#90. "Returning" the World...

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This post is a bit longer than most, and a lot deeper, so I've put it into three parts. They follow one another sequentially but can be read separately. Much to think about!

Part 1. "Your recent blog is great," says reader Mary Coelho. "It is a most important topic and very well written. I can't say I quite get [Thomas Berry's comment] that our common task is 'to return the universe to itself and to its numinous origins'."

Mary's comment on post #87 (Stardust's Imperative: Reinterpretation) was echoed by other readers, so in this post I want to share my thoughts about what Berry means by "returning" the world. It's not only an important concept in itself. The distinction Berry makes between returning the world to its numinous source and to itself is also especially helpful in clarifying the nature of the "new mode of religious understanding" we have today thanks to the evolutionary world view of modern science.

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What Berry means by "returning the world" makes sense to me because one of my all-time favorite religious thinkers, Alexander Schmemann, says something very similar. It's in the opening chapter of his popular and influential book on Christian faith understood from a liturgical perspective, For the Life of the World, Sacraments and Orthodoxy.

His book was originally prepared as a study guide for the National Student Christian Federation in 1963. It has been translated into eleven languages and even had an anonymous version published by the underground samizdat in the Soviet Union.

Because in the last 50 years we have become highly sensitive to the use of "man" for human and "He" for God, I've edited Schmemann's words slightly; it's important that what's now seen as sexist language doesn't get in the way of what Schmemann has to say about our "common task." I think it provides us with a very clear understanding of what Berry is saying.

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Schmemann begins by talking about the story in the first book of the Bible where God gives Adam the job of naming the animals. "To name a thing," say Schmemann, "is to manifest the meaning and value God gave it, to know it as coming from God and to know its place and function within the cosmos created by God."

"To name a thing," he continues, "is to bless God for it and in it." He emphasizes that in the biblical view, "to bless God is not a 'religious' or a 'cultic' act, but the very way of life."

Because "God blessed the world, blessed humanity, blessed the seventh day (that is, time), and made all this 'very good,' the "only natural (and not 'supernatural') reaction of humanity, to whom God gave this blessed and sanctified world, is to bless God in return, to thank God, to see the world as God sees it and-- in this act of gratitude and adoration-- to know, name and possess the world."

Schmemann also notes that "this capacity to bless God, to know, so to speak, the meaning of the thirst and hunger that constitutes humanity's life" is what distinguishes human persons from other creatures, so that the "first, the basic definition of humanity is that a person is a priest."

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Fifty years ago Schmemann's readers would not have been as uncomfortable with his word "priest" as many would be today. It has become a patriarchal term-- distinguishing privileged males (for the most part) from the rest of us. But as I see it, describing person as priest is a way of saying that we are to be the world's "spokesperson." 

We speak as the world and for the world. We "return" the world to its source by returning the world to itself.

Here's how Schmemann puts it: "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 phase that might well have been written by Teilhard de Chardin, Schmemann 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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Here are Thomas Berry's words again: "Persons are a cosmic phenomenon-- both a part of the process and also the process itself come to self-awareness." And it's in this cosmic perspective, says Berry, that we can see our proper role in the universe; it allows us to see what persons are "for." We can see that our role (our job, our common task) is "to return the universe to itself and to its numinous origins."

It's only in light of the stages of the emergent evolutionary process that we can recognize ourselves as living matter become conscious and self-reflectively aware. And it's by this self-awareness, this knowing and experiencing ourselves as "the universe become conscious of itself," that we thereby "return" the world to itself.

And as the universe become conscious of itself, we are also the cosmos become conscious of its origins. That awareness isn't merely logical but relational: we are aware via both our Thinking and our Feeling functions of the world's numinous source, so that we can't help but express an appreciation and gratefulness. And, as Schmemann emphasizes, our gratitude is not a "religious" or a "cultic" act but a fundamentally human response to reality.

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Part 2. There's an interesting parallel between Berry's words about "returning world to its itself and its source" and the two types of intense religious experience described by neuroscientist Andrew Newberg in his new book Principles of Neurotheology.

Newberg is currently Director of Research at the Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia; he recently moved there to devote full time to his work on the neurological understanding religious experience.

In his book's Chapter 7, “Physiological and Phenomenological Correlates of Spiritual Practices,” Newberg notes that with regard to especially intense religious experiences, there is already considerable agreement by scholars on five of their seven main characteristics.

