Sam Mackintosh

#98. The Unfinished Business of Science

2012-02-07T00:02:00.005-05:00

This three-part post is an introduction to a book I think represents a major breakthrough in the 500-year history of science and its relationship with religion.

When I began my blog more than five years ago, the main concern I had was to help those interested to see that when we write off religious perspectives we miss out on the value of religious experience as part of humanity's effort to understand and be part of the world.

I see myself addressing people like myself: anyone who wants to understand human beings as participants in the world's evolution. We don't want to shut ourselves off from either ancient wisdom or modern efforts at understanding. My concern was to show that the two world views-- of religion and science-- were ultimately about the same thing: ourselves and our existence in the real world of space, time, matter and energy.

The way I see it, the difference between the ancient and modern perspectives is that they are coming from very different directions-- from radically different ways of perceiving reality-- but that they meet precisely in an understanding of human persons. That's why I use the term "convergence" in the blog's title.

It's also why I didn't begin the blog with posts about the new evolutionary cosmology. I focused instead on the research being done-- as much as I knew of it at that time-- on the human brain and nervous system in the context of anthropology.

Several of my earliest posts were about the work the Biogenetic Structuralists described in their 1990 text, Brain, Symbol & Experience (New Science Library). (I first discovered that research because of my interest in liturgy and ritual: the second of their earlier publications is The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis (Columbia U. Press, 1979).)

Much has happened in the areas of science and religion in the last three decades and, indeed, even in the five years since I began the blog.

Recently, the work of a highly creative new contributor to these science and religion issues has appeared. He, too, has a background in anthropology and neurological studies. Terrence Deacon is chair of Biological Anthropology and Neuroscience at the University of California (Berkeley).

I mentioned Deacon back in post #50 (The End of Patriarchy) in connection with his earlier (1998) book, also published by Norton, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. His research is described as "a combination of human evolutionary biology and neuroscience in the investigation of the evolution of the processes underlying animal and human communication."

I heard Professor Deacon speak in October at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Anthropology and Archeology, just before the publication of his new book, Incomplete Nature (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).

With its subtitle, How Mind Emerged From Matter, his book addresses head-on-- and as far as I know for the first in the 500-year history of modern science-- humanity's two greatest problems with regard to our scientific understanding of the world: scientific reductionism and philosophical dualism. Most Americans have fallen victim to one or the other of these views, and it's important to be clear about their meanings.

---

Reductionism is a mechanistic view of reality; it sees all life and mind as nothing more than the workings of the material parts of machines. It reduces biological and human life to the barest minimum of inanimate matter, facts and logic. In this view there is no meaning or value to our existence.

Although few live their everyday lives as if this was an accurate understanding of the world, reductionism is a widespread theoretic view. And, unfortunately for our culture, it is commonly understood to be the scientific understanding of reality-- which it is not.

---

Dualism, of course, is the opposite of reductionism. It's a philosophical and religious perspective, which insists that life and consciousness are not only more than mere matter, but also that the "more" has been inserted into matter by a source external to the world.

As Deacon notes, dualism is a highly attractive viewpoint. "There is indeed a difference," he says, "between mind and matter." But he also notes that our need now is to understand the difference in scientific terms, and not-- as reductionism does-- explain it away.

This is the great issue of our time, says Deacon. He calls it "the unfinished business of science." Despite the success of humanity's scientific endeavor in the last 500 years, "Our best science," he says, "excludes us." We ourselves are left out of our own understanding of reality.

===

The big question, of course, is: Why has our best science excluded us?

Deacon's answer-- the central idea of his book-- is that science has not given the attention needed to the energy processes which physical matter undergoes.

If you are asking, "What have energy processes to do with the human mind and heart?", that is the right question!

As Deacon says, neither the reductionist perspective (that we are machines) nor the dualistic perspective (that human consciousness comes from outside the physical universe) is acceptable from a strictly scientific viewpoint.

He acknowledges that science has neglected to bring together an understanding of life and mind with physical matter. He says science has been deficient precisely because it's been so successful in improving the human condition. But in its success, he adds, it has ignored what is most important to us-- our own self-understanding.

---

I'm sure long-time readers of the blog will know what Deacon says is the needed perspective which science has neglected. I've mentioned it many times, because institutional religion has neglected it too. It's our need to move out of the static viewpoint of the ancient world and move into a much more dynamic understanding of the universe.

Deacon's most basic thought is that if we are to understand ourselves and the world from a scientific perspective we need to stop thinking only in terms of physical things and material objects and to look, instead, at the dynamic processes by which the universe operates.

Buddhists have been saying this for centuries.

Deacon emphasizes that, in looking at the processes rather than static objects, we are remaining grounded in the material-physical world. We do not want to become either reductionists or dualists, he says; what we do want is to understand reality from a point of view which includes those dynamic energy processes.

===

Long-time readers will remember that I've said numerous times in these posts, "There's more to religion than it seems." And now, thanks to Deacon's insights, we can say the same thing about science. Just as there's more to religion than is commonly understood even by many religious people, so there's more to science than is commonly assumed even by many science-literate persons.

In both cases, the key to understanding that "more" is to move away from the ancient world's preference for seeing reality in terms of permanently stable and static objects.

This change in perspective-- from stasis to dynamis-- is the Great Turning happening in our time. It is the Immense Transition in human consciousness which global humanity is currently experiencing. And it is the central focus of Deacon's book.

His book is far from easy reading, but I've found it highly satisfying and have been urged by friends and blog readers to share my understanding of it. So that's what I'm doing in this post. Without their inspiration and encouragement, I wouldn't have the courage to try it.

===

The "unfinished business of science" is its need to look at the processes by which the physical world becomes living and conscious. At first hearing, this may sound a bit simplistic. But listen to what Deacon has to say....

He stresses that in everyday life we act all the time as if we have goals for what we do; we also presume that for our purposes, some things are better than others, and that we can use things as tools for specific tasks. Purpose, value and function are the common names for what he's talking about here.

His point is that while in ordinary life we take for granted things like purpose, value and function, science has tended to ignore them. The scientific enterprise has been so successful in practical terms in the last few centuries that it has simply denied reality to these aspects of life which are important to us.

It's obvious that having a purpose is something real, even though it can't be found in physical or material objects. It's real because it influences our actions; purpose makes a difference in the world. But these things which matters most to us-- such as purpose, value and function-- have yet to be understood in scientific terms.

In our day, the central question for science, then, says Deacon, is how we can understand the reality of these aspects of our lives which mean so much to us-- even though they are not physical or material things-- and how we can understand them without moving outside of the realm of the natural sciences.

That's the challenge. To not just look at physical objects but at the energy dynamics which physical matter undergoes. "Look at the energy processes," says Deacon.

For most of us, it's not an obvious problem. We know that there are many aspects of our experience which, while not being embodied in physical objects, are real because they make a difference to us.

In addition to purpose, value and function, other aspects of our lives neglected by science are information (as in "how-to" directions), meaning (as in "the meaning of symbols") and even personal experience itself. Deacon has coined the term "ententional phenomena" to include all of them and notes that what they have in common is an end or goal (telos, in Greek).

===

Few would argue with the idea that these aspects of life and mind are real; we experience daily their power to cause things to happen. But the important point Deacon wants us to keep in mind is that these "ententional phenomena" are not embodied in physical things or static material objects. They emerge from the dynamic processes which generate them.

Science is about explaining things, but if the scientific enterprise writes off aspects of human experience such as these ententional phenomena, that makes us nothing but machines-- which is exactly what the reductionist view says. It makes us robots-- automatons like the golems of Medieval stories or the zombies of contemporary science fiction films. There's human-like behavior but, as Deacon puts it, "nobody's home."

And if we were in fact robots, he says, "There would be no caring, no cared for, no kindness, no sharing of beauty and discovery and sorrow; no value to our pains and pleasures." Indeed, for each of us, there would be no "me" at all. Reductionist materialism, says Deacon, "is impotent to explain the mystery of ourselves."

If, on the other hand, we accept the dualistic view that life and mind are real because of an intervention from outside the physical universe, that makes us aliens in our own world. And of course many people do experience this kind of painful alienation today.

Taking into account dynamic processes and what emerges from them will, says Deacon, "make it easier to increase our sense of belonging in the universe." His hope is that we will eventually have a scientific perspective "which includes us and our own incomplete nature as legitimate forms of knotting in the fabric of the universe."

It becomes clearer every day that if we are ever to deal with our multiple global crises-- environmental and political, economic and educational-- this sense of "belonging in the universe" is probably humanity's single greatest need in our time.

===

There's one more idea I want to include in this introductory part of my post on Deacon's Incomplete Nature. He says that in order to move beyond the impasse of rationalist reductionism and religious dualism, we need something in science like what zero is in math.

Zero was once banned, shunned and feared, but it eventually revolutionized math and made modern science possible. In our day, ententional phenomena-- things like purpose, function, value and meaning-- are similar.

Just as zero, in the Middle Ages, was not considered real because it stood for nothing, so today in science things like function, value and purpose are ignored because they are not present in physical objects. Deacon observes that contemporary science is centuries behind its understanding of the more tangible realties in its understanding of things we take for granted in everyday life such as meaning and purpose. And in doing so, science is denying those things that are most important to us.

This denial of the reality of the "ententional phenomena" has divided the natural sciences from the human sciences, and has divided all of science from the humanities, says Deacon. It has, he says, alienated scientific knowledge from human experience.

And that denial makes science appear to be the enemy of human values. It also accounts for the understandable rebirth of religious fundamentalism with its deep distrust of a non-religious determination of human values.

Clearly, it is time to get on with the unfinished business of science!

---

In the second part of this post I'll share my understanding of what Deacon has to say about how those dynamic energy processes allow life and mind to emerge from cosmic matter. Meanwhile, your comments and questions are invited and welcome!

sam@macspeno.com

+++

* LINKS to ALL PUBLISHED POSTS

2012-02-07T00:01:00.000-05:00

[This is an experimental list of links to all my published posts. It's the best I was able to come up with to deal with the problem of the original archive not being able to contain more than 50 entries.]

