Tag Archives: evolution in human life

June 13 – So, Who and What Was Jesus? – Part 1

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Today’s Post

In the last two posts we saw how the understanding of Jesus, as depicted by Paul, the synoptic gospels and John, represents an evolution of the understanding of Jesus.  Jesus, the teacher of wisdom becomes Jesus, the Christ, who was ‘exalted by God’ due to his sacrificial act, and finally to Jesus, 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 gets to development of God as ‘triune’: the trinity.

Today we will begin to put these insights on Jesus into the perspective of our search for the secular God.

The Second Dimension of Duality

As we have seen, the concept of ‘the Christ’ evolves 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 moral behavior.  Paul, while not denying this humanistic portrait of Jesus, expanded on his teachings (for example, in his treatise on Love), and goes on to see him tasked with the sacrifice required for reconciliation of sinful man with divine God.  The claim to divinity, in Paul’s mind, comes about as God’s ‘exaltation’ of Jesus as a result 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 part 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.

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.  In the ‘atonement’ theory, for example, Jesus is placed into history to re-establish the connection between God and his creation that was 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” theory of John, Jesus, as the Christ, is co-substantial with God, and therefore had always existed as part of the creation process.

These two theories are orthogonal in that 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 rising of man’s understanding of God, becoming manifest in human history as the recognition of God’s continuing presence in human existence.

Church history describes 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 God’ 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’, with the appearance of 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 concepts associated with God, such as those addressed in earlier posts, can fall into coherence, and the dualities fall away, by understanding God as the ‘ground of being’, active in both the principles of being (physics) and the principles of becoming (evolution via the ‘axis of evolution’).  In the same way we should be able to re-look at the person of Jesus.

Making Sense of Jesuswere

Thomas Jefferson was one of the first 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 to underpin a new nation.  In doing this, Jefferson was one of many who attempted to ‘articulate the noosphere’.

As an eighteenth century Deist, of course, Jefferson’s ideas of God were limited to ‘source’ and without recourse to the nineteenth century findings of Physics and the emerging science of natural selection.  Without these insights, he could not conceive of this ‘source’ continuing as an active agent to power the increasing complexity which would eventually manifest itself in the human person.

With the insights of Teilhard in hand, however, we can understand God as not only the ‘source’ but the ‘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 who 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 posts 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 a secular God.

May 25  – Jesus: Part 2- John and the Cosmic Christ

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Today’s Post

Last week’s post looked at the earliest writings about Jesus: the beginnings of the ‘New Testament’ as seen in the letters of Paul and the ‘synoptic’ gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke.  We saw how these gospels did not necessarily depict a Jesus who considered himself divine, and instead showed a teacher whose ‘millennialist’ beliefs led him to preach moral behavior in preparation for the ‘coming’.

This week we’ll take a look at the gospel of John, in which Jesus is depicted as not only as divine, but in some way, eternal.

The Second Perspective: John

John seems to have written the fourth Gospel as many as thirty years after Paul, and probably had access to both the letters of Paul and the synoptic gospels.  While the synoptic gospels stressed the teachings of Jesus, his interpretations of the Torah and his millennialist beliefs, John delves into the nature of God and how it could be that Jesus himself was divine.

As we saw last week, Bart Ehrman doesn’t consider the concept of a ‘God-Man’ as necessarily audacious during Jesus’ time due to the many similar and familiar myths of antiquity.  John, however, goes into detail of how Jesus was divine, indeed co-extensive with God, laying the groundwork for the doctrine of ‘the Trinity’ which would emerge later in church history.

With John we see a significantly different depiction of Jesus’ life and death from that of the synoptic gospels.  Some examples:

–          Jesus’ claims to divinity are much stronger, including self-identification with the ‘Son of Man’.

–          There are more stories of miracles, and the nature of the miracles is more supernatural

–          In the synoptic gospels, Jesus hesitates, often even refuses, to perform miracles as a sign of his identity.  He even downplays miracles, and notes that they are also performed by others.  In John, Jesus not only performs miracles frequently, but does so as signs to compel belief.