When studied "cross culturally" (in numerous individuals and spiritual traditions), the universally accepted characteristics of "peak" religious experiences include a sense of being in touch with the deepest aspects of objective reality-- although, paradoxically, the experience can't be put into words easily or at all. And they are usually described as being experiences of the "holy" and "sacred" which are accompanied by feelings of "blessedness" and "peace." Intense religious experiences everywhere have these common characteristics.

But, says Newberg, there also are two commonly observed characteristics which have different forms. To greatly over-simplify, one form is more abstract and introvert-like: the experience of a non-temporal and non-spatial pure consciousness. It is often referred to in the various spiritual traditions as "the One" or "the Void." The other type is more grounded and extravert-like: a "more concrete apprehension of the One in all things," says Newberg, "a unifying vision of the unity of all things."

While Newberg is interested in understanding the significant difference between these two types of religious experience in terms of the workings of the human brain, my concern here is understanding the difference in terms of its connection with Thomas Berry's words about our human task of returning the world to itself and its source.

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In a happy coincidence, a friend recently passed on to me an extensive article from the periodical Spiritus (Fall, 2005) by priest-theologian John McGuckin about the 10th-century Byzantine saint, Symeon the New Theologian. (I mentioned St. Symeon briefly in posts #56 & #57.)

The article has a formidable title: “Symeon the New Theologian’s Hymns of Divine Eros: A Neglected Masterpiece of the Christian Mystical Tradition.” But to my delight, I found the same distinction contemporary scholars make about the two different forms of intense religious experience was also made by Symeon the New Theologian a thousand years ago.

John McGuckin says that it is only in the 20th century that it can be seen just how remarkable Symeon's vision is: "His combination of a stress on the light-filled radiance of the divine vision, with a need for the conscious awareness of the Holy Spirit, marks him out as synthesizer of two great currents of spiritual thought."

The first of these two great currents are described by McGuckin as "the spirituality of light flowing from the school of Origen," while the other comes "from the Syrian school which emphasized the sensibility of the Spirit in the heart."

McGuckin also notes that, in his distinction between the Vision of Light and the Action of the Holy Spirit, Symeon surpassed his teachers and his sources "as only a man who speaks directly from experience can manage to do."

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Those who know me know that a major aspect of my own personality type is to continually look for patterns. It seems to me that the two types of intense religious experience distinguished by neuroscientist Newberg and other authors-- and "confirmed," so to speak, by Symeon the New Theologian, as well-- can also be understood as expressions of 

Thomas Berry's distinction between returning the world to itself and returning the world to its numinous source.

It seems to me that this action of "returning the world to God" would come from the kind of peak experience which has to do with experiencing the world's numinous source as the Ultimate, the One, Pure Consciousness-- Symeon's Vision of Light.

In contrast, "returning the world to itself" is related to the experience of what Symeon calls the "action of the Holy Spirit" operating within us. 

And this second kind of religious experience seems to me to be especially appropriate to the dynamic world view of the new, evolutionary, cosmology.

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I realize, of course, that just as many today would not be comfortable with having their cosmic role described as that of "priest," so, too, many today-- even persons who might often use the name "Holy Spirit" in prayers-- would not be comfortable with the thought that talking about the Holy Spirit operating within us is a good way of understanding the energizing force behind the evolutionary process.

And yet that is exactly what "Holy Spirit" means. In the very first verses of the Bible it is this divine spiritus which is said to move across the face of the waters and bring the world into being. Words like "Cosmic Spiritus" and "Evolutionary Spirit" are accurate names for the Divine Energy, the Dynamis of God, that is the driving force of the evolutionary process. In the static context of the pre-evolutionary world view, it's just not so obvious.

So it's the second type of peak experience-- the one Newberg describes as a "more concrete apprehension of the One in everything, a unifying vision of the unity of all things," and in which the numinous source is experienced not as being outside time and space but as operating within the material and living world, including our own minds and hearts-- which seems to be especially appropriate for our new evolutionary cosmology.

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Part 3. In a nutshell, "returning the world to itself" simply wasn't part of Western religion's dualistic perspective. The focus of dualism is escape from the world.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition at its best, however, the emphasis definitely has been on what in Berry's terms we call "returning the world to its source" and in Schmemann's terms "blessing God." "It is right to give God thanks and praise," say all the ancient churches' liturgical texts at the start of their central prayer which they still called "the Thanks-giving."

We know, too, that the early Christians saw themselves as spokespersons for the whole of humanity. But without the evolutionary perspectives of modern science they could not have seen themselves, any more than anyone else could have 2,000 years ago, as spokespersons for the entire universe. Even what they would have meant by "universe" was a static world, billions of times smaller and far younger than the dynamic cosmos we know today.