#98. The Unfinished Business of Science

#97. Five Years of Posts

#96. Science's Best: Cosmic Energy

#95. Science's Best: Matter, Time and Space

#94. Religion "At Its Best"

#93. The Home Stretch

#92. Evolution & Holy Communion

#91. Evolution and the Passover Seder

#90. "Returning" the World....

#89. Recovery of Sacred Manhood

#88. Understanding Sacred Manhood

#87. Stardust's Imperative: Reinterpretation

#86. Global Consequences of Recovering Reverence

#85. Primal Religion

#84. Doubly Estranged

#83. New Comments Collected

#82. Moving Up the Ladder

#81. The Deep Roots of "Person"

#80. Two Mavericks

#79. A Dowd Sampler

#78. "Thank God for Evolution"

#77. From Theory to Practice

#76. Modernity's Gains

#75. Three Post-modern Movements

#74. Modern, Pre-modern, Post-modern

#73. Two Important Books

#72. "Great Mystery" in the Tao Te

#71. Sam's Tao Te, 55-81

#70. Sam's Tao Te, 28-54

#69. Sam's Tao Te, 1-27

#68. Sam's Tao Te, Intro

#67. More Comments Collected

#66. Arlene's Questions

#65. Ritual's Cosmic Roots

#64. Ritual's Biological Roots

#63. Ritual's Psychological Roots

#62. "Let Us Attend"

#61. Wisdom, Cosmology & Creativity

#60. Symbol, Myth & Meaning

#59. Evolution and Religious Ritual

#58. Even Religion Evolves

#57. College 50th-Anniversary Report

#56. A Saner Approach to Nature

#55. "All we have to do..."

#54. We Take Care of What We Value

#53. Bridging the Gap

#52. "Exciting Times"

#51. A New Series of Posts

- - -

#50. The End of Patriarchy

#49. Evolutionary Spirituality

#48. Do We Have a Future?

#47. The Growing Edge

#46. Convergence?

#45. Midnight Wisdom: Sophia as Provider

#44. Noonday Wisdom: Sophia as Gatherer

#43. Morning Wisdom: Sophia as Guide

#42. Evening Wisdom: Sophia as Architect

#41. Four-fold Wisdom

#40. Wisdom/Sophia

#39. Hebrew Thought

#38. Exodus

#37. What's Next

#36. Aspects of the Immense Transition, Parts 3 & 4

#35. Aspects of the Immense Transition, Parts 1 & 2

#34. Talking About Us

#33. Talking About God

#32. Comments Collected

#31. Integrating the Four Functions

#30. Ways of Being Religious

#29. The Four-fold Mind

#28. "Where I'm At"

#27. Radical Honesty: The How-to of Ontogenesis

#26. Help From Uncle Louie

#25. Ontogenesis: Phase Three

#24. Ontogenesis: Phases One & Two

#23. Ontogenetic Development

#22. The Other Half of "Person"

#21. Struggling with Words

#20. Resurrection of the Dead

#19. Diversity: Our Service to God

#18. Called By the Universe

#17. What Is the Universe Doing?

#16. Our Own Inner World

#15. Re-view and Pre-view

#14. Person as Process

#13. Cognized Environment

#12. The Cognitive Extension of Prehension

#11. The End of Dualism

#10. Overview of Biogenetic Structuralism

#9. "Exchange of Thought"

#8. Background to Biogenetic Structuralism

#7. Brief Autobiography

#6. Tai Chi

#5. Alternative to "Human Nature Redux"

#4. The "Biogenetic" Perspective

#3. High School 50th-Anniversary Report

#2. Spirituality Research Symposium

#1. On Recent Developments in Science and Religion

==================================

#97. Five Years of Posts

2011-12-28T08:35:00.023-05:00

Added: 23 Jan 2012. Just a quick note. I described self-organizing structures in post #97 (Science's Best: Cosmic Energy). They are especially important because, among other things, they provide a link between inanimate substances and the structures of living matter.

For a highly unusual example of a self-organizing structure, check out the photo of the North Pole of Saturn from yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day: Saturn's Hexagon Comes to Light.

===

Five years ago today, December 28, 2006, I published my first ever blog post.

The world is already very different from what it was just five years ago. Science continues to make major technical advances, while the institutional churches lag behind by several centuries.

Neither of them still has had much to say about the place of humanity in the universe.

It took me five years to say what I had to say, and I still don't feel quite done. There's something more I'd like to say, but I'm not sure yet just how to go about it.

Meanwhile, this note is to say "thank you" to all who sent comments, both personal and for publication, and for all the support and encouragement I have received from family and friends-- and readers whom I've never met.

Your thoughts, comments and questions are still most welcome!

My good wishes for the remainder of the twelve days of Christmas and a Happy New Year.

sam@macspeno.com

#96. Science's Best: Cosmic Energy

2011-10-02T00:02:00.000-05:00

In the previous post I shared my thoughts about Science's Best in terms of how our consciousness of matter, time and space allows us to see that our Earth and the whole universe grows and develops just as we ourselves and all living things do.

I used a mandala-- the four functions of consciousness-- to describe how Thinking and Feeling gives us our awareness of the temporal and spatial arrangements of cosmic matter perceived by our Sensing ability.

Though it may seem unfamiliar, I hope the wording helps make clear that an understanding of the developmental cosmic process via the Thinking function is fairly easy, and that-- with a bit of effort-- so, too, is our understanding of its spatial aspects using our Feeling function.

The mechanics by which the sequential nesting process happens, however, aren't so easy to understand. To make sense of these energy dynamics-- the fourth part of my matter, time, space and energy mandala-- we need to use the fourth of our consciousness functions, Intuition.

It's Intuition that puts it all together. And there is a lot to put together! That's what this post is about, and why it's as long as the previous post which dealt with all three of the other parts of the cosmic mandala. I'll start with a quick review of post #95. (If you haven't read it, you might want to read it before going on.)

===

My Quick Review: Our Sensing-function awareness of matter lets us see the many diverse aspects of the physical universe-- from people, animals and plants to rocks, stars and galaxies; our Thinking function gives us our awareness that these many diverse aspects of the world have emerged in a orderly sequence; and our Feeling function gives us our awareness that that orderly sequence also has a relational aspect: it's a "nesting" sequence.

But it's when we ask how it all works-- "What are the mechanisms, the dynamics, by which the material things of the universe emerge in an orderly nesting sequence?"--that we need to use the Intuition function of our conscious minds.

And as I've noted many times in these posts, in Western culture Intuition is the least understood or valued of the four ways our minds operate. That's why this second post on Science's Best-- focused only on energy and Intuition-- is as long as the previous post; I need to describe both energy and Intuition in much more detail than was needed for all three other parts of the mandala.

Most of us are fairly comfortable with the idea of energy, even if we don't give it much conscious thought, so I'll share my thoughts about energy first. Then I'll describe how our Intuition ability helps us to understand this fourth aspect of the cosmic mandala.

---

We know by personal experience what "energy" means. It's our name for what makes things happen. The most elementary scientific definition of energy is "the ability to do work."

Common synonyms for energy are "power" and "force." In Latin, it's spiritus; in Greek, dynamis. And while energy may be invisible, like air, no one doubts its existence; energy is the dynamic force which makes things move. And just like the air we breathe, energy keeps things moving. Without breath, we die; without energy, absolutely nothing happens.

So when we say "How does it all work?" we're asking about the dynamic forces and powers which bring about galaxies and stars, atoms and molecules, living things and ourselves. To see Science's Best in our day, we need an understanding of those dynamic energy processes.

===

For me, this is where the mandala image is especially helpful. What allows us to understand the creative energy processes by which the components of the universe emerge is not our Sensing awareness of matter, nor our Thinking awareness of the temporal flow of time, nor even our Feeling awareness of spatial relationships. As I've said, it's our fourth consciousness function, Intuition, which "puts it all together."

But our culture's patriarchal disdain for relationships and its consequent refusal to look at the over-all picture of the world make it difficult to see this aspect of Science's Best. So even though I've mentioned the four functions of consciousness in many previous posts, I need to say a few words here specifically about how C. G. Jung's descriptions of the operations of our conscious minds can help us to better understand energy and Intuition.

---

Jung pairs the mind's four conscious functions into two groups: perceptions and judgments. He says Thinking and Feeling are judgment operations-- evaluations of what we perceive-- while Sensing and Intuition are the mental operations by which we perceive what we do.

And while no one doubts that we perceive the world through our Sensing ability, many of us have a problem in our still-patriarchal culture with the idea that we also can see the world via our Intuition function.

In recognizing that Intuition is no less a perception function than is Sensing, it helps to recall that, when we talk about the cosmos, we tend to automatically combine the words "matter and energy." It's not accidental that we do it in exactly the same way that Jung, in talking about consciousness, paired Sensing and Intuition, the perception functions.

We also usually join "time and space" in the same way that Jung paired Thinking and Feeling, the evaluative functions.

Long-time readers will remember that, as I've mentioned many times, the difference between these two perception functions is that through Sensing we see details ("the trees"), while by Intuition we see the over-all picture ("the forest"). Just as we can focus our attention on the smallest detail by Sensing, we can "take it all in at once" via Intuition.

Another way to say it is that Intuition lets us see from higher up on the Great Ladder than Sensing does in its position down on the bottom rung of the ladder. We can also say that while Sensing focuses on surface details, Intuition lets us look deeper-- below the surface, at the underlying processes.

---

Besides our cultural prejudice against Intuition, there's a second reason why many of us are uncomfortable with the big picture which Science's Best offers us today.

This second reason is that science and technology have come a very long way in a very short time. Only within the last few decades have scientists been able to look more deeply into the over-all picture of the cosmos specifically with regard to the complex dynamic energy processes by which the nesting components of the universe have emerged.

What has made the difference is the development of high-speed computers. Some of them can do millions of calculations in one second, allowing scientists a far deeper look at the dynamic processes of the cosmos than earlier generations could ever have imagined.

For example, a recent computer simulation of the formation of a spiral galaxy was completed in "only" eight months by a super-computer system in Switzerland; that sounds like a lot but on a personal computer the same simulation would take 570 years. A video of the simulation can be viewed in less than three minutes.

So it's not only our patriarchal culture's disdain for Intuition that makes it difficult for us to take into account all the details and put them into an over-all picture. It's that modern technology is "putting it all together" so fast that the resulting big picture doesn't filter down to the rest of us quickly enough. Most of us just can't keep up!

