#88. Understanding Sacred Manhood

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I've been writing this blog about the New Cosmology for more than four years. My intent from the start has been to be a teacher, offering simple and clear ideas about the many details involved in understanding the contemporary convergence of science and religion.

At this point I've written close to 90 mini-essays. If I haven't been able to say what I want to say by now, I probably won't ever be able to. 

Recently, it occurred to me that it might be helpful to offer an overview of all the various topics I think are needed for an accurate understanding of the contemporary science-religion perspective and its new cosmology.

When I began to think about it, however, I realized that there are two big topics I would want to include in the overview which I've not written about in separate posts. One of them has been mentioned frequently (symbols, rituals and sacred signs), although I've never presented what I consider an adequate post along those lines. I've shied away from it because, while I have some practical skill at helping people take part in rituals, I feel much less adequate when it comes to a conceptual discussion of those practical aspects.

The other topic I never got around to writing about is an evolutionary understanding of sacred manhood: the "masculine" seen in the light of the New Cosmology.

This topic may be even more difficult to write about than sacred ritual. As with signs and symbols, it deals with perspectives so radically different from the conventional views taken for granted in our culture that we don't yet have the language for it. But I'm going to give it a try; this post and the next will be about understanding and recovering sacred manhood.

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As elementary as it seems, I need to start by saying what I mean by "manhood." It includes not just genes and genitals but "maleness" and the "masculine" in the very broadest sense-- physical, anatomical, psychological and cultural.

"But what," you may already be asking, "has that to do with either religion or science?" My answer? "Everything." As I see it, it's precisely because an understanding of sacred manhood is so different from the conventional perspective on maleness and the masculine that it can provide us with the very context we need for making sense of the convergence of science and religion. So please be patient. Thanks!

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The difficulties involved in talking about a contemporary understanding of manhood are quite similar to the difficulties involved in talking about a contemporary understanding of God. For many centuries, Western culture has used the word "God" to refer to an external-only divinity, and there is no easy way to express in everyday words what's meant by an inner experience of what Thomas Berry calls the "numinous source of all things."

We obviously need a better way to talk about the “Ultimate" or the "Great and Holy Mystery" than the language which patriarchal culture allows us. The problem, of course, is that Western culture remains to a great extent stuck in its patriarchal assumptions about the meaning of "God."

It's also stuck in its assumptions about manhood. Just as there are alternative and richer ways to understand divinity than as a reality which is only external to us, so there are also alternative-- and indeed richer!-- ways to understand the significance of human maleness.

In both cases, recovering these alternatives is a major part of the New Cosmology. So this post is about understanding just what "sacred manhood" means, and the next post will be about ways in which sacred manhood is being recovered in our day.

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Thomas Berry does a wonderful job in describing the roots of religion in humanity's genetic coding; he makes clear that, thanks to natural selection, our experience of the numinous in nature-- our sense of the Ultimate-- is in our genes. As he explains it, our Paleolithic ancestors were unable to survive in the face of an overwhelming cosmos without a sense of alliance with the Ultimate Mystery behind the cosmos.

The same is true with regard to sacred manhood. But just as our earliest ancestors' experience of the sacred in the natural world was eventually lost in Western culture, so too our early ancestors' experience of the sacred character of human manhood was lost.

Historically, that double loss-- of the divine-within as well as of manhood's sacred quality-- resulted in the attitudes and perspectives we know today as "patriarchy."

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We tend to think of patriarchy primarily in terms of male domination of women; the second-class status of women continues to be a major aspect of Western culture in our day. But the loss of sacred manhood along with the loss of an awareness of the divine within us has also brought about two other significant and related features of the Western world. I've mentioned them often in these posts: religious dualism and reductionist science.

Reductionist science sees the world only in terms of matter and logic, from the "bottom rung of the Great Ladder." It's about 500 years old. 

And religious dualism, which is about ten times older, is characterized by its disdain for matter, its hatred of the body, and its fear of the feminine. These are the primary aspects of the Western world's patriarchal culture.

My point here is that patriarchy is a distortion of human maleness. And that we are as much in need of a recovery of primal (sacred) manhood as we are in need of recovery of primal (Cenozoic) religion.

The patriarchal expression of maleness has been a historical reality for only the last 2% of human history. On a walk from one goal line of a football field to the other, 2% is the last six feet of that hundred yard walk. Sacred manhood was the norm for 98% of human history-- 98 yards of our walk down the length of a football field.

Historically, then, this link between Cenozoic religion and primal manhood is fairly clear. When we recognize it, we can see that, for a renewal of contemporary religion and spirituality, our cultural understanding of sacred manhood has a central place.