It's only with the 19th- and 20th-century advances in astronomy, geology, biology-- and especially in the human sciences of anthropology and neurology-- that we can know ourselves as the evolutionary cosmos-become-conscious-of-itself and thus as spokespersons-- priests, in Schmemann's words-- for the entire physical universe.

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Today, we can be much more aware of the divine dynamis as the "unity within all things," as Newberg expresses it, and as the Spiritus operating within each of us, as St. Symeon describes it.

And with that awareness we can have a much better sense of our divinely-given task of "returning the world to itself." We do in fact have, as Berry says, "a new mode of religious experience," and it is, indeed, thanks to science.

It's thanks to science that our awareness has shifted from stasis to dynamis: from a static world view to a dynamic-- evolutionary-- understanding of the world. And it's also thanks to science that our religious perspective has shifted: it now includes returning the world to itself along with returning the world in thanks and praise to "to its numinous origins."

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But how do we actually return the world to itself? How do we cooperate with the action of the holy spiritus in our minds and hearts? I think the word needed here-- the word we need to add to "thanks and praise"-- is service.

Obviously "service" isn't something new to the Western world's religions-- Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Nor is it new to any other of the Earth's spiritual traditions. But in the context of the New Cosmology "service" has, I think, a much more inclusive understanding than in the past.

Taking care of the world itself is a good example. Environmental concerns are understood today as no less significant from a religious perspective than were giving thanks and praise in earlier forms of spiritual practice. And to a great extent, the change has already happened.

But where does it come from?

Obviously it comes from the hearts and minds of persons attuned to the world's dynamic flow. While many, perhaps most individuals would not identify that dynamic flow in Judeo-Christian terms as St. Symeon's "action of the Holy Spirit within us," by whatever name that dynamic perspective is a major aspect of our new mode of religious understanding.

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I have a good example, from an unexpected source. I often attend the monthly meetings of a special interest group on Spirituality, Religion and Health at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. The recent speaker was the Rev. Daijaku Judith Kinst, a Buddhist priest in the Soto Zen tradition and a member of the core faculty of the Institute of Buddhist Studies, part of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA.

Her topic was "Educating Buddhist Chaplains and Teaching Chaplains About Buddhism." In her talk she noted that while Buddhism has been in the Western world for more than a century, it has especially grown and flourished in the last thirty to forty years.

During that time many thousands of Americans have taken the spiritual practices of Buddhism with great seriousness. And it's out of those decades of intense practice and spiritual experience that a movement has arisen among Buddhist practitioners to become hospital chaplains.

When persons practice meditation regularly over a period of time, the practice generates a strong desire (a need, thrust, urge-- Quakers would call it a "leading") to be of service. The Buddha himself taught that to alleviate suffering is a primary goal of spiritual life.

The path these Buddhist chaplains follow leads them to minister to Buddhist patients, of course, but more generally to be of help to anyone caught in human suffering and misery.

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Daijaku Kinst also noted in her talk that it is one of the basic views of Buddhism that "everything is related." A physicist in the audience contributed this significant fact: "In physics," he said, "we call that 'quantum entanglement'."

My point in offering this example is that it would seem that in any tradition, the intense religious experience of the unity of all things can attune us to the dynamic energy of the cosmic process, and that the normal result of such sustained spiritual practice is to personally experience the inner drive to be of service.

"Redemptive sacrifice," in Thomas Berry's words, is how the universe works; so we can expect to experience the 'drive' to give ourselves in service, to help alleviate human misery.

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To put these thoughts in the context I began this post with, the second form of "peak experience"-- Newberg's "experience of the unity of all things" and Symeon's "awareness of the action of the Holy Spirit in the heart"-- shows itself in our need to participate in the evolution of the universe by way of service.

In New Cosmology language, we return the universe to itself by incarnating-- embodying in the here and now-- what the universe is all about. And just as the more abstract experience of the Ultimate Mystery spills over in praise and thanks, so the more down-to-earth experience of the ultimate Unity of all things spills over into the desire to serve.

While that first kind of experience was common in pre-scientific times, the second seems to be, if not something new, at least something which is more obvious and clear in our day.

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The Christian tradition preserves a wonderful expression of this cosmic drive to serve as something added to the natural desire to offer thanks and praise.