===

There are three big ideas to which we need to give our attention in order to understand Science's Best in terms of Intuition and energy. One is familiar and easy to understand: the interaction of opposites. The second is also familiar but not so easy to understand: creativity. The third is much less familiar because science has only recently given its attention to it and real effort on our part is required to make sense of it: self-organization.

I'm going to do my best to spell out these three ideas for readers willing to stay with me for the rest of this post. It's a lot of work, so this is a good place to take a break.

=== +++ ===

Opposites. I'm starting with opposites since everyone knows what "opposite" means. There are two basic ideas involved here. The first is that, in nature, many things come in pairs-- our body parts are a good example. And even the four ways our conscious minds work come in pairs-- a pair of pairs, actually. So it's not surprising that energy also operates in pairs of forces.

The second idea is that the energy comes in pairs of opposite forces. Our whole world is, in fact, made up of such pairs of opposites. The ancient Chinese symbol for the dynamic interaction of opposites has been around for centuries: yin and yang, night and day, summer and winter, hot and cold, light and dark, big and small, male and female-- it's an unending list.

This same idea of interacting opposites is true of the various forms of cosmic energy. They, too, come in pairs. And these powerful energy forces don't just "make things happen" or "cause things to move." They cause things to move in opposite directions.

---

The most cosmic of all powers is the expansion of the universe itself. From the first moment of the existence of cosmic matter at the Big Bang, every bit of it has been moving away from every other bit in an expansion process which is still going on today.

But at the same time, the opposite power-- one we're quite familiar with: the force of gravity-- is also pulling those bits of the universe's matter back into a single mass again.

It was the interaction of these opposites-- the "push" of the expansion of the universe outward and the "pull" of the gravitational attraction inward-- which caused the primordial bits of matter (leptons, quarks and hydrogen nuclei) to spread unevenly throughout the early universe. And it's that unevenness which resulted in those "clumps" of matter which eventually became what we call today "galaxies."

It was within the galaxies that stars began to form, and it was within the stars that atoms and molecules were first made-- and they're still being made in stars today.

And just as with the galaxies themselves, those chemical elements and compounds are also formed by opposite forces, but in this case the energy is electrical, rather than gravitational.

Even if we have little sense of just what "electricity" means, all of us are familiar with the basic idea that "opposite charges attract and like charges repel."

Those opposite electrical forces also allow large molecules to combine to form the even-larger macro-molecules, which-- on at least one planet we know of-- have formed into living cells. On Earth, some of those early cells eventually joined together, also because of electrical forces. The result, over millions of years, was the plants, animals and humans we know on our Earth today.

---

Every new thing in the universe-- the first stars, the first atoms, the first cells, the first mammals, the first primates, the first human beings-- is the result of the interaction of opposites. The point of this very brief description of the cosmic flow of energy is that it always happens by way of the interaction of opposite forces. And it's this interaction-- this push and pull-- which causes the cosmic process to be creative. Creativity, too, is a primary characteristic of our world.

===

Creativity. Although everyone understands what "creativity" means, many still have a problem with it today because of Western culture's earlier static religious picture of the world-- that it was created all at once. The thought of an on-going creative process-- that new forms of cosmic matter are continually emerging via the temporal and nesting developmental process-- is an idea with which many in our culture are not yet comfortable.

I said earlier that while we're more or less familiar with the word "creative," it's not so easy to understand creativity as a concept. It's worth our best effort, however, because creativity is an especially important aspect of contemporary Science's Best. We need to understand and trust our creative ability in order to deal, for example, with our present social, cultural political, economic and environmental crises.

We need to move past Western culture's older but-still-lingering understanding of creation as a static event in the distant past. To do this, we can start where Asian cultures often begin: with the recognition that nothing in our world is permanent. There are two important thoughts here: first, that on-going change is a fundamental aspect of the way our world works; and second, that not all change is negative.

But just as the idea of evolutionary development wasn't part of Western culture's understanding until the 19th century, and just as the nesting characteristic of the evolutionary process wasn't understood until the 20th century, creativity has yet to become part of the 21st century understanding of the cosmos process.

It's been slow to catch on because the older patriarchal perspectives shy away from change. Religious fundamentalists even deny the very possibility of change when it comes to plant and animal species. If we don't understand on-going change as creative, we miss a fundamental understanding of the very nature of the world and our place in it.

---

To me, this is a basic issue of our time. Without our awareness of creativity as a major characteristic of the dynamic cosmos, we're simply unable to understand how we fit in with the rest of the created world. (That's why fundamentalists want to escape from it.)

So it's especially important for us to recognize that the creative process is, in fact, a normal part of everyday life and personal experience. A few examples can help:

Who doesn't delight in a baby's first words and first steps? And what pre-teen doesn't delight in the prospect of his/her newly emerging sexual characteristics? And what's more delightful to each of us as adults than those new insights into ourselves and our world which come to us-- and often transform us-- all throughout our lives?

My point is that we do know what "creativity" means. It's just that we're only gradually coming to realize the fact-- thanks to Intuition-- that it's an aspect of our personal experience because it's an aspect of the way the whole universe works.

This conceptual understanding of creativity-- that the universe is creative and that new realities emerge in the cosmic process precisely due to the interaction of opposite energy forces-- greatly enriches Western culture's understanding of the nature of the world. It's a prime aspect of Science's Best precisely because it lets us see that, rather than escaping from a world to which we don't belong, we have in fact a major role in creating a better world.

Our contemporary social, cultural, political, economic and environmental crises are due to our slow pace in becoming aware of global humanity's creative place in the cosmic process. But we need to use our Intuition ability to see this big picture. And we miss it if we get lost in the details. For the perception of reality, Intuition is no less important than is Sensing.

===

Self-organization. The concept of self-organization is a fairly new understanding of how matter works; it isn't so easy to understand because it simply wasn't available until recently.

But it too is a characteristic of cosmic matter which we do, in fact, know by personal experience. Because self-organization is so intimately personal to each of us, however, we have even more trouble thinking of it as a characteristic of the matter and energy of the cosmos than we do in attributing creativity to the universe as a whole.

To put it as simply as possible, when matter forms into clumps due to gravity acting in the opposite direction from the cosmic expansion force, those clumps are not static.

They have a dynamic internal energy by which they are able to organize themselves into something more. The clumps of matter take a shape, they form internal "structures," all by themselves. The word "communities" is even used to describe the new realities which emerge. The fact that clumps of matter can give themselves both external shapes and internal organization is what's meant by the term "self-organizing."

The self-organizational aspect of cosmic matter was first recognized by biologists as a characteristic of living things, but with the availability of computers and high technology we now know that that it extends to every aspect of the physical universe. (If you didn't, earlier, you might want to watch that less-than-three-minute video of the formation of a galaxy I mentioned above. It's a wonderful example of elemental matter's ability to organize itself.)

---

From the spiral structure of galaxies to the arrangement of petals on a flower and our own personal body-build, self-organization characterizes every bit of cosmic matter.

What I called its "intimate" nature is clear in some examples from our own personal experience. Whenever we say to ourselves, "I need to get in shape" or, with regard to some issue we may be dealing with in our life, "I need to pull myself together," it is precisely this self-organizational aspect of cosmic matter that we are acknowledging as operative within our own personal self-awareness.

But it's operating not only in human consciousness and in other living things; it's also operating in atoms, stars and galaxies.

---

We can find the simplest example of self-organization in our own kitchen sink: in the whirlpool that forms when water swirls around as it drains out. That whirlpool is a real, if elementary, example of cosmic matter's self-organizing ability.

The shape of the whirlpool is the point here. The individual water molecules are constantly changing, but the spiral shape holds even as gravity pulls the molecules down the drain.

It's not a coincidence that galaxies have a similar shape. Spirals are, in fact, everywhere. And they come in many sizes.

I learned recently that it's a tiny whirlpool of air that lets hummingbirds fly and hover the way they do. (There's a brief description of it in the September, 2011 issue of Discover magazine. Look for "Hummingbird Flight Secrets Revealed.") And the spiral shape of Hurricane Irene, roughly 300 miles across, became familiar to millions as they watched its progress up the East Coast of the United States in late August of this year.

---

This ability to organize itself pervades all cosmic matter-- galaxies, stars and planets, air and water, and especially the life-forms on the Earth. From single-celled bacteria and multi-cellular plants and animals to the nervous systems of mammals and primates-- including our own brain-- all forms of matter have this internal self-organizing ability.

Even the Earth itself, our planet as a whole, has it. There's an especially clear example of Earth as a living self-organized system in Brian Swimme's and Mary Evelyn Tucker's recent book Journey of the Universe (Yale University Press, 2011).

The book is part of a major New Cosmology project which includes an extensive study guide and an hour-long video documentary. (The documentary has already been shown on several PBS stations.) The book is beautifully written and easy to read; its authors were long-time friends and collaborators with Thomas Berry.

Here's their example of the self-organization of the Earth:

We know that the temperature of the Earth can't vary too far in either direction, or life will disappear. It was once thought that our planet's average temperature was simply a fortunate consequence of its being just the right distance from the sun. "But," say Swimme and Tucker, "thanks to the 20th century discovery of nuclear fusion and the structure of stars, we now know that over the past four billion years our Sun has increased its temperature by nearly 25 percent."

Their point is that the Earth has adapted itself so as to remain in the narrow band that enables life to flourish: "By drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by photosynthesis, Earth altered the composition of its atmosphere to keep itself cool as the Sun grew hotter."

So, as Swimme and Tucker say, "our planet isn't just a big ball of rock and metal on which living things exist. The Earth is a creative community of beings that reorganizes itself age after age so that it can perpetuate and even deepen its vibrant existence."

---

This example is obviously of great relevance to our global environmental crisis, but here I want to emphasize that this same energy "dynamic"-- this creative "orchestration," as Swimme and Tucker call it, of our planet's self-organizational ability-- appears over and over again in the universe's billions of years of development.

Along with creativity and the interaction of opposites, the cosmos' self-organization power is a primary characteristic of the whole universe. And (as I think I may have mentioned once or twice earlier!), it is Intuition that lets "put it all together."