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The link between patriarchy and religious dualism is no less clear. 

Patriarchy may be somewhat more political, and religious dualism more psychological, but they come from the same need for control-- of the material environment and of other human beings-- generated by the patriarchal male's disdain for matter, fear of the feminine and hatred of the body.

From the unitive perspectives of the New Cosmology, it's especially clear that patriarchal dualism is the very opposite of the unitive worldview; it is the opposite of that cosmo-the-andric unity I've mentioned so many times in these posts. Whether we think of it in terms of scientific reductionism or of religious dualism, the distorted form of manhood we call "patriarchy" separates us from the rest of the natural world and from the world's numinous source.

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Probably the most difficult idea to deal with here is the question of the origin of patriarchal manhood. Where does that male fear and disdain of matter, body and feminine come from originally?

This is an especially difficult problem because of our cultural assumption that the patriarchal form of manhood is, and always has been, the only natural one. Bringing long-submerged ideas into consciousness is never easy; and because we are, as Thomas Berry says, "doubly estranged," the very idea of a possible alternative to patriarchal manhood is only very slowly becoming part of our new cultural perspectives.

Over the years, I've found one relatively easy way to understand it. In terms of a historical perspective, we can think of patriarchy-- including both religious dualism and scientific reductionism-- as a reaction to the loss of primal (natural, sacred) manhood.

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What exactly was it that got lost? What was especially sacred about maleness for the first several million years of human history? That's the main question in this post.

I need to put in a good word first about the term "patriarchy." At least since the 20th century, "patriarchy" has primarily been a label for the suppression of women's rights; but originally it didn't refer to a social evil. The Hebrew patriarchs, for example, were honored as men who were responsible for the welfare of their people-- much the way, even today, we honor George Washington with the title "father of our country."

"Patriarchy" in this original sense meant being responsible for others, providing especially for those less able to take care of themselves, such as women with children, the sick and the old. This was the very essence of the male role in the human community from the time of our earliest ancestors. For two million years, it meant that to be male was to be a hunter.

We know from the sciences of anthropology and archeology that the Hunting Culture persisted for 98% of our history. The final 2% of humanity's cultural development saw the discovery of agriculture in the Neolithic period about 10,000 years ago and the invention of writing, social organization and cities about 5,000 years ago. What we call "civilization" is only the final one yard of our walk down the football field.

It's difficult for us today to understand that, prior to the Neolithic and Civilization periods, hunting was a religious activity. For all those several million years, obtaining food for the life of their people was the very essence of sacred manhood.

For countless centuries, natural selection shaped males-- physically and psychologically-- for that task of being a hunter. But when the Neolithic-agricultural period of human history began, males gradually lost their several-million-year-old sacred role in human life.

What we call "patriarchy" today can be seen as a reaction to that loss. 

When we look at human manhood in light of these stages of humanity's cultural development, we see that in the modern, negative sense, patriarchy-- with its religious dualism, male superiority and suppression of women--goes back at least five thousand years. No wonder the people of Western culture-- women, no less than men-- take patriarchy for granted!

A way to summarize this historical perspective is to say that patriarchy is a backlash, a negative response to the loss of sacred manhood during the Neolithic period of the Great Mother Goddess. Patriarchy was an misguided attempt to restore meaning and significance to manhood by negating the "evils" of matter, body and women.

What constitutes the essence of sacred manhood, then, is the very opposite of that rejection of matter, body and feminine. It means to give oneself, as a hunter, for the life of the people.

As I've said, it's not easy to appreciate that hunting was once a spiritual activity, the religious work of our male ancestors. But we can more easily understand today that hunting was how human males participated in the cosmic process, that it was a sacred task carried out "on behalf of all and for all."

My main point is that while the Paleolithic hunting culture is long gone, the male need for significance, for participation in life by meaningful action, is not.

What constitutes the sacredness of manhood is precisely that spiritual meaning and significance of giving oneself "for the life of the people." 

And, as Thomas Berry says in his essay on reinterpretation that I described in the previous post, redemptive sacrifice is a primary characteristic of the cosmic emergence process. It's how evolution works.

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I'm aware that I've presented a very big picture and that understanding it takes a lot of effort, so I considered ending this post right here.

But besides this historical perspective, I have one other way of understanding sacred manhood that I think is helpful, so I've decided to include it in this post rather than trying to incorporate into a later one. 

You might like to take a break before continuing to read on. I'll leave some space, to mark the place, when you come back to it.

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As you may have guessed, my second way of understanding sacred manhood make use of the "tools" of the four-fold perspective which I have referred to in many previous posts. This too takes effort; it can get complicated and once again I ask for your patience!