In the gospel stories of the Last Supper, the first three Gospels include the familiar words about Jesus giving thanks over bread and wine. But the fourth gospel leaves out that familiar scene and replaces it with a story of service:

While they were eating, Jesus got up from the table, took off his outer garments, and wrapped a towel around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the feet of his disciples.

John's Gospel was the last of the four to be written, and according to biblical scholars it seems to be especially concerned with the actual issues of the church-and-synagogue debate that was taking place at the time when that Gospel was written (about 90 CE).

As I see it, the substitution of the washing-of-the-feet story in John's gospel for the familiar blessing-over-bread-and-wine story found in the earlier gospels may in fact be an expression of an awareness into which the somewhat later Christian community had grown.

In any case, while Jesus' blessing of bread and wine is ritually re-enacted thousands of times daily all over our planet, a foot-washing ceremony is rare. I know some of the very early Protestant groups practiced it. And it's "on the books" of the liturgical churches for the Holy Thursday commemoration of the Lord's Supper-- at least of those denominations which follow the Roman traditions. But except in monasteries, it was ignored for centuries.

As we better understand (thanks to thinkers such as Andrew Newberg, Symeon the New Theologian, John McGuckin, Daijaku Judith Kinst and Alexander Schmemann) Thomas Berry's words about "returning the world to itself" as well as "returning to the world to its numinous origins," we might look for a recovery of the washing-of-the feet ritual.

Isn't that a delightful thought-- foot-washing as a ritual expression of our understanding of how we participate in the evolution of the universe!

sam@macspeno.com

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#24. Ontogenesis: Phases One & Two

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Whether we call our consciousness "neuro-gnosis," "psyche," "mind," "soul" or "spirit," as individuals we have been "gathered," in Teilhard words, "from all time and the four corners of space into a wondrous knot" so that each of us is an utterly unique expression of the cosmic process and called to contribute to it nothing less than the mystery of ourselves.

Those are scientific concepts, although the language obviously isn't. I see them as good examples of the convergence of contemporary science and the deepest core of humanity's religious insights.

When we recognize that those concepts are descriptions of our place in the scheme of things, they are, in themselves, sufficiently powerful to move us out of the dreary perspectives of religious dualism and scientific rationalism which have haunted the western world for many centuries.

They provide a strong sense of meaning and purpose because they allow us to see our personal existence as part of the evolution of the physical universe. They also help us to realize that, as persons, we are no more static than is the rest of the cosmos. In the language of the neuro-sciences, the conscious ego is an actively fluctuating process, internally self-regulated and self-organized.

As I spelled out in entry #14 (Person as Process), "neuro-gnosis" (our conscious awareness) is the "informational content" of the media of nerve cells and networks of neural structures in which the informational content is "coded" and by way of which it gets modified via our life experience. That awareness, the brain's structuring of the cognized environment, depends on a number of things, including our genes, our developmental history, our present level of structural development and our external environment.

In everyday language, all those words simply mean that we grow and develop just as do the stars, planets and the living things of the Earth, and that the context in which we're growing makes a difference. And because we are in state of continuous dynamic transformation, everything we perceive from the external world is conditioned by our state of structural organization and thus expressed in us as a transformation of that cognized world.

But we don't grow and develop as isolated individuals. Our development takes place within that specifically social and communal context which the human sciences call "culture." That's the main idea in posts #22 (The Other Half of Person) and #23 (Ontogenetic Development). This present post and the next are about Biogenetic Structuralism's understanding of the three phases of our ontogenetic development within the cultural context.

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My emphasis on culture is a change in focus from the previous thoughts I've been sharing about the convergence of science and religion. It's a shift from neurological information about how the brain works to information from cultural anthropology about how we develop as conscious persons within the social-cultural context. It's an important transition in the perspectives I've been offering. Previously, those perspectives centered on how the human mind-brain got to be that way ("evolution" in the broadest cosmic sense); now the focus is on to the results of that emergence of conscious awareness (that is, on "culture" in the broadest cosmic sense).

My main point here is that our personal consciousness, which we can think of as "immaterial" or "mental" or "spiritual," is not only in continuity with the earlier levels of biological complexity, but also includes the development of the biological, behavioral, cognitive and emotional aspects of conscious awareness in a communal context. It's all the one same process.

In thinking about ourselves from this anthropological rather than neurological viewpoint, it's important to keep in mind that "culture" refers to whatever we do that's not controlled by our genes and instincts.

As I spelled out in the previous post, culture includes anything and everything that gets "passed on," for the sake of life's survival, from more experienced to younger and less experienced persons. It includes not only language and technology but all the learning, skills and information which need to be passed on precisely because they are not part of our instinctive or genetically-based behavior. And it's in this creative educational-cultural context that our "ontogenetic" development takes place.