=== +++ ===

A final thought about Intuition. Its role isn't limited to putting together our understanding of the universe's underlying energy processes. It also integrates our Sensing function's awareness of matter, our Thinking function's awareness of time, and our Feeling function's awareness of space. Intuition integrates all three into one big picture of the world we live in.

And it's that big picture which is Science's Best in our day. When we look at the big picture, what we see at the center of the cosmic mandala of time, space, matter and energy is ourselves.

---

You may feel that that's too much of an exaggeration. So to round out these two "home stretch" posts on Science's Best, I want to offer one example of how using Intuition along with Sensing, Thinking and Feeling helps us to see the unique, central place in the universe of personal consciousness.

Scientists are able to measure the speed of the expansion of the universe that began at the Big Bang. And they have learned that if that rate of expansion was slightly higher, the gravitational force would not be strong enough to cause those clumps of the initial particles which eventually resulted in galaxies, stars, atoms, planets, life-forms and ourselves.

The same thing, in reverse, would have happened if the speed of expansion was slightly slower: there would be no elementary particles to clump in the first place.

So while it's via our Sensing function we know that if the expansion speed wasn't "just right"-- that if it was even a fraction of one percent higher or lower, there would not have been a temporal emergence process for us to understand via our Thinking function, and there would not have been a nesting characteristic for us to understand via our Feeling function--it's via our Intuition function that we see that, in fact, we wouldn't even be here.

The main point of this example may not be as obvious as I like to think it is, so I'll say it a different way. It's only when we use our Intuition ability to put together the details into a big picture that we become aware of the fact that our very awareness of the cosmic process is itself an aspect of the cosmic process.

The personal awareness-- which you, I, and every person on Earth embody-- is at the center of the dynamic energy process we call "the universe."

---

With this big picture of the world, science in our day has moved well beyond Western culture's patriarchal disdain for relationships and its refusal to look at the big picture.

With its willingness to perceive the world via Intuition-- and especially with its willingness to include in that big picture our Feeling-function awareness of the inter-relatedness of all things in the cosmos-- science has indeed come a long way since its 19th-century emphasis on "facts and logic." It's that willingness which is, for me, Science's Best.

sam@macspeno.com

=== +++ ===

Your feedback is welcome!

Special note: In dealing with numerous spam comments, I inadvertently deleted all comments at the end of the posts up until #90, but they are still preserved in the collections of comments found in posts #32, #67 and #83.

Special request: I've completely lost the comments for posts #84 to #89. If you happen to have copied any of them, please send them to me. Thanks.

To send a comment: use either "Click here to send a comment" (below) or click on "Post a Comment" (at the bottom).

If you prefer, send your thoughts, suggestions and questions to my email address (above).

To email a link to this post to a friend, with your own message, click on the little envelope with an arrow (below).

If you would like to be notified when I publish a new post, let me know; I'll put you on the list.

+++

#95. Science's Best: Matter, Time and Space

2011-09-01T00:02:00.066-05:00

In this home stretch of my blog efforts it seems like a good idea to share some thoughts about Science's Best to parallel the thoughts in my previous post, #94, about Religion "At Its Best."

===

Just as the Western religious tradition has come a long way in the 20th century, so has science.

When I started working as a science teacher back in 1959, the popular image of a scientist, for example, was still very much that of the "mad scientist" from the movies of the 50's. (If you're too young to remember, he was seeking to take over the world-- with the help of his hunchback assistant, Igor.) Even at its best in those days, what "science" meant for most people was kids launching rockets in back of the high school.

I have a more personal example, from a decade earlier. When I was in my last month of eighth grade and signing up for high school courses, I was given the choice of one elective: either Latin or science. It wasn't much of a choice for me; it felt like choosing between the past or the future, the old or the new. I think I was the only one in the class who elected to take science instead of Latin; my eighth grade teacher did not approve.

---

But science itself-- not just the popular view of it-- has come a long way in the last sixty or seventy years. While religion was working its way out of its old Medieval worldview during the 20th century, science was working its way up from its position on the bottom rung of the Great Ladder of Beings.

I've used the Great Ladder image frequently in these posts; I first became aware of it in Ken Wilbur's book, The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion (Random House, 1998).

I know that "ladder" isn't a helpful image for everyone. Another image, which works better for many, is to say that science is learning to "look more deeply into things." John Haught's book, Deeper Than Darwin (Westview Press, 2003), is an excellent example of that imagery.

But while "higher" and "deeper" are good images, what works best for me is the mandala. With its simultaneous attention to all four directions-- considering them all to be of equal importance-- it is an image of our own four-fold "looking" process itself.

I don't need to remind long-time readers that I've referred repeatedly in these posts to this quaternary understanding of consciousness. The main idea is that our minds have a four-fold way of operating and that if we use only one or two of those ways, our experience and awareness of the world is severely limited.

We miss a lot, for example, if we focus only on facts and logic-- as Western culture has done in recent centuries.

We owe the modern expression of the quaternary understanding of human awareness to the depth psychologist C. G. Jung, but older expressions of it are found in many non-patriarchal traditions. The rituals of Wicca and the animal images on the Native American Medicine Wheel are good examples; so are the sacred sand paintings of Tibet and the numerous mandalas found on the walls of temples and homes in India.

---

These are all expressions of the four-fold view of the human mind. Using Jungian words, I can summarize it briefly. I wouldn't repeat these ideas again here-- except for the fact that I think the quaternary understanding of our conscious awareness is an especially helpful tool to use for appreciating "Science's Best."

My brief sum: We experience the details of the world via Sensing, the relationships between parts of the world via Feeling, the cause-and-effect sequence of things via Thinking, and we see the whole picture-- without getting lost in the details-- via Intuition.

Western culture, unfortunately, got lost in the details. Patriarchy ignores the big picture of how all thing are inter-related and focuses only on the cause-and-effect connections between the details. So if we understand the world exclusively by our functions of Sensing and Thinking we have only a materialistic view. And from that perspective the world looks like a machine; for a while it was even called the "clockwork universe."

Science wasn't always mechanistic and materialistic, however. When early scientists such as Galileo, Copernicus and Newton began their work, their intention was not only to give us a more accurate picture of the world, but also to improve human life. And at that, science has been extremely successful.

But, as patriarchal attitudes took over in science-- just as they did in religion-- the Earth became seriously damaged and its peoples horribly exploited. The result was today's political, economic and environmental crisis.

This global crisis is only gradually dawning on the people of the Earth as we slowly come to have a bigger picture. But as we better understand how our minds work-- as we learn to look more deeply into things or to see our world from higher up than the bottom rung of the Great Ladder-- we are in fact moving away from the patriarchal attitudes of the past.

And just as religion has been working its way out of its dualistic and static perspectives, so contemporary science has moved far beyond its materialistic and mechanistic views.

---

In my previous post I offered three Greek words which, in addition to evolution, help us to see the Western religious tradition at its best: eschaton, eucharist and ecclesia.

I don't need Greek words to describe Science's Best. We have four English words, familiar to everyone, which work fine: time, space, matter and energy.

You may be thinking that those terms seem a bit too basic to be helpful. But I can say from my experience that once we see how well they serve as tags for the ways our minds work, they become as enriching for our understanding of the modern scientific worldview as are evolution, eschaton, eucharist and ecclesia for a contemporary understanding of religion.

---

The connections between those four words-- time, space, matter and energy-- and the four functions of our conscious minds-- Thinking, Feeling, Sensing and Intuition-- are not obvious, to be sure. In everyday life we hardly ever associate time with the Thinking function or space with our Feeling function, but some examples can help to make those connections clearer.

We use space-related terms like "near" and "next to" or "far" and "distant" when we want to express our Feeling-function awareness of the connections between ourselves and others. Saying "I feel close to you," for example, expresses a strong positive relationship just as "Keep away from me!" unambiguously expresses a negative one.

The correspondence between time and our Thinking-function awareness is even clearer. We always express cause-and-effect reasoning, for example, in words that presume a temporal sequence: there's an assumed "before" and "after" whenever we say "if this, then that" and especially when we say that something "follows from" something else. Thinking is an awareness of the sequential flow of time.

A good example of both time-awareness and space-awareness together is a comment we might make about a past relationship when we say something like, "He and I used to be close, but we've drifted apart." When we say that, we're combining "then and now" Thinking with "near and far" Feeling.

The idea that Sensing is our awareness of matter (that we are conscious of the world outside ourselves via sight, taste, touch, smell, hearing) isn't a problem for anyone. But many feel uncomfortable with the association of Feeling and space; and the idea that there's a correspondence between energy and Intuition (our big-picture consciousness) is a problem for almost everyone.

It's a problem because of the still-lingering effects on our patriarchy culture's disdain for relationships and the consequent refusal to look at the over-all picture of the world. We just can't see too much if we refuse to look more deeply into things; or, to say it the other way: our worldview is limited if we remain at the bottom rung of the Great Ladder.

---

I'll be sharing my thoughts about Science's Best in terms of matter, time and space in this post, and my thoughts about the energy-Intuition correspondence in the next. Both posts will be called "Science's Best," but #96 will have "Cosmic Energy" added to it, just as this post's title includes the words "Matter, Time and Space."

My point in having such similar names is to emphasize that that just as Sensing, Thinking, Feeling and Intuition form a mandala of our conscious understanding, so matter, time, space and energy also form a mandala-- in this case, of tags for our understanding Science's Best.

The two posts go together, but because of our patriarchal culture's disdain for relationships and its consequent refusal to look at the over-all picture of the world, the connections between energy and Intuition are far less familiar and need to be spelled out in more detail. So I'm making it a separate post.

I'd really like to publish #95 and #96 together, as I've said, but if I did, the one big post would just be too long. No one would want to read it. Even separately, each of these posts is longer than usual, so you will probably want to take an occasional break while reading them. And once again, my thanks for your patience!

=== +++ ===

TIME. I said above that the idea of Sensing as our awareness of matter isn't a problem for anyone; the correspondence, once we see it, between time and our Thinking-function awareness is just as acceptable to almost everyone.

As I also said above, we always express cause-and-effect reasoning, for example, in words that presume a temporal sequence: there's an assumed "first" ("if this") and "second" ("then that") whenever we say that something "follows from" something else. The Thinking function is our awareness of time's sequential flow.