–          Where Paul sees Jesus as a human who is ‘exalted by God’ as a reward for his sacrifice, John sees Jesus as having been ‘one with the Father’ from the beginning of time

–          Where Paul and the synoptic gospels treat ‘love’ as the correct form of behavior, John goes on to depict ‘love’ as an aspect of God Himself

–          Where Paul identifies Jesus as ‘the Christ’ prophesied in the Old Testament, John goes much further, stressing his eternal kinship with God and introducing the concept of Jesus as ‘The Word’.

The Cosmic Christ

This last new concept in John’s depiction of Jesus is the most important of all.  Not only does it stress a close kinship between Jesus and God, it posits Jesus as eternal, as having always existing even as God has always existed, and being co-responsible for the act of creation itself.

John introduces the idea of Jesus, as the Christ, as “the Word”.  As Ian Barbour says:

“The term word merges the logos, the Greek principle of rationality, with the Hebrew image of God’s Word active in the world.  But then John links creation to revelation: “And the Word became flesh.” “

   With this concept, John locates Jesus as part of the same ontology in which creation itself was effected.  Jesus, as ‘the Christ’, had always existed, along with God, and collaborated with God in the act of creation.  Jesus, in this context, represents the ‘blueprint’ for creation, in the same way that God represents the ‘act’ of creation.  While the terms ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ are used to distinguish between these two facets, John doesn’t see this as reflecting an ontological ‘order’ in which one comes from the other, but an ontological ‘equality’ in which they are ‘co-temporal’.

So, in John’s view, Jesus ‘the man’ is simply the inevitable appearance of the human aspect of the ‘word’, the personal aspect of creation as it unfolds.  Jesus is indeed, The “Word become flesh.”

John, Love, God and Jesus

The idea of love is generally addressed as a manifestation of emotion in human relationships.  From this perspective, love is an ‘act’, or an emotion that underpins the act.  John overturns this common approach by identifying love as the very nature of God.  He does not say that God loves, nor even that God loves perfectly.  John says that God is love; that the very nature of God is love itself.  By distinguishing the phenomenon of love from an action of God (found in the many lines of scripture that describe God as ‘loving’), John goes one step further and describes God as love itself, which opens the door to an ontological engagement with God in the act of loving.  From John’s perspective, we don’t love God so that we can earn a position in the afterlife, we love God (and we love in general) because it is ultimately essential to our growth as human persons.

To John, we ‘become’ through a relationship with God which effects our personal growth.

We have seen this passage from John several times, but it’s worth reviewing in light of this week’s post:

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

The Next Post

We have seen in the last two posts 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 the emerging portrait of Jesus can be seen in light of our search for a secular God.

February 2 – – Relating to God, Part 7: Loving God, Part 2 

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  Today’s Post

Last week we addressed how Teilhard saw love as the latest energy to become effective in the long list of energies that have powered evolution: the strong and weak atomic forces, gravity as a force which changes simple atoms into complex atoms, atoms into molecules (with chemical forces), and natural selection effecting more and more complex aggregations of cells.  He saw evolution as eventually forging an entity, aware of its awareness, which could now unite with other entities to effect its own maturation, and through it the maturation of society.  In summary, an entity emerged which was now susceptible to the energy of love.

The Action of Love

Teilhard addresses how this new energy plays out in human relationships.  (This was addressed in more detail in the May, 2015 Posts, http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?m=201505.)

In a nutshell, he saw that our personal evolution, our personal growth, is the same as our continued ‘complexification’.  Teilhard sees our complexification as occurring in two basic steps, repeated over and over, as we ‘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.  (See http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?p=305 to see how Carl Rogers articulates our maturation)  As these relationships develop, we become aware of the regard which others hold for us, which prompts us to see ourselves more clearly, less subjectively.  This results in the second step of ‘centeredness’, 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, the more authentic and less centered person that we become, in addition to being more capable of self-management, the more we are able to engage in deep, personal relationships.  Thus the cycle continues in a spiral fashion, leading us always towards deeper maturity.

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’ (articulated by Dr. Rogers) of the two individuals involved.

Thus love 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 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 thus becomes more ‘complexified’.

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?  How can we ‘love’ the ground of being?

In the past few weeks we have been exploring how our recognition of this 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 operations 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.  It is always necessary for us to understand what beliefs, practices, and fears are part of the scaffolding, the shell, that we have erected on 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 more the recognition, the confident belief that the energy of the universe flows through us, trustworthy and ever-present.  It is the energy of the universe made manifest in human life.