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A problem in understanding culture as the context for our personal development is that the perspectives of cultural anthropology are unfamiliar to most of us. Our educational institutions and the media simply haven't caught up yet with this branch of scientific research. Cultural anthropology is probably the least familiar of all the contemporary sciences.

But it has much to contribute to a contemporary understanding of ourselves: it's nothing less than the scientific observation of how humans act in groups and the efforts of research scientists to understand our social-communal behavior. It's also the context in which the convergence of scientific and religious perspectives becomes especially clear.

As I've said, we're just not yet attuned to thinking in terms of culture, but it's what we need to do if we are to understand our place in the scheme of things. We need to see not only that the entire cosmic process takes place at three levels of increasing complexity (matter, life and mind) and that the development of human culture is in continuity with that process, but also and specifically that it's culture that is the context for our personal conscious development.

I've referred to this "long view" frequently. I spelled it out in posts #8 (Background to Biogenetic Structuralism) and #16 (Our Own Inner World), and I offered a quick review of it in the previous post (#23 Ontogenetic Development).

I'm emphasizing its importance because, while it's relatively easy to think of our individual selves as part of the cosmic process, it's not so easy to think in terms of our communal relationships within it. It's indeed challenging to see our ontogenetic development in terms of the one cosmic process which continues-- from the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago and the evolution of galaxies, stars and planets to the emergence of life on Earth, the development of the primate brain and the emergence of conscious awareness several million years ago-- to our group behavior at this very moment.

But that's the context in which our personal ontogenetic development takes place.

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Thanks to its origin in the field of cultural anthropology, Biogenetic Structuralism sees that the three phases of our ontogenetic-cultural development all have to do with the same ultimate question: "What is our place in scheme of things?"

In cultural anthropology, this understanding of "our place in the scheme of things" is called a culture's cosmology. It's described as a culturally-conditioned, cognized view of reality, where reality is seen as an organized whole which offers an account of all the significant elements and relationships that go to make up the universe. What those technical words come down to is that a culture's cosmology defines the place of the individual and the group within the universe.

The "group" can be small as a nuclear family or as large as all humanity of together, and it's in this largest, what might be called "planetary" sense, that the phrase "New Cosmology" is used in both contemporary scientific and religious thought. The New Cosmology is the essentially dynamic rather than static understanding we have today, thanks to modern science, of the place of the individual and the group within the universe. It includes cosmic, biological and human evolution.

Because science is cross-cultural, the New Cosmology is the birthright of all humanity. This is a new situation in our understanding of the world and for this reason the New Cosmology is often referred to as the "New Story" or the "New Story of the Universe." Of course it really is the new story of ourselves. And as Thomas Berry observed many years ago, it's a story we can all agree with.

In New Cosmologist Brian Swimme's words, "For the first time in human existence we have a cosmic story that is not tied to one cultural tradition.... but instead gathers every human group into its meanings."

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With regard to our ontogenetic development, cultural anthropologists have observed that most world cultures (although not that of the modern West) recognize that we humans have an internal drive to experience reality at all three levels or phases, and that (at least in all pre-industrial cultures) there is an impetus to guide members through those three stages of ontogenetic development. In the Biogenetic Structuralist framework, both the personal internal drive and the social impetus to guide members are understood themselves to be aspects of the cosmic evolutionary process.

The issue of guidance is a big topic, too big to talk about here; so to keep this posting from becoming too long, I will describe my understanding of the first two phases in this entry and save the third phase, where the issue of guidance makes most sense, for the next post.

Easy tags for the three stages (or levels or phases) of the development of consciousness are belief, experience and participation.

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"Belief" sounds like a religious term, but in the anthropological perspective it simply means whatever we accept on the word of others about our place in the scheme of things. It is vicarious knowledge rather than knowledge based on personal experience. Biogenetic Structuralism calls it "received gnosis" to emphasize that while it is our own conscious understanding, it has been given to us by others.

"Belief" doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what we usually think of as religion, although religious beliefs obviously would be included in this first phase of conscious development since they are the gnosis we have about the way things are because we have been told that that's the way things are.

The scientific study of the processes by which we are told that "this is the way things are" is a principal focus of cultural anthropology. The process is called "enculturation" and while it definitely includes catechism-like instruction, it also includes things like the stories, legends, dramas and rituals which are a normal part of every culture.