Science's Best in terms of our Thinking function and time is the understanding that the world is dynamic. It had been presumed to be static for many thousands of years, but from the work of geologists, biologists and astronomers in the last two centuries, we know today that the material world came into existence gradually over a very long period of time.

We are aware now that the various physical parts of the world-- galaxies, stars, planets, rocks, plants, animals, human beings-- emerged in a series of events, very much like the way any living thing grows and develops.

When we plant a seed, for example, it first puts out roots and then a pair of special leaves. Only later do a stem and the ordinary leaves develop, and only later still are they followed by buds, flowers and fruit. In the same way, all the material parts of the universe-- from galaxies and stars to primates and persons-- also appeared sequentially.

It's such an ordinary thing-- when we see the sprouting of seeds or watch a baby developing-- that we take it for granted. "That's the way things work," we say.

But the idea here is that that's the way the whole universe works.

Not just plants, not just babies, but everything-- the entire cosmos-- acts like one big living organism. And this understanding of the sequential growth and development of the universe is new for all of us.

---

A few examples can help us appreciate just how all-inclusive this understanding is of the world which we have via our Thinking function's awareness of the flow of time.

Galaxies. We've known about galaxies for less than a century. And we know now that there was a time when there were no galaxies at all-- and that once they came into existence, that was the end of their phase of the cosmos' growth and development. No new galaxies have appeared since. It's something like those first special leaves that appear when seeds spout. Once they emerge, that's it. That stage in the plant's development is done.

Stars. While humans have known about stars since there first were humans, the understanding that even stars get born and go through a developmental cycle is only about fifty or sixty years old. And the fact that at one time in the world's history there weren't any stars, and that many that once existed now no longer exist... well, it's very difficult for many of us to be comfortable with such thoughts.

Atoms. The earliest elementary kinds of matter were sub-atomic particles: leptons and quarks. Some of them bonded to form the simplest atoms, hydrogen and helium, and some of those atoms were gradually pulled together by gravity to form clumps of matter which eventually became the galaxies and stars.

Elements. Chemical elements are formed in the hearts of stars, where the increasing density from gravitational attraction results in the fusion of the simpler atoms of hydrogen and helium into atoms of the more complex elements such as carbon and nitrogen. The heaviest and most complex elements-- radon and uranium, for example-- are formed when a star reaches the end of its life-cycle and explodes as a super-nova-- scattering its remains into space. Some of that stardust eventually forms into planets.

Molecules. At the lower temperatures on the surface of planets, the chemical elements can bond into small molecules such as water, ammonia and carbon dioxide, and these simple molecules can bond further to become the more complex compounds like proteins, carbohydrates and nucleic acids found in all living things.

Cells. Some of the larger and more complex biochemical molecules can bond to form living cells, and some cells can eventually unite to form many-celled plants and animals.

Brains. Out of this long temporal sequence, some animals develop a nervous system and brain. And some of the most complex brains allow for reflective self-awareness. (That's us!)

---

Yes, each of us results from the process of growth and development of the universe over 14 billion years. But it's the sequential nature of the process that I want to emphasize here.

The universe isn't just a place but an event. Or better, it's an on-going series of events, a developmental sequence of continuous transformations.

This isn't easy for our minds to take in. Some people still refuse to believe that there really was a time when there were no human beings on Earth. But, in fact, there was once a time when there wasn't any Earth at all. Even harder to imagine is that there once was a time when the stars had not yet come into existence.

---

To appreciate Science's Best in terms of time and the Thinking function, it's important for us to understand this over-all developmental sequence. When we look at it, we see that the pattern is very clear:

There were no human beings on Earth before there were earlier primates.

There were no primates before there were earlier mammals with brains.

There were no animals of any kind without earlier living cells.

There were no single-celled life-forms without earlier macro-molecules.

There were no large molecules without earlier simple atoms.

There were no atoms of the more complex elements without earlier stars.

There were no stars without the elementary atoms of hydrogen and helium.

There were no elementary atoms without the earlier leptons and quarks.

And there were no sub-atomic quarks and leptons before the initial flaring forth of matter at the Big Bang.

---

It's only in the 20th century that this pattern of cosmic growth and development has become clear to us. The fact that we live in a dynamic, evolutionary world is Science's Best understanding in terms of the Sensing function's awareness of matter and our Thinking function's consciousness of time.

=== +++ ===

SPACE. In the same way that the Thinking function gives us our awareness of the temporal sequence of events which make up our universe, so the Feeling function makes us conscious of the relationships between those things which have emerged.

As we are aware that events can happen "before" or "after" other events happen, so we also are aware that things can found be "here" or "there," and "near by" or "far away." Space is the context for our realization of how things relate to other things.

But because patriarchal attitudes dismiss relationships as unimportant, Western people tend to feel much less comfortable with the spatial relationships between the various parts of the cosmos than with the temporal sequence of those parts' emergence.

However, just as we know today that things emerge sequentially, scientists have discovered that the temporal sequence also has a space-linked characteristic. They call it "nesting."

Everyone knows what a nest is, so "a nesting sequence" is a good image. And even though this is a feature of the universe which earlier generations experienced but which they weren't explicitly aware of, its meaning is obvious when we give our attention on it.

---

The main idea here is that the more complex forms of matter always appear spatially within the "nest" of less complex material forms.

We don't expect, for example, that a baby bird will hatch from an egg in a nest before there is an egg-- or even before there is a nest. It sounds silly just to say it. My point is that we so take for granted this nesting aspect of the universe's development that at first we can hardly see why it even needs to be mentioned.

But it's a major aspect of the cosmic process. Although it wasn't clearly understood for most of humanity's existence, we know today that it holds true for everything which has ever emerged in the long history of the universe.

---

I've learned from my teaching experience that it's far easier to say the words "nesting sequence" than to express well what they mean. It's important to me that I try, however. So while what follows may seem at first to be just a string of sentences, it's an attempt to describe just what's meant by "nesting sequence" when we're talking about the development of cosmic matter over 14 billion years:

When the first quarks and leptons appeared after the Big Bang, not all of them became hydrogen and helium atoms. (Leptons and quarks still exist today.)

Once there were the elementary atoms of hydrogen and helium, not all of them were pulled together by gravity to form galaxies. (The universe is still filled with clouds of hydrogen atoms.)

Once galaxies came into existence, not all of them produced stars. (Stars are formed only in those galaxies which have the familiar spiral shape.)

Once stars are formed in galaxies, not all of them generate atoms of the complex elements like sulfur and oxygen.

Once stars reach the end of their life-cycle, not all of them explode; that is, not all of them create the more complex heavy elements like uranium which gets splattered into space.

Once the stardust from exploded stars is scattered into space, not all of it gets pulled together by gravity into clumps which eventually form planets.

Once there are planets, not all of them have conditions favorable for the emergence of single-celled life-forms.

Once there were living cells on the Earth, not all of them joined to form multi-cellular plants and animals.

Once there were animals, not all animal species developed a nervous system and brain.

And once there were animals with a nervous system and brain, not all them had brains complex enough to allow them to become, as we humans are, reflectively self-aware.

---

The point of it all is that you and I-- as the universe become conscious of itself-- exist within a nest within a nest within a nest... within a nest within a nest within a nest... of cosmic matter. The flow of time results in a nesting sequence of galaxies, stars, planets, living things and human persons. Every new thing emerges out of previously existing things.

This understanding of the spatial relationships between things and the nesting sequence in which they emerge is a major aspect of Science's Best in our day.

A significant consequence of understanding the concepts of "nesting sequence" and "spatial relationships" is the realization that the idea of human beings as isolated solitary individuals is an obvious mistake. A more accurate evaluation of our consciousness of space in terms of our Feeling-function awareness is the familiar Native American expression, "All things are my relations!"

=== +++ ===

For many, a question which immediately comes to mind when we use our Sensing, Thinking and Feeling functions to understand the matter, time and space of the cosmos is one which you have probably often asked yourself: "How does all that work?"

We want to know why it is that matter emerges through space and time in a nesting sequence. We want to know why the flow of time results in the temporal sequence of galaxies, stars, planets, living things and ourselves. And why do we find ourselves existing spatially-- "in a nest within a nest within a nest..."?

To round out the fourth corner of this mandala of Science's Best we need the understanding of energy which our Intuitive awareness offers us. It's Intuition that puts it all together.

sam@macspeno.com

=== +++ ===

Your feedback is welcome!

Special request: I've completely lost the comments for posts #84 to #89. If you happen to have copied any of them, please send them to me. Thanks.

To send a comment: use either "Click here to send a comment" (below) or click on "Post a Comment" (at the bottom).

If you prefer, send your thoughts, suggestions and questions to my email address (above).

To email a link to this post to a friend, with your own message, click on the little envelope with an arrow (below).

If you would like to be notified when I publish a new post, let me know; I'll put you on the list.

+++

#94. Religion "At Its Best"

2011-07-13T00:02:00.020-05:00

This post now contains all three parts which were originally published separately.

===

"There's more to religion than it seems."

I've made that statement many times during my years as a teacher. And in the home-stretch reflections that I described in the previous post (#93) about my nearly five-year-long blog-writing effort, I discovered that what stands out most for me is the inadequacy I feel with regard to sharing my thoughts about that "more."

So in this post I'm going to try say, as well as I can, what I mean by "Religion 'At Its Best'."

The very fact that there is a "more"-- an inner core of wisdom at the depths of Western culture's Judeo-Christian tradition-- is difficult for many of us to realize. It's difficult because it's precisely that "best" that got lost.

---

Religion's "best" was replaced by body-soul and matter-spirit dualism-- the basic outlook of patriarchal culture and classical philosophy-- which has dominated western culture and religion for many centuries.

I'm aware that I am more personally attuned than many, apparently, to that kind of depth awareness often called "right brain" or "intuitive" perception. But still I have to say that I'm continually amazed that the very fact that there is a "more" to religion-- more than the static dualism of rational empiricism-- remains for the most part unknown to the general public.

The "more" is still there. That inner core of wisdom is preserved in the rituals, customs, art and music, creeds, feasts and seasons of the Western religious tradition. But it's precisely the significance of such things that rational empiricism can't see because of its position at the bottom rung of the Great Ladder.