To love God 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.

The Next Post

Now that we have seen how God can be understood, and loved, as the sum total of all the forces of the universe including that which effects beings conscious of their consciousness, we can go on to take a look at how such an understanding of God can be used to reinterpret the most basic precepts of Western religion.  Next week we will sum up how we got to such a ‘Secular Side of God’ that would be the basis of this inquiry.

January 19 – Relating to God, Part 7: Loving God, Part 1

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Today’s Post

We have spent the past few weeks following Teilhard’s use of meditation to the finding of God.  We have followed this thread as it appears in the science of Psychology, noting the evolution of Psychology 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”.

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 a 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

(The subject of Love and evolution is addressed in more detail in the blog “The Phenomenon of Love” (http://www.lloydmattlandry.com/?page_id=57) which addressed the concept of love from Teilhard’s evolutionary standpoint.)

In today’s culture, it would seem that few things are less obvious and 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, 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 and Jesus than the facet of the universal energy which effects our growth as it brings us together.

Teilhard notes that the systematic and ever repeating act of evolution is the increasing of complexity which results from simple union.  Over and over in 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 greater potential for union. 

Science observes this phenomenon as active in the evolution of simple matter from the first bosons to the very complex molecules which underpin life.  Natural Selection observes the continuation of this rise of complexity, at a much higher rate, 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.  Without it, the universe would still be a ball of unorganized energy.

Love As The Energy Of Evolution In The Human

As we have mentioned several times in this blog, we can hardly expect such a powerful and inexorable upwelling of complexity to stop with the human person: this agent of evolution is just as active in humans today as it has been throughout the history of the universe.  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 evolution 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 forced by gravity, atoms 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.   The forces of chemistry were mute until the arrival of molecules.  And the forces of love could not play their part until the entities of evolution became conscious.  Love, therefore is the energy which effects our own ‘complexification”.

Seen through Teilhard’s eyes, the increasing complexity in living things, resulting as it does in the phenomenon of consciousness, results in entities subject to the play of energies so subtle as to be immeasurable yet so powerful as to power the ascent of complexity which is ‘consciousness aware of itself’.

The Next Post

Teilhard addresses how this concept of love is ‘the energy which unites persons in such a way as to continue the rise of complexity in evolution’.   Next week we will take a look at how he sees it at work in our lives, and how we can see cooperation with this energy as ‘loving God’.

January 5, 2017 – Relating to God, Part 6- Freud, Teilhard and Rogers in the Search for the ‘Secular Side of God’

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Today’s Post

In the last two weeks we followed Carl Rogers as he went into some detail in describing his observations of the process of finding the kernel of person-ness within us.  He also describes what emerges when we begin to trust and cooperate with this fundamental energy which Teilhard identifies as the ‘thread of evolution’ as it rises in us.  This week we will relook look at the three approaches we have addressed in the past few weeks, those of Freud, Teilhard and Rogers as they relate to our search for a ‘Secular Side of God’.

From Freud: the Dark Side

Even the most casual study of human history reveals the ‘dark side’ of humanity.  All of the great books of ancient religions recognize it and warn against it.

Sigmund Freud was the first to systematically apply the emerging practices of science to study of the human person, and as we saw a few weeks ago, assembled a magnificent edifice of concepts, terminology and theory which was applicable to diagnosis and treatment of human emotional problems.  Unfortunately, as we also saw, his premise of the dangerous nature of the basic human, combined with his disdain of organized religion, colored this remarkable undertaking with a deep-seated pessimism that was to permeate his ‘school’ of psychology.

Freud’s view of human ontology was surely influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, in which the human evolved from a non-human (animal) ancestor.  He held that this evolution explained the source of our ‘dark’ side, and hence had to be overcome if we were to rid ourselves of our ‘psychoses’.

While Freud (and Darwin) are correct about these roots and how they affect us, they don’t take into account another perspective on such evolution.  Teilhard remarked on the ‘transitional’ states of evolution, such as the formation of atoms from subatomic particles, cells from highly complex molecules, and self-aware persons from conscious animals.  He points out that the first of each of these ‘new’ entities, in every case, initially are virtually indistinguishable from their predecessor.  He refers to the earliest, prokaryotic (non-nucleus) cells as emerging ‘dripping in molecularity’.  If it were possible to see them in a population of highly complex, non-living molecules (such as viruses), it would be very difficult to distinguish them.  In contrast, at the evolutionary level of, say, neurological cells, the uniqueness of living tissue has become obviously different from complex molecules.