A good example of a means of enculturation in a non-western culture would be the puppet plays presented in a temple I visited when I was in Singapore. In our culture, Christmas pageants would have a similar role.

But this first phase of ontogenetic development includes all the beliefs a culture offers. In our contemporary situation that means, for example, all the taken-for-granted views about reality presented in TV shows and newspaper ads and on the Web. But it includes whatever we accept to be so, without personal experience of it: whatever we think is true because somebody else has said, or in some other way indicated, that it is.

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Despite all that, it's important to be aware that "belief" is not necessarily a bad thing. We couldn't survive the earliest years of childhood without it. And we continue to need and make use of "received gnosis" throughout our lives.

But because it has come to have a bad name, especially as the result of its exploitation by the advertising media and by political and religious authorities, I feel the need to stress that it's not necessarily something negative.

For example, many of the findings of science constitute beliefs for all of us. A trivial example is the existence of Halley's Comet. Most of us have heard of it and we may know that it returns to the Earth approximately every seventy-five years, but few of us have ever seen it. The existence of Halley's Comet is a belief rather than a personal experience for most of us. So is the existence of DNA or chlorophyll. We are dependent on phase one belief for much of our knowledge of the physical world.

Of course, religious beliefs also are examples of this "received gnosis." My point is that whenever we take someone else's word for something we are operating at this first stage of the ontogenetic development of our consciousness.

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According to the noted University of Pennsylvania neuro-scientist Andrew Newberg, this first stage of ontogenetic development is wired into the human brain. We can't do without it.

In previous posts I've mentioned that it was media reports of Newberg's work involving brain scans of meditating Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns which originally lead me to the discovery of the earlier generation of researchers (the Biogenetic Structuralists) with which his work is in continuity. Much of Newberg's research focuses on an understanding of the first phase of ontogenetic development in a religious context.

His most recent book is Born to Believe: God, Science, and the Origin of Ordinary and Extraordinary Beliefs (2007). It's the paperback edition, with a preface and for some reason a different title, of his 2006 book, Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth. Obviously "belief" is a central interest for Newberg.

His earlier books have similar titles: Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (2002) and The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience (1999).

None of these books is light reading. They are challenging both in terms of their content and of their often less-than-easy-to-understand style. Essentially, they are attempts to respond to the question of what's going on in the brain during the various phases of ontogenetic development.

I've mentioned Newberg's books to emphasize the importance of belief not just in our everyday lives but especially to emphasize its importance for an understanding of the convergence of science and religion.

Because of the exploitation and abuse of this "received gnosis" by church, government and business leaders, we can easily have a negative attitude toward "belief" and overlook the fact that it is a significant phase of our ontogenetic development. As a foremost pioneering research scientist, Newberg helps us to see that belief is something we should not overlook. We need a clear understanding of it from both an anthropological and a neurological point of view.

The anthropological perspective is easier to understand than the neurological. I've offered the beginnings of an anthropological understanding of belief in this post. And sometime I'd like to offer simple and clear descriptions of the neurological understanding of things like what's going on in the brain when we accept something to be true on the word of others. I'm not ready to do that yet, but I hope I'll be able to, eventually.

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Meanwhile, I need to say something about the second phase of ontogenesis. Luckily, this one doesn't need a lot of explanation. We know from personal experience what we mean by "personal experience."

This second phase of ontogenetic development is no less fascinating in terms of what's happening in the brain during it, and nowadays frequent reports of studies along these lines appear in the media. It's impossible to keep up with it.

The main thing I want to point out here is that, in terms of the convergence of scientific findings and religious perspectives, the acquired perspectives and attitudes of phase one may, or may not, be confirmed via our personal experience in phase two. Personal experience may verify the information we previously accepted to be true on the word of others; but it also may contradict that received gnosis. The result is, of course, that we often find ourselves at odds with our upbringing and with commonly accepted social views and attitudes.

Obviously, dysfunctional families as well as dysfunctional religious institutions and dysfunctional administrative governments do a great deal of damage. Much healing is required in our society. People talk nowadays more freely than in the past, for example, about their struggles to recover from an alcoholic parent or to get rid of their "religious baggage." And we can hardly go anywhere nowadays without hearing talk about our need to recover from the phase one acceptance of military and environmental information given out by American political leaders.

My point is that because the healing process is so urgently needed for so many in our society and for society as a whole, we can forget that there's a third stage of personal development.

And it's precisely that third stage to which we have to turn if we are to see the real convergence of the contemporary scientific worldview and the deeper values of humanity's religious traditions. The third stage is where healing is found.

