnetism, chemistry), God can be seen in the force of ‘personization’.

The Process of ‘Personization’

So, from this perspective we can see that the human person emerges from evolution not in a single discontinuous step, but instead from a slow accretion of characteristics layered one upon another over a long period of time.  Cells evolve from single-cell to multiple-cell, adding sensory and mobility characteristics which communicate with increasingly complex centers of activity via increasingly complex neural circuits.  There is not a single step in this long line of development that does not proceed from a less-complex precursor.

There are two seeming discontinuities in this process.  The first is seen in the appearance of the cell itself.  At one instance in the evolution of our world, it is swimming in a primordial soup of very complex molecules.  At the next, many of these molecules are functional parts of an enclosed and centered entity, the cell.  As Teilhard notes:

“For the world to advance in duration is to progress in psychical concentration.  The continuity of evolution is expressed in a movement of this kind.  But in the course of this same continuity, discontinuities can and indeed must occur.  For no psychical entity can, to our knowledge, grow indefinitely; always at a given moment it meets one of those critical points at which it changes state.”

The advent of the cell is such a ‘change of state’ in which increasing complexity results in something totally different from its predecessor, but still composed of the same basic elements.

The ‘person’ is the second example of such ‘change of state’.  Materialists argue that the differences between humans and their non-human ancestors are too small to be of significance, denying any uniqueness to the human person.  This is true at the levels of morphology and supported by the evidence of DNA. It is just as true that human persons, through their unique ‘awareness of their consciousness’, are clearly separate from the higher mammals.  They represent the same significant type of ‘change of state’ as seen in the advent of the cell.

Therefore, while human persons are clearly a ‘product of evolution’, their level of complexity has increased from ‘consciousness’ to ‘awareness of consciousness’.

The Next Post

This, of course, does not answer the question “Is God a person?”, much less address the issue of a human-God relationship.

Next week we will address this side of the question of personness, and explore how the concept of God as an agent of ‘personization’ can be extended to that of a force of evolution with which we can have a relationship.

Reinterpreting God- Part 1, A Starting Place

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Today’s Post

Last week we concluded the identification of eighteen ‘principles of reinterpretation’ that we will use to address the traditional teachings of Western religion.  Since all religions in some way address and attempt a definition of the underlying ‘ground of being’, that of God, we will begin here.

Where to Start?

The concept of God as found in the many often contradicting expressions of Western religion can be very confusing.  Given the duality which occurs in both the Old and New Testament (such as punishment-forgiveness), layered with the many further dualities introduced by Greek influences in the early Christian church (such as body-soul) (”The Evolution of Religion, Parts 1-10,  Sept 3, 2015 to Jan 7, 2016), and topped by many contemporary messages that distort the original texts (such as the “Prosperity Gospel”) this is not surprising.  Finding a thread which meets our principles of interpretation without violating the basic findings of science but staying consistent with the basic Western teachings can be difficult.

A perhaps surprising starting place might come from the writings of one of the more well-known atheists, Richard Dawkins.   Professor Dawkins strongly dislikes organized religion, but in his book, “The God Delusion”, he casually remarks

“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God.  Yes, I said, but it must have been simple and therefore whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name (unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers). The first cause that we seek must have been the simple basis for a ‘self-bootstrapping crane’ which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence.”

Here we find an excellent outline of the nature of the ‘fundamental principle of existence’:

–           It must be the first cause of everything

–          It must work within natural processes

–          It must be an active agent (“a ‘self-bootstrapping crane’ ”) in all phases of evolution from the Big Bang to the appearance of humans

–          It must be an agent for increasing complexity (“the raising of the world as we know it into its present complex existence”)

–          It must be divested of “all the baggage” (such as magic and superstition) of many traditional religions)

–          Once so divested, “God” is an appropriate name for this first cause

Dawkins goes on to claim that such a God cannot possibly be reconciled with traditional religion.  Paradoxically, he fails to grasp how acknowledging the existence of a “first cause” which raises everything to its current state is indeed at the core of all religion and offers an excellent place to begin this reconciliation.  Our process for this ‘reconciliation’ is of course that of ‘reinterpretation’.

For an example of such reinterpretation, in our preliminary outline above we find a reflection of Pope John Paul II’s statement on science’s relation to religion:

“Science can purify religion from error and superstition.”

So here in this starting place we can begin to see a view of God that is antithetical to neither science nor religion, but one in which John Paul II echoes Teilhard when he sees it as one in which:

“Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

But What About the Baggage?

Both John Paul II and Richard Dawkins recognize that Christianity has developed a complex set of statements about God.  How is it possible to put these statements into a context which is consistent with the simple outline offered above: to ‘divest them of their baggage’?  This is the objective of this last section of the blog.

The way to go about it?  We will use those ‘principles of reinterpretation’ which we identified in the last two posts to ‘divest the baggage’ in which the traditional statements about God are frequently wrapped.

A Preliminary Definition of God

To start this process, I offer a simple working definition of God:

“God is the sum total of all the forces by which the universe unfolds in such a way that all the entities that emerge in its evolution (from quarks to the human person) each have the potential to become more complex when unified with other entities.”

The question could be asked, “But isn’t this just Deism?’  We addressed this question in the posts, “But Isn’t This Just Deism?”-  6-20 August, 2015”, and noted the differences between our definition and that of Deism.  In summary, the Deists, most notably represented by Thomas Jefferson, conceived of a ‘ground of being’ which was responsible for everything which could be seen at that time.  In their minds, in order to strip “the baggage” from the religious expressions of their time, God had to be understood as a designer and builder of the world, but once having built it, retired from the project.  Theirs was a static world and in no need of continued divine involvement.  As they saw it, Man, given his intelligence by God, was capable of operating the world independently from its creator.

The Deists were off to a good start, but without the grasp of the cosmos and its underlying process of evolution that we have today, they were unable to conceive of a continuing agent of an evolution which continually manifests itself in increasing complexity.  Their static world postulated either an uninvolved God or (as they saw traditional religion’s belief) a God continually tinkering with his creation.

The Next Post

Next week we will begin to examine conventional conceptions of God, starting with that of ‘person’.