Long-time readers will remember that the essential insight of the four-fold perspective is that we can be conscious in four different ways. And, as with so many other important understandings in this time of great transition, we don't yet have a commonly accepted language to talk about these four ways our minds work.

I've described a number of different versions of the four-fold perspective in previous posts. They include images from the Native American Medicine Wheel and from the Hebrew Bible's Wisdom literature, as well as the language used by teachers and thinkers as diverse as C. G. Jung, Ken Wilber, Michael Dowd and Karl Rahner.

As I noted in post #82 (Moving Up the Ladder), even the classical elements (earth, air, fire, water) make good tags for talking about how our minds work, as do the four directions (north, east, south, west), the four seasons (winter, spring, summer, fall), and the four times of day (midnight, dawn, noon, dusk). I think the simplest words to work with are body, mind, soul, spirit, however, especially when used in conjunction with the Jungian terms.

We are flooded with riches! We can easily get lost in all these treasures, so I want to make my main point as clearly and simply as I can with regard to the efforts needed for an understanding of sacred manhood: the patriarchal mind limits itself to two of these four ways of being conscious.

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Using Jung's terms, it is the Sensing and Thinking functions which are considered masculine in the patriarchal perspective. That's body and mind in the older wording. We can see right away that restricting reality to only physical matter and logical thought is a perfect description of the limited perspectives of Western culture's reductionist science.

For Patriarchy, the Jungian Feeling function (soul, our awareness of connections) is considered feminine and therefore of no importance, while the Intuition function (spirit, the big picture of life's significance) isn't even acknowledged.

Nature imagery especially helps us to see what's missing from patriarchal manhood: fire and water, day and evening, the warmth of relatedness and the healing flow of meaning.

This imagery helps us to see why some of the essential religious perspectives of sacred manhood-- expressed, for example, in Native American prayers such as "All things are our relations" and "Great Mystery, we see you all around"-- simply make no sense to the severely limited dualistic view of the patriarchal masculine.

This lack of any sense of relatedness or significance explains why Western culture is only gradually coming to see the importance of human rights not just for some but for all, and to value environmental awareness. The two modes of human consciousness most needed in our present situation-- the Black Bear's big picture and the Green Mouse's sense of connectedness with all things-- are precisely what's missing from patriarchal manhood.

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As I've said, understanding all this takes a lot of work! I hope these historical and psychological perspectives on humanity's cultural development and on four-fold consciousness are helpful in providing a positive understanding of sacred manhood and the importance of its recovery.

If I were presenting these thoughts in a college classroom it would take five or six sessions, since there would be so many comments and questions. There would be objections too, of course, since there's something here to upset almost everyone.

But objections and questions, about even the smallest details, are what help us clarify these basic ideas. I invite you to share yours.

sam@macspeno.com

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#86. Global Consequences of Recovering Reverence

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At the end of the previous post I mentioned a fifty-year-old book of essays, recently reissued, with the title The Transfigured Cosmos. I said that for me the title is a wonderful summary of the consequences of what Thomas Berry calls the "new mode of religious understanding" that's ours thanks to modern science. Because of the new cosmology we are, as Berry says, "recovering reverence." And when we do, our world is indeed transfigured.

I see three big areas of the global situation where the consequences of recovering reverence are especially significant: our environmental problems, our on-going concern for social issues such as gender and racial equality, and the seemingly insolvable question of ever-deepening religious conflicts. It's not that these areas of human need are being ignored-- they are discussed daily in the media-- but in this post I want to share my thoughts about them specifically in terms of the recovery of reverence.

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One of my main points in the previous post is that we are genetically coded to the Cenozoic era-- to the Earth's "lyric period," as Thomas Berry calls it. Primal religion is in our genes. I think it's especially important for us to appreciate the fact that this fact has been established, as Berry emphasizes, not by any of the religious traditions but by the efforts of modern science to understand humanity and the world we live in.

From the point of view of "Big History"-- the longest long-range perspective available to us, starting with the Big Bang and ending only with the present moment-- the major religious traditions as we know them today began quite recently.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the West, and the spiritual traditions of the Eastern world such as Buddhism and Hinduism, all appeared around the same time in human history-- about 25 centuries ago.

In contrast, primal (Cenozoic) religion was the religion of our earliest human ancestors, and for countless centuries was the religion of all humanity.

Those early humans and to a great extent indigenous peoples still today, says Berry, are attuned to the natural world and the numinous nature of the cosmos spontaneously. For them, "Mountains were spiritual modes of being. Sunrise and sunset were sacred moments. Animals were spirit presences."