We need to move up the ladder. It's only when we make use of our intuitive rationality that we can recognize the "more" of the Judeo-Christian tradition and can enter into an experience of that inner core of wisdom which is our Western culture's religion "at its best."

---

I have referred repeatedly in these posts to the four-fold way our minds work-- the fact that we don't just think sequentially and we don't just perceive our existence in terms of its surface details. We can, in fact, be aware of our connections with everything; and we can, in fact, see the whole picture-- the big picture of how the world works and how our lives fit into it.

Even though the Judeo-Christian tradition originally gave the world its evolutionary viewpoint, the dynamic and unitive perspective at the base of Western religion was gradually replaced by the static-dualistic outlook of classical philosophy. For many in our patriarchal culture, the word "religion" still means only that world-rejecting outlook of patriarchy's static dualism.

So if we are to get to the heart of our Western religious tradition, we need to move higher up the ladder; we need to see the world, and ourselves in it, from the dynamic and unitive perspectives.

===

Everybody know what "dynamic" means in contrast to "static," but hardly anyone is comfortable with either "unitive" or its opposite, "dualistic."

Nowadays, our world is changing so fast that no one any longer thinks that "there's nothing new under the sun." Indeed, we know now that the world has never not been undergoing great changes. We know from science that over billions of years galaxies, planets and the stars have evolved; that on Earth living matter has emerged from the dust of the stars; and that we ourselves have developed from those earlier life forms.

But it's still a surprise to many to learn that that dynamic (emergent, evolutionary) worldview comes originally from our Western religious tradition, and that we even have a biblical name for the "energy" or "power" of the cosmic process: dynamis in Greek, spiritus in Latin.

Spiritus also means wind, air and life-breath; the holy spiritus we understand to be empowering the evolution of the universe is the same dynamis which gives each of us our life and breath and personal self-awareness.

---

This dynamic perspective-- that we are not separate from the matter of the physical cosmos, nor from the Earth's biological life-forms, nor from the holy spiritus which empowers the evolution of the universe-- also helps us to understand what's meant by "unitive."

For most of us, it's an unfamiliar word. As the opposite of "dualistic," "unitive" refers both to our union with the natural world and to our union with the world's creative source.

And while "Big History"-- the big picture of the universe we have from contemporary science-- makes clear that we are indeed part of the natural world, we don't yet have something analogous to "Big History" which we might call "Big Religion." The most explicit contemporary perspectives available about our non-duality with the divine come from the unitive views of the Asian religious traditions.

While the spiritualities of Asia have remained more open than have those of the West to the sense of divine-human unity which goes back to Paleolithic times, in Western culture the unitive view was smothered by the static dualism of patriarchy. So the non-Western religious traditions such as Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism can help us recover the human-divine aspect of the unitive worldview.

---

I've mentioned in several posts the twentieth-century religious thinker and British monk Bede Griffith. He not only makes the point well that science is helping religion recover its "inner core"; he even left England and went to live in India "to find," he said, "the other half of my soul."

Bede's words may sound confusing, but the unitive view is in fact two-fold, and we need to be especially clear here in thinking about it: there is a human-cosmos unity and a human-divine unity. We need both, if we are to recover the non-dual vision of cosmic-human-divine unity at the heart of the Western tradition.

But while help for seeing the cosmic-human view comes from science, and while the divine-human perspective is clearer with the help of Eastern spiritualities, that's not enough. It's the convergence of these two perspectives-- the cosmic-human from science and the divine-human from Asian religions-- that provides the context for us to enter into and to experience the inner core of wisdom at the depths of our own Judeo-Christian tradition.

===

You may be thinking, "All that is just the context? What, then, about the content?"

Well, I have three Greek words which, in addition to "evolution," seem to me to be needed to spell out what I'm calling the Judeo-Christian tradition "at its best." They are eschaton, eucharist and ecclesia.

In the previous post I mentioned that if I were sharing these thoughts in an article for an academic journal, the essay would have a title something like "Evolutionary Eschatology and Eucharistic Ecclesiology."

That's quite a mouthful, but those are the words I have to work with! "Eschatology" is a deep-level comprehensive view of the purpose of our evolving universe, "Eucharistic" refers to our human response to that understanding, and "Ecclesiology" is concerned with the nature of the community of those who respond.

What holds all these ideas together is, as I see it, the modern understanding of person-- which, remarkably, is honored both in Western secular culture and by Western religion. In what follows, I will use each of these ideas-- eschaton, eucharist, ecclesia and person, all in the context of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution-- to do my best to spell out my understanding of religion at its best.

If you've been feeling that this post has been heavy-going so far, you're right. But you've got through the worst of it. And while the rest is relatively easy, it's long. So if you're reading it at one sitting, this is a good place to take a break.

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ESCHATON. Eschaton is our understanding of the world's end-purpose. In the old static context, "the end of the world" meant its annihilation-- "when God will come to judge the world by fire," in the words of the hymn sung at Catholic funerals for a thousand years.

In the dynamic context, we're not talking about the world's "end" in the sense of its annihilation, nor in the sense of the coming of the "Rapture" repeatedly announced by religious fundamentalists. In unitive (non-dualistic) terms, the world's "end" is its purpose: why it exists-- and why, of course, we exist.

If we are to appreciate our Western religious tradition "at its best," we need to understand the end-purpose of the world in terms of the tradition's own dynamic-unitive insights.

I noted back in post #20 that even those who promote the New Cosmology seem to shy away from this aspect of the Western tradition. But as I see it, no matter what we may call the divine creative power-- the ultimate, the numinous, the great Mystery-- we have a profound need to understand-- in terms of the Western tradition's own evolutionary and unitive context-- the tradition's insights into the creative source's purpose.

And this is one area where the rational empiricism of science isn't of help. We simply can't see the "end" or "purpose" of anything-- let alone the purpose of everything-- from the bottom rung of the great ladder. Our Sensing function's focus on details just isn't good enough. We need to use our mind's Intuitive ability if we are to see the biggest of all Big Pictures: why there is anything, rather than nothing.

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In writing this blog over the last four-and-a-half years I've worked hard to spell out my understanding of modern Western culture's upward movement to this higher rung of the great ladder-- where we can, in fact, see the Big Picture.

I focused on that cultural transition especially in post #80, where I described the mid-20th-century efforts of the "two mavericks"-- depth psychologist C. G. Jung and atomic physicist Wolfgang Pauli-- to accept and express their understanding of our mind's intuitive capacity in the face of several centuries of its neglect and denial by Western science's empirical rationality.

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In the science of cultural anthropology, any social group's response to the basic human need to understand "our place in the vast scheme of things" is called its cosmology. The "New Cosmology" is new precisely because it replaces Western culture's previous static cosmology. And as I've mentioned frequently, in that older dualistic religious perspective we were told that our purpose was to escape from the world.

We can now see, however-- thanks to the evolutionary worldview of modern science-- that we do in fact have a place in the evolving cosmos. And it's this insight which allows us to recover the older inner core of wisdom-- that "more"-- that I've been calling the West's religious tradition "at its best."

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I've noted many times that the very idea of evolution comes originally from the Judeo-Christian tradition. And that to this day, the perspective of an on-going emergence of newness-- imaged traditionally in terms of Exodus, Passover and new life arising in Spring-- remains an essential aspect of its inner core of wisdom. When we think in terms of transformation, we can see that it's not an exaggeration to say that evolution is what Western religion is all about.

Christianity sees this transformation process at the heart of the cosmos as a manifestation and embodiment of the divine source. We even have familiar words for this understanding: "epiphany" and "incarnation." But it is precisely the deeper meaning of those terms which got lost when patriarchy's static dualism replaced the earlier dynamic perspective.

In that patriarchal context, the meaning of "incarnation" came to be limited to one time, one place and one person. As its broader meaning was lost over the centuries, that limited understanding came to be taken for granted and, eventually, it was presumed to be the very basis of Western religion.

But as we recover the earlier dynamic-unitive perspectives at the inner core of the tradition, the entire evolutionary process can once again be recognized as the incarnation of the creative source of the cosmos. We can see, in that evolutionary context, that the embodiment of divine creativity is happening always and everywhere-- and that it excludes nothing and no one.

Here are some examples of this understanding, from three profound 20th-century religious thinkers:

Karl Rahner says, "The Mystery is always and everywhere giving itself to us." It is "always and everywhere making itself known to us."

Sergius Bulgakov calls the cosmic process the "actualization of the divine potentialities."

Raimundo Panikkar-- in his demanding but significant language-- names what's being embodied "the cosmo-the-andric unity." The union of the cosmic (cosmos), the divine (theos), and the human (andros) is what's being manifest by the cosmic process.

Rahner was a German Catholic and Bulgakov was Russian Orthodox. Panikkar had a Spanish mother, an Asian Indian father, and he described himself as "Catholic when I'm in Rome, Hindu when I'm in India, Buddhist when I'm in China."

Each of these profound religious thinkers, with their highly varied cultural backgrounds, is expressing-- in the dynamic-unitive perspectives available to us from modern science-- the same inner core of wisdom at the heart of the tradition. And that is "religion at its best."

My whole point here is that the "more" isn't new. Rahner, Bulgakov and Panikkar are saying exactly what the New Testament's Second Epistle of Peter proclaims, for example, when the apostle says that we are called to be "partakers in the divine nature." That "more" is expressed even more dynamically in Paul's letter to the Ephesians where he describes the end-purpose of all things to be "the fullness of God in everything."

It is a great gift that, in our time, thanks to science, we can understand once again this dynamic and unitive understanding of eschaton as the embodiment of the divine-human-cosmic unity, "God all-in-all."

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EUCHARIST. Gratefulness is the normal response to anything we experience as a gift, and clearly this deep comprehension of the eschaton evokes in us a very deep response.

To this day, Jewish tradition preserves this fundamental human response to the dynamic world in words of thanks-giving over bread and wine. The early Christians continued this form of grateful response when they gathered in homes on the first day of the week in remembrance of Jesus; and this tradition, too, is still continued daily throughout the world.

But just as with the dynamic understanding of eschaton, the evolutionary meaning of eucharist was lost when the static-dualistic-- patriarchal-- view replaced the earlier Judeo-Christian perspective. But also as with eschaton, the shift in our day away from the static perspective to a recovery of the older dynamic understanding is happening with regard to eucharist as well.