He sees the same thing happening with the human.  Were it possible to see the first homo sapiens in a jungle filled with pre-humans, how would we tell them apart?  Today there is no problem with such observation.

We humans have indeed emerged as animals with more brains, but that makes all the difference.  The pre-humans, with their reptilian and limbic brains, are at the mercy of their stimuli.  The reptiles fight or fly, breathe, eat and procreate according to their basic brain stimuli.  Animals add new powers of nurturing offspring, clannish connections and adaption to environment changes.  These new behaviors, due to the new limbic brain are in addition to the stimuli from their reptilian brains, and endow them with more evolutionary fitness.

Even though we humans have a third layer to our brains, the instinctual stimuli of the lower brains is still active, but the neo-cortex provides the capability of modulating them.  I have suggested that the key manifestation of evolution in the human person can be found in the evolving skill of the neo-cortex in modulating the instinctual stimuli of the lower brains.

So, even though Freud’s recognition of the Dark Side is correct, his assumption that the kernel of the person is dangerous does not take into account that it is through engagement with this kernel that the human evolves from emotional immaturity toward personal wholeness.  It’s not that the child’s essence is negative, but that his growth towards maturity is incomplete.

From Rogers: Toward the Light

As we have seen, Carl Rogers takes a view of our personal evolution that is quite different from Freud.  He assumes that each human person comes into the world with a quantum of potency, and that instead of being broken, he is incomplete and capable of personal evolution –growth– towards increased being.

It should be noted that Rogers’ articulation of the emerging characteristics of a maturing person are purely secular.  His methods are those of science: observe, theorize, and test.  They require no adherence to religious belief (and as we saw in the November 24 post above, are often antithetical to some), but rather a basic, fundamental belief in the trustworthy nature of the basic self, and a willingness to cooperate with it.

While there might not be a universally accepted list of the characteristics of human happiness or articulation of human potential, Rogers’ list is not only an excellent beginning but universally applicable.

Combined with the unique (and universal) nature of Rogers’ therapeutic relationship, concepts such as belief, faith and love take on a new, secular, meaning.

Rogers’ approach offers a structure for a true, secular, employment of secular meditation as a means to self-discovery.

From Teilhard: The Light Itself

As we have frequently discussed in this blog, Teilhard starts from the ‘other end’, describing how God is manifest in the very basic and totality of forces which power the evolution of the universe itself.  He describes how these forces combine to effect all that we can see, and not only the human as a species but individual human persons as well.  In his view (and Blondel’s and others), it is impossible to distinguish where God leaves off and where we begin since each act of our ‘becoming’ requires recognition and cooperation with this force as it rises in us.

Freud, Rogers and Teilhard in a Nutshell

Freud applies science to atheism, “It is Id, be very afraid”

Rogers applies experience to science, “It is me, I am trustworthy”

Tielhard applies science to religion. “It is I, be not afraid”

As Teilhard affirms, finding ourselves is finding the universal thread of evolution that rises in us.  As Rogers discovers, the legacy that we receive as human persons can be trusted to power our growth towards more complete being.  God can not only be found, He can be embraced.

The Next Post

After identifying God as an agent of evolution,

by which things increase in complexity over time,

through which the process of evolution is possible,

from the big bang to the human,

as products of evolution: even in our lives,

to which we can come in contact

by searching for the kernel of ourselves

using the emerging insights of science

the next post will now go on to the final stage of Relating to God: the secular side of Loving God.

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’

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.

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.

What is Religion? Part 5: Transcendence

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Today’s Post

We’ve looked at religion so far as a way of making sense of things, as a locus for our evolved understanding, as a basis for our acting, and as a context for our sense of belonging.  Today we will look at religion as a ‘signpost to transcendence’.

Transcendence: More Than We Can See

Human history is filled with intuitions of a reality which exists outside, beyond, above or beneath the tangible world that we all experience.  Ancient cultures, through their myths and rituals, routinely attributed supernatural causes to things they did not understand, and the gods and religions that they invented gave structure to an otherwise dangerous world.