It is precisely the wholistic worldview of the New Cosmology which provides us with the wholeness-making process that's so urgently needed in our damaged culture.

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Biogenetic Structuralism understands the third level of consciousness beyond personal experience as nothing less than our personal participation in the cosmic process. It's this scientific understanding of the third phase which involves those things which in the two previous posts I called "in-between" ideas.

I called symbol, myth and ritual "in-between" ideas because they're not only perennial aspects of humanity's global religious practice but also objects of study in the sciences of cultural anthropology and neuro-physiology. They bridge the gap, as odd as it may sound, between science and religion.

But they are also "in-between" concepts in a second sense. Much like what the noted Canadian professor Charles Taylor called our "yearning for eternity" (in his recent Commonweal article which I quoted in the previous post), symbol, myth and ritual tend to be dismissed as belonging to an earlier and more immature stage of human development.

Note that, however, that dismissal itself is a belief. Along with individualism, it's a major belief of the western culture's materialist-rationalist cosmology.

But in terms of what I've called in post #22 "the other half of person" (i.e., the communal and relational parts of our human nature), these "in-between" concepts are essential aspects of our self-understanding. In the scientific perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism, myths and symbolic rituals are understood to be nothing less than the tools by which we participate in the cosmic process.

As I've mentioned many times in these blog entries, I've been interested in both ritual and evolution all my life. So you can get some idea, I hope, of the delight I experienced when I first discovered, thanks to the work of Andrew Newberg, the scientific perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism which embraces both and attempts to integrate them into its over-all understanding of our human place in the scheme of things.

I don't have the skill to convey those feelings well, but from my forty years as a teacher I've got some ability to spell out the concepts involved. Which is why, of course, I started this blog for "sharing thoughts about the convergence of science and religion." I've had to do a lot of clearing and plowing the ground before I could share these thoughts about ritual and symbol with readers, so I'm glad to finally get the point where I can do that.

sam@macspeno.com

#15. Re-view and Pre-view

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Biogenetic Structuralism's combination of biological evolution, cultural anthropology and neurophysiology makes for a heady mix. But I find it delightful. As I've said a number of times in these blog postings, I think I was born into it.

In any case, it's definitely not trivial. Thanks to the dynamic world view of modern science, especially to the data about the workings of the brain and nervous system coming from contemporary neurology, we can see ourselves differently now from how we have seen ourselves in past centuries.

But holding together the different perspectives of evolution, anthropology and neurology isn't easy. This seems a good point in these blog entries to review what I've had to say so far and to preview what I hope to be describing in the next few postings.

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In contrast to the old static worldview, the contemporary evolutionary perspective allows us to see that matter, life and mind are three distinct developmental stages in the cosmic process.

We can recognize that life is a more developed stage of the world than water, rocks and clouds. And we can see that mind (soul, human consciousness) is the epitome of the development of life: that humanity is the "terrestrial head," in Teilhard's words, of the entire cosmic process.

This is the context which we now have to understand ourselves. It allows for a deeper understanding both of humanity's relationship with the rest of the physical universe (the anthropos-cosmos relationship) and of humanity's relationship with the creative source behind the physical universe (the anthropos-theos relationship).

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In recent entries, I described my understanding of several major points with regard to the relationship of humanity and the material universe.

The first, which I spelled out in postings #11 and #12, is that we simply don't need any more to hold to that separation of mind and matter which results in religious and rationalist dualism. Thanks to modern science, we now can understand that the human spirit is free not because it is alienated from, but precisely because it is rooted in, the Earth.

A second major point with regard to the relationship of humanity and the rest of the universe, described in posts #13 and #14, is that we can better understand ourselves not as an entity or substance but as a dynamic process. We can see that each person is a dynamic process precisely because each of us is the dynamic universe, internalized ("cognized").

These are major aspects of what has come to be called the New Cosmology and they have profound implications for our self-understanding.

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One of the most fascinating findings the neurological perspectives uncover for us is that we each have our own inner world. It's something we experience all the time but rarely give any attention to. I plan to spell out some of the details of this understanding in the next blog entry and to follow it up with several postings dealing with its specific religious implications.

Two of those implications have to do with how we are related to the rest of the universe, with what I've called, above, the anthropos-cosmos relationship.

One is that each of us not only has our own inner world, we also make that inner world. We create ourselves.

The other is that, in creating ourselves, each of us is making a personal and unique contribution to the evolution of the universe.