I wrote about the recovery of the dynamic view of eucharist in two recent posts. In post #91 (Evolution and the Passover Seder), I described how the seder's central act of thanks-giving is an explicit response to the evolutionary worldview which originated in the historical Exodus from Egypt.

And I wrote about the unitive meaning of eucharist-- our cosmo-the-andric union with all things-- in post #92 (Evolution and Holy Communion).

I don't feel the need to repeat those thoughts here. But I do want to note just how different was the original dynamic understanding of the eucharist from its later static meaning. In the same way that eschaton in the dualistic worldview came to mean not the fulfillment but the annihilation of the world, so eucharist in the dualist context came to refer not to an activity by a group of persons, but to an object. A sacred object, surely, but an other-worldly sacred object.

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You may be expecting me to say that a similar process happened with regard to ecclesia, the third of the Greek terms needed for understanding Western religion at its best. You are right, again!

Of those three terms, ecclesia is by far the most difficult to understand from the dynamic-unitive perspective. This is not, however, because the meaning of ecclesia is difficult to understand in itself-- it isn't-- but because patriarchy continues to dominate the (essentially unconscious) perspectives of the Western religious tradition's own self-understanding.

That self-understanding is what the following section is all about. It's challenging material in that it requires time and effort to work through it well, so if you are reading this post in one sitting, you might want to take another break.

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ECCLESIA. We don't have a English equivalent for the Greek word eucharist, but the English equivalent of ecclesia is, of course, "church." It comes from an Old English word, kirk, which simply means "assembly" or "gathering"-- just as the Greek ecclesia does.

Probably the best contemporary translation of ecclesia is "community"-- not in the sense of a geographic or genetic group, but in the sense of a gathering of persons who intentionally get together for a specific purpose.

In the New Testament, eucharist was the name for an action, what the early Christians did when they gathered; ecclesia was their name for themselves when they got together to do it.

As the perspectives of static dualism took over, however, "church" lost its meaning as community and eventually acquired the patriarchal meaning it has today: a hierarchical institution or sociological establishment, often top-heavy with authority. And as it's commonly used nowadays, especially by journalists and media people, "the Church" has come to mean only those authorities.

This patriarchal, static and dualistic understanding of ecclesia obviously does not represent our religious tradition at its best.

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But just as with eucharist and eschaton, the modern evolutionary perspective helps us in recovering the original-- dynamic and unitive-- meaning of ecclesia. It does takes some effort, however.

We know from contemporary science-- and specifically from the study of complexity theory-- that the 14-billon-year evolutionary process has been continually characterized by the emergence of new levels of self-organization.

We know that stars can produce chemical elements, that some of those elements can combine to form living cells, and that some cells unite to form the kind of brain and nervous system which is needed for the emergence of our uniquely human self-reflective awareness.

That's a greatly simplified summary of the idea of emergence in the evolutionary process, but I think it's good enough to make fairly clear that the natural next step-- beyond atoms and molecules, life-forms and personal consciousness-- would be those groups and gatherings of persons we call "communities."

It's in this context of evolutionary emergence that we can better understand the ecclesia as a community rather than as a patriarchal and hierarchical institution.

In the Western religious tradition at its best, what characterizes the ecclesia is its self-understanding precisely as a community of those who gather to give thanks. Just as in the evolutionary context we can better understand the meaning eucharist in terms of eschaton, so in that came context we can better understand the meaning of ecclesia in terms of eucharist.

A fancy way to summarize these confusing-sounding thoughts is to say that "as eschatology is evolutionary, so ecclesiology is eucharistic." (That's where my imaginary academic title for this post-- "Evolutionary Eschatology and Eucharistic Ecclesiology"-- comes from.)

But those fancy words aren't helpful. In fact, they get in the way of our entering into the deeper meaning of the insights they are attempting to express.

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For me, the two religious thinkers who are most helpful for an understanding of the meanings of eschaton, eucharist and ecclesia in the context of evolution are Alexander Schmemann and Thomas Berry.

I quoted both of these profound religious thinkers in recent posts: #90 ("Returning" the World...) and #87 (Stardust's Imperative). If you haven't read those posts, I hope you will. Here's a very brief summary of some of their main thoughts.

Both Berry and Schmemann begin with the primary evolutionary insight that, in Berry's words, "persons are a cosmic phenomenon," and that it's this cosmic perspective-- that we are "the evolutionary process come to self-awareness"-- that allows us to see "our proper role in the universe."

Each describes "our place in the vast scheme of things" with quite different words, but with remarkably similar meanings.

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Alexander Schmemann speaks in a more traditional and liturgical language. "Our primary role in the cosmos is to be priest," he says. The "first, the basic definition of humanity, is that a person is a priest." And it is the "only natural reaction of humanity, to whom God gave this blessed and sanctified world, to bless God in return."

Returning the world to God in thanks, says Schmemann, is "our common task." Because we are "the world become conscious of itself," we humans are its "spokespersons." We speak as the world and for the world. In Schmemann's words, "We stand in the center of the world and unify it, in our act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God."

And "by filling the world with this eucharist," he adds, "we transform our life." In a wonderfully Teilhardian sentence in summary of these thoughts he says, "The world was created as the 'matter,' the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and humanity was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament."

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Thomas Berry's words sound much less traditional, but his meanings are very much the same. Here too, we humans are understood to speak as the world and for the world. It's easy to overlook, but Berry even uses the word "return," just as Schmemann does, in describing our cosmic role. We are "to return the universe to itself and to its numinous origins," he says. And we "return" the world to its source by returning the world to itself.

Berry is especially strong in his emphasis on our need to recognize that "community" is the very goal and purpose of the cosmic process. Eschaton and ecclesia come together in Berry's words when he says, quite explicitly, that "the ultimate community is the whole universe together."

Understood in this way, we can see that ecclesia includes everything: no one and nothing is outside the cosmic process of divine incarnation. This-- obviously-- is an understanding of ecclesia utterly unlike the conventional understanding of "church" as an authoritarian patriarchal institution.

And when we do see ecclesia in this way-- as the ultimate community, the whole universe together-- then "church" is simply another way of expressing the meaning of eschaton, as God all-in-all and the fullness of God in everything.

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You may be thinking the meanings of these Greek words are starting to overlap. They are!

Our rational, right-brain, linear Thinking ability just isn't able to produce the words and concepts well enough to express these profound, deeper-than-rational, left-brain intuitions. The religious tradition itself offers an outstanding example of this fact about the limitation of our rational-only minds: since New Testament times, the underlying realities referred to by the words eucharist, ecclesia and eschaton have all been given one same name.

The eschaton as the embodied cosmic community of the fullness of God in everything, excluding nothing... the eucharist as humanity's deepest response of thanks-giving for the evolution of the universe as the manifestation of the divine-comic-unity... the ecclesia as the community gathered around bread and wine in thanks for this divine incarnation of God all-in-all, and for our participation in it-- all of these profound realities are traditionally called the Corpus Christi.

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These are deep thoughts. It's not easy to wrap our minds around them. And yet they are in fact what Western religion is all about "at its best."

For me, what holds them all together is the centrality of person. In the convergent perspective-- where eschaton, eucharist and ecclesia are understood within the context of cosmic-biological-cultural evolution-- what stands out most for me is our personal uniqueness.

We are unique from the moment of our conception. The chance that anyone else might have the exact same DNA is said to be one in 10, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000.

We not only have our own inner world from the first moment of our existence, however. Our personal self-awareness is continually being modified by every life-experience. And once we reach the stage of self-reflective maturity, we add to it ourselves by our personal relationships and free choices.

And all of this-- the mystery that we are-- becomes our unique contribution to the Corpus Christi.

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So that's the "more" as I see it. In the simplest words I'm able to come up with: Each of us makes a difference with regard to the ultimate end of the world.

In my previous post about reviewing my almost five-year-long blog effort (#93, The Home Stretch), I said that what stood out most for me was the feeling of inadequacy I had with regard to doing a good-enough job in expressing my thoughts about the depths of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I think I've probably done as well in this present post as I'm going to be able to do. It's my best in sharing my thoughts about religion at its best. My thanks to you for staying with me through all these efforts!

sam@macspeno.com

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Your feedback is welcome.

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If you would like to be notified when I publish a new post, let me know; I'll put you on the list.

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#93. The Home Stretch

2011-06-21T00:02:00.061-05:00

I began writing this blog about the convergence of science and religion late in 2006. I didn't expect, then, that over the next five years I would end up writing almost a hundred mini-essays. I didn't know I would have so much to say. I've learned a lot in five years!

As the number of posts continued to grow, I had the feeling that I should stop before I reached the one hundredth post. That's still my plan. I hope to end with #99.

The need to stop before post #100 has the feeling for me of the old Zen story about the novice who was assigned to swept a littered garden path but each time he thought he was finished, the chief gardener said "Not good enough." When, after a half-dozen attempts, the young monk finally asked in frustration to be shown what more he needed to do, the old gardener picked up a handful of leaves and scattered them on the path.

Not going to the nice round number for the blog posts feels something like leaving a few leaves scattered on the path. So, at this point (June 2011) I'm in the home stretch and I've been looking back at my earlier entries to see what thoughts I feel I still want to share. I've found several; that's what this post is about.

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I need to begin with a few words about how this blog got started in the first place.

It was an invitation, in the summer of 2005, from the alumni committee of my high school's fiftieth anniversary reunion which originally got me started in sharing my thoughts about the contemporary convergence of science and religion. "Send us a note," the committee said, "telling us what you've been up to in the last few years. We'll publish the responses we get in a booklet for the reunion."

When I retired in June 2000-- after 40 years of teaching high school science and college level theology-- I finally had the time to think about the links between those two big areas of human endeavor. Since that was, in fact, "what I'd been up to over the last few years," I wrote a brief report about my reflections for the reunion committee.

It was my earliest attempt to share my thoughts about the connections between science and religion. With an introduction and a few additional comments, that reunion report was eventually published in February, 2007, as post #3 ("High School 50th-Anniversary Report"). It's still on-line, if you'd like to look at it. (It's brief.)