As we saw in the post of September 17, “The Evolution of Religion, Part 2- The ‘Axial Age’, about 500 BCE the object of ‘understanding’ began to shift from our environment to ourselves.   As Karen Armstrong puts it

“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.”

This evolving awareness of our environment from ‘the unknown’ to ‘the yet to be known’ involves a new understanding of the future as ‘promising’, filled with ‘potential’, and is the basis of the human sense of transcendence.

In this sense, we stand before a future which is unknown (and hence risky) but nonetheless has the potential to yield to our yearnings.  While we may feel finite and limited (and hence weak) when we sense the risk, we may also be able to sense the potential for both understanding and dealing with the unknowns that we will encounter as we step forward.

None of this can be objectively proven, but to the extent that we doubt we are unable to take this step into the unknown.

A Brief History of Transcendence

As humanity has gone forward, slowly replacing our sense of transcendence as simple ‘intuition of the unknown’ with an increasingly clear understanding of ourselves and our environment, it might be expected that this milieu of transcendent reality would be eventually replaced by empirical facts.  This, in fact, is the belief expressed by the atheist community.

However, even the famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, recognizes that something is at play in human evolution that moves us forward.  He refers to this something as “the phenomenon of Zeitgeist progression” which he explains:

“..as a matter of observed fact, it (human evolution) does move…  (the Zeitgiest) is probably not a single force like gravity, but a complex interplay of disparate forces like the one that propels Moore’s law.“

While it is certainly true that the history of religion and society as a whole can be superficially seen as the continual replacing of supernatural rationale for phenomena by empirical explanations, as Dawkins asserts, it continues to be enriched by a ‘Zeitgeist’ which pulls it forward in the direction of increasing complexity.

Science, in particular, is enriched by such a phenomenon.  The basic principle which underlies every scientific theory is that there is something not yet known which causes something that is observed.  It may well be true that this process of discovery may result in an empirical explanation for this ‘something’.  However, faith that the nature of reality is such that it will yield to human inquiry is itself an acknowledgement of its transcendent nature.

The other aspect of this faith is that the human activity of ‘reason’ is capable of both managing the process of discovery and of understanding reality sufficiently to describe it.

From this perspective, ‘transcendence’ can be understood as the ‘open-ended’ nature of both ourselves and our environment.

Teilhard addresses this movement toward transcendence at both the personal and universal level:

“Evolution consists of the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes in a world in which there is always more to see.”

Religion and Transcendence

Religion, in its role of ‘making sense of things’ has a long history of informing human society.  In this long history, however, it has accumulated an immense amount of supernatural, mythical and otherwise other-worldly explanations for entities and phenomena.  The Western bible, for example, contains many such depictions and explanations.  In its roots of thousands of years of multiple oral traditions, fragmentation of Jewish society and scribal redactions it also contains many contradictions.

These aspects of the bible have given rise to much ado in Western religions as well as encouragement to the recent rise of Western atheism.   The Western expressions of Christianity fight among themselves over the meaning to be derived from scripture, while the atheists crow over the many inaccuracies and contradictions of literal interpretations.

But all religions insist on ‘meaning’ beyond their literal expressions.  As Karen Armstrong asserts above, religion offers “the means of rising above the world”, of rising above the obvious, the tangible, the material and the limiting aspects of reality.  This “means of rising” can be recognized as the ‘Zeitgeist’ of Dawkins, active in human evolution as it moves us forward.

Religion reminds us that there is more to life than that which appears.  As we have seen in the thinking of Teilhard:

  • in his understanding of evolution as it rises through our life through the activation of our potential for growth and relationships
  • as his perspective rounds out the findings of science as it accommodates the human in scientific thinking
  • as religion can be understood as the human attempt to reflect these aspects of life

From this perspective, religion is a signpost to transcendence.  It reminds us that the thread of evolution continues its billions of years of upwelling to flow in our lives, and in our society, continually offering us

  • an increase in our ‘complexity’: our growth and maturity
  • and a more robust energy of relationship: our ability to love.

The Next Post

The next two posts will provide a sixth and final approach to defining religion, that of “Stability”.