It's my view that, of all the various aspects and implications of the modern scientific worldview, this idea-- that each of us has a personal contribution to make to the world's development-- will be the most significant in the long run. I think it will have the greatest impact on how we live our human lives in years to come because it's the opposite of meaninglessness and despair. To know that we have something to offer the world, to know in the innermost depths of our being that we count, we matter-- that our existence isn't meaningless-- is a tremendously empowering perspective.

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Two other significant implications of the insight that we each have our own inner world have to do more explicitly with the anthropos-theos relationship: they have to do with how humanity, as part of the created universe, is related to the creative source of the universe.

Western religion begins with the idea that we exist to "know, love and serve God." Modern science helps us to better understand how we do that. In an evolutionary context, we can see that we serve the Divine Mystery precisely by contributing our personal self to the cosmic process.

It's a challenging idea, to be sure. But the second explicitly religious implication of the fact that we each have our own inner world is even more challenging. It has to do with an ancient religious doctrine-- older than Christianity and Judaism but enshrined in the earliest Christian creeds still used by countless persons and groups today-- the doctrine of "the resurrection of the body."

I'm sure even the most good-willed readers of this blog will raise their eyebrows at that last statement. All I can say is that I'll spell out my thoughts as well as I can, and you can see what you think.

I started this blog to share with interested readers my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion. It doesn't seem surprising, to me at least, that if we have a new understanding of matter and life, thanks to the modern scientific worldview, then that understanding should have some impact on age-old religious teachings as well. So why not on a teaching that declares the physical body to be of great value to the universe?

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Besides religious ideas, the findings of modern science also offer new insights into religious practices: what nowadays is sometimes called "following a spiritual path." We can expect that the data of biological evolution, cultural anthropology and neurophysiology will also have an impact on how we are religious; that is, on how we live out our inner life as the cosmos become conscious of itself.

My discovery of the Biogenetic Structuralists' perspectives was personally so exciting precisely because these scientific researchers in the field of cultural anthropology were using insights from evolutionary biology and neurology to understand better global humanity's religious practices.

Just knowing, for example, that cultural anthropology can trace a contemporary spiritual practice back to our Paleolithic ancestors of 70,000 years ago, and that it makes sense in terms of what's going on in the brain today, can make those who were bought up in the rationalist worldview a bit less uncomfortable with the inclinations they may find in themselves to engage in religious activities.

Knowing that the religious impulse is in our genes makes it easier to move away from the rationalist prejudice that every kind of religious practice is simply superstition. Ironically, it's the prejudices of scientific rationalism which, thanks to contemporary science, can be recognized now as uninformed superstitious views.

As I said, the "combination of biological evolution, cultural anthropology and neurophysiology makes for a heady mix." What I find most delightful about it is that it brings together my life-long interests in biological evolution and religious ritual.

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From an evolutionary perspective, we are neurologically wired by the cosmic process itself to be conscious. Biogenetic Structuralism calls this the "cognitive imperative." We seek not only to know and understand the world, but also (as they put it) "to understand understanding."

Because their basic starting point is the human sciences, specifically Cultural Anthropology, the work of Biogenetic Structuralists also is open to the fact that consciousness operates primarily by way of story, myth and symbol. Much of this is spelled out in their second book, The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis, by Eugene G. D'Aquili, Charles D. Laughlin, Jr. and John MacManus (Columbia University Press, 1979).

It was references to these ideas-- which I discovered in second generation researcher Andrew Newberg's book, The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience (Fortress Press, 1999)-- that originally opened the door to, and hooked me on, Biogenetic Structuralism.

It "hooked" me for two reasons. It's clear in this context that ritual activity is a primary means by which our most intimate personal development is nurtured. But beyond that, it's also clear that because we are the universe become conscious of itself, religious ritual is the primary means by which the cosmic process itself proceeds at the human level.

My two life-long interests come together in this radical convergence of science and religion, where sacred ritual is seen to be the very means by which we enter into and are empowered by the universe to participate in the dynamic process of cosmic evolution.

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So that's where I'm coming from in this blog adventure, and a preview of some of the thoughts I hope to be sharing in the next few postings.

Meanwhile.... The noosphere is a global reality. Thanks to the Internet, it's at our fingertips. Please don't be intimidated by the mechanics of sending suggestions, comments and questions about these blog postings. You don't need a Google account: just click on "Comments" at the bottom of this post, and when it opens click on "Other" to use your regular e-mail. Don't hesitate to share what you're thinking and feeling with other readers. Thanks!

sam@macspeno.com