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When I first considered the reunion committee's request, it felt important for me to send something less conventional than the usual comments in such reports, like "living in Florida now" or "had our third grandchild." I felt the need to say something about my efforts to understand the connections between science (specifically, evolutionary science) and religion (specifically, Western culture's Judeo-Christian tradition).

I mean it quite literally when I say that "I felt the need." I experienced a strong sense of being urged or called to say something of significance about how cosmic evolution and the spiritual side of life are related. I felt as if I was being given a "calling"-- a "vocation" in the old-fashioned sense. It seems I was. It turned out that this was, indeed, a major start for a new phase of my life.

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The task I felt was being assigned to me was to make use of my many years of teaching experience along with my background in science and religion (I have masters degrees in both) to share with my fellow high school graduates something about where my life-long interest in science and spirituality had taken me over the half-century since we graduated together from high school.

It wasn't until a year after I wrote the report for the reunion, however, that the idea of writing a blog about the convergence of science and religion came to me. It was originally my daughter's suggestion.

While many in our society tend to back away from any serious interest in science and math, and many more remain amazingly (to me) uninformed about the religious traditions of the world, Rosemary knew that I was comfortable with both areas and she obviously thought that I had something to say.

===

I have, in fact, been fascinated by these two areas of human endeavor all my life. But in contrast to many who think of science and religion as incompatible perspectives, I always saw them as complementary and converging ways of understanding human life and our existence in the world.

I'm not alone, of course. In reviewing my earlier posts to see what thoughts I still felt wanted to be shared, I was surprised to see how many of the names of the thinkers-- scientists and religious writers-- who I mentioned in the first few posts are mentioned in many of the later posts as well.

Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry top the list, as might be expected, since Teilhard was a prophet and Berry a pioneer of the integration in our culture of science and spirituality. But many other less well-known names are also mentioned frequently: Sergius Bulgakov, Bede Griffiths, Brian Swimme, Raimundo Panikkar, Michael Dowd, Mary Conrow Coelho, and Bruno Barnhart, for example. All of them are mentioned in my first few posts.

These are persons who I see as being on the growing edge of humanity's present cultural development. And, as I said in the high school reunion report, "Although they each use very different words, they all seem to be saying something similar."

What they are saying, in one way or another, is that "we humans are an integral part of the evolving universe and that we thrive in dynamic relationship with the cosmic Mystery."

That last sentence is from post #3. It's a pretty good summary of what the "new cosmology" is all about and why the contemporary convergence of science and religion is so important in our day. For the most part, in recent centuries, Western religion has denied that we humans have any place in the material universe and Western science has denied that there was any mystery for us to relate to.

That's the context, thanks to that high school reunion committee's invitation, for my "calling" to help make the insights of the new cosmology available to others who might be interested but who, for one reason or another, do not happen to have the background or experience I do. In a word, my teaching career wasn't over, it just took on a very different form.

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There was a second event, in addition to that high school reunion committee's invitation, which helps to make sense of my "calling." In the spring of 2006 I attended a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania, co-sponsored by a number of medically and spiritually concerned groups, on the place of belief, "religious and otherwise," in the healing process.

It was attended by a large number of medical people, as well as hospital chaplains, pastors, persons involved in religious education, and the curious-- like me.

It was very exciting to be part of that symposium. When I returned home and reflected on my experiences, I had such a strong desire to share with others what I'd learned that I wrote a report about it which I e-mail to friends. That report also became a blog post, and it, too, is still on-line, if you'd like to read it. Look for post #2 ("Spirituality Research Symposium").

Unlike the high school reunion committee's request, I had not been invited to write about the symposium. I wrote it simply because I had a strong inner need to "share my thoughts."

So that's how this blog came to be. And, as I've said, it did, in fact, begin a new phase of my life.

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Now that it is five years later, and I'm in the home stretch, in looking back I see something else which quite unexpectedly stands out. It's how frequently I express frustration at the lack of adequate words for communicating the thoughts I want to share.

I see that I have complained repeatedly about the available words being just not good enough; I've even entitled one of the posts (#21) "Struggling with Words."

My teacher-instincts rebel at the inadequacy of good tools, in our culture, for communicating new ideas about our place in the world and the presence of mystery in our lives. There's a good example in post #2 where I end a brief description of the cosmic and biological basis of our human origins with the words, "And we started out as stardust."

I don't have the talent to express well the awe I experience when I reflect on our origins and destiny seen in the context of evolutionary science and the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. As I've said many times in the blog, I'd really like to be a poet!

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Another fact which stands out in my home stretch blog-review is how consistently I have made use of the four-fold or "quaternary" understanding of human consciousness in trying to put my thoughts into clearly understandable words.

That sentence I just wrote provides another example of the frustration I mentioned above about the lack of adequate words. The fact is that I can't count on every reader knowing what I mean by the "quaternary understanding of human consciousness." Few people in our culture are yet aware that our conscious awareness functions in four distinct ways.

So we don't just need a better understanding of our religious instincts and of how the physical world works. We also need a better understanding of how our own minds work!

I've found my understanding of the four-fold workings of our conscious minds to be a big part of what I've had to say with regard to the new cosmology. More accurately, it's a big part of how I've tried to say what I have to say. I've come to see that the quaternary perspective provides us with a basic set of "tools" for our understanding of the new relationship between religion and science which emerged in the 20th century.

My genes didn't give me any poetry-writing talents, but they certainly have provided me with strong thinking skills and teaching instincts!

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In my home stretch reflections I have also recognized something about the quaternary perspective which I hadn't seen before: how useful it is precisely for understanding the details of the great cultural shift that's happening as we move away from the static worldview of patriarchal civilization.

Knowing that conscious awareness operates in four distinct ways is tremendously helpful for understanding the many details involved in global humanity's movement to the dynamic-evolutionary perspectives of the new cosmology. And some of those details about that great shift in human consciousness are still calling to me to be shared.

If I was writing about it for an academic journal, I'd name that article something like "Understanding the Contemporary Immense Transition in Terms of the Four Jungian Functions." That wouldn't work as a title for a post, of course, but it is a good expression of what would be the main thoughts I'd be sharing.

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Perhaps what stands out for me most in the review of my five-year-long blog effort is the inadequacy-- or maybe, more correctly, the incompleteness-- of my attempts to express well my thoughts about the depths of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

With regard to the spiritual side of the science-religion convergence I often say, "There's more to religion than it seems."

By that "more" I mean precisely the inner core of wisdom at the depth of the religious tradition that got lost over the centuries due to the body-soul and matter-spirit dualism which has dominated western culture and religion for so long.

Even though the Judeo-Christian tradition originally gave the world its evolutionary viewpoint, the static-dualistic outlook of classical philosophy and patriarchal culture gradually replaced the dynamic and unitive perspectives at the base of the Judeo-Christian religion.

So, in talking about the convergence of science and religion, to indicate that I don't mean "religion" in the static-dualistic sense-- as it's still understood by fundamentalists-- I often use the words "religion at its best."

I say "at its best" because I can't assume that all readers know what I mean by Christianity's "dynamic and unitive perspective"-- any more, unfortunately, than I can take for granted that every reader knows what I mean by "quaternary consciousness."

For me, religion "at its best" specifically includes all those concerns which are outside the competence of the rational-empirical awareness of science and which, for that reason, are dismissed as non-existent by those lacking the quaternary perspective.

We need that four-fold outlook to recognize that there is "more" to our lives than just the details. A good example of the "more" is our deep, if usually unspoken, wonder about the end of the world.

Even those words-- without an understanding of our minds' intuitive-rational functioning-- are usually misunderstood!

I mean "end" in the sense of purpose. At the level of intuitive rationality-- where we focus not on empirical details but on the big picture of our lives in the world-- our consciousness asks questions like, "Why does the universe exist at all?" And, "What's the place of conscious creatures such as ourselves in the vast scheme of things?"

Those who are still stuck on the bottom rung of the Great Ladder laugh at such thoughts. (If the idea of the "Great Ladder of Being" is new to you, see posts #74, #75 & #82.)

While I have already written many posts about the four-fold capacities of our minds, in this home stretch I still feel the need to spell out more clearly my thoughts specifically about the dynamic and unitive perspectives which are part of what I mean when I refer to "religion at its best."

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One more concern is closely connected with the world's purpose or end. Since we can't remain indifferent to it, we have the question of what kinds of responses our awareness of the world's end might take.

I think that topic-- of how we respond to our conscious awareness of the purpose of the world-- must be the most difficult of all the thoughts I feel called on to share.

Just as my "academic" title for a post on a quaternary view of the shift away from patriarchy wouldn't work well as the name for a post (it was, you will remember, "Understanding the Contemporary Immense Transition in Terms of the Four Jungian Functions"), neither would the title appropriate for an academic journal work well for what I want to say in the blog about "religion at its best."

In an academic context, that post would have a title like "Evolutionary Eschatology and Eucharistic Ecclesiology."

As you can see, at this very moment-- even after five years of writing these posts-- I'm still "struggling with words"!

In any case, the fact is that an awareness of world's purpose is at the heart of Judeo-Christian tradition, and my thoughts about how we can most humanly and authentically respond to it are ideas about which I still feel urged to share my thoughts. I hope to do it in the next few posts.

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The final topic I still feel called to write about-- even after more than 90 posts-- will not come as a surprise to long-time readers. Yes, it's ritual.

From the time I first started the blog, I've felt a very strong need to share my understanding of the explanation of ritual presented in what's now a more than 30-year-old text, The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis (Columbia University Press, 1979).

I think the insights coming out of that early neurological research-- done completely in the context of biological and anthropological evolution three or four decades ago-- are by far the best perspectives yet available on the nature of religious ritual.

I feel, in fact, that I won't be able to die in peace if I don't share with others at least some understanding of the ideas offered by the early Biogenetic Structuralists. I hope to do it.

If nothing else, I would like to write at least a brief book review-- so I can rest in peace!

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Well, that's my agenda as I move into the home stretch of the blog. If you would like to add something to my list, let me know.

sam@macpeno.com

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Your feedback is welcome.

Special request: I've completely lost the comments for posts #84 to #89. If you happen to have copied any of them, please send them to me. Thanks.

To send a comment: use either "Click here to send a comment" (below) or click on "Post a Comment" (at the bottom).

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If you would like to be notified when I publish a new post, let me know; I'll put you on the list.

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