And it's from this spiritual communication with the natural world that all "religious ritual, prayer, poetry and music were born."

The important point here is that the ability of our ancient ancestors to be attuned to the numinous nature of the cosmos is still in our genes today.

We are no less capable of experiencing communion with the Earth-- the sacred, the holy, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans-- than were our very earliest human ancestors a million years ago.

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In Western culture, that sense of communion with the Earth was, as Berry says, "lost for a time." We became "doubly estranged"-- by both religious dualism and scientific rationalism. But thanks to the new cosmology provided by contemporary science, we are discovering again the story of our origins and of our place in the universe.

Berry emphasizes that we learn to hear this story by listening to the voices of nature: "the stars at night, songs of birds at dawn, the smell of honeysuckle on a summer evening."

He says those experiences of "wonder for the mind, beauty for the imagination, and intimacy for the emotions" are experiences of "that numinous reality whence the universe came into being and by which it is sustained in its immense journey."

Especially important for us today is appreciating that these voices of nature are "dimensions of the human soul, revelations of the divine being communicated to us, and inspiration for our spiritual life." Berry sums it up nicely by saying that because of the new cosmology, we know today that "Evolution is our sacred story."

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Despite the strong unitive and sophiological perspectives in the scriptures of the Western religious tradition, Judaism, Christianity and Islam could hardly avoid adopting the patriarchal and dualistic attitudes of the culture in which they arose. And early science, with its tremendously practical successes due to its focus on physical matter, greatly enhanced that loss of communion with the natural world.

But it was the Industrial Revolution, with its extraction technologies such as coal-mining and oil-drilling in the 18th and 19th centuries, which put an apparently definitive end to Western culture's sense of unity with nature.

"With extraction," says Berry, "the planet lost its beauty, wonder, majesty, grace and life-giving-ness. It became an object to be used." The engineers took over, he says-- "the mechanical, the electrical, the chemical and now the genetic engineers." The result is that in our contemporary world "the radiant presence of the divine is no longer recognized."

The most important point here, once again, is that our unique human ability to experience the numinous is still in our genes. We remain "genetically coded" to recognizing "the radiant presence of the divine" by listening to the voices of the Earth. And thanks to the new scientific cosmology, we are in fact recovering reverence.

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With regard to the consequences of our recovery of reverence, I think the most important practical result has been global humanity's growing awareness of our responsibility to take care of the Earth from which we have emerged.

When we see that "evolution is our sacred story" and that we are participants in the evolutionary process, we recognize immediately that, as Berry says, "Every geological, biological and human component of the Earth is bound together." His point is that "what happens to one happens to all."

He quotes a Native American speaker who expresses these thoughts with simplicity and power: "We live with all that lives and is, and it calls us to take care of it."

I learned a chant along these lines many years ago, on my first vision quest. It's sung to a steady drumbeat, with the last three words getting two beats: "The Earth is our mother; she will take care of us. The Earth is our mother; we must take care of her."

When we know our life to be a participation in the cosmic process, then our numinous experience of communion with nature calls us take care of Mother Earth.

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In the same way, it becomes clear that we are called to take care of one another.

Berry says that this sense of being responsible participants in cosmic evolution is now the context for every kind of social action. No "good works," he says, "will succeed in our time apart from the larger context of the natural world; it is the only effective context for survival."

"We live or die," he says starkly, "with this world."

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I'm sure that most readers agree with the thoughts I've shared so far in this post. They are relatively familiar. But it's the importance of the recovery of reverence specifically in terms of global religious conflicts that may be new for many readers. That's what I want to give more space to here.

One of the most immediate and significant results of recognizing that our numinous experience of the sacred goes back to our earliest human ancestors is that we recognize, in this larger context, that "primal" or "Cenozoic" religion is the basis of all humanity's religious traditions.

In light of the unitive perspectives of the cosmo-the-andric unity-- whether we call that numinous awareness "contemplative" or "mystical" or "spiritual"-- we can readily see that all the religions of the Earth have the same fundamental source.

It is our inborn genetic sensitivity to the numinous in the natural world that allows us to see-- not via any external authority but from our own personal experience-- that all the religions of the Earth are expressions of the sacred.

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In an earlier post (#84), I quoted Thomas Berry's remark about how hard it is for those of us in Western culture to believe that science that has established the fundamental spiritual aspects of human nature:

"Secularism, materialism and rationalism have prevailed for so long that we can hardly believe (Sam's italics) that the long course of scientific meditation on the universe has finally established the emergent universe itself as a spiritual as well as a physical process and the context for a new mode of religious understanding."

I think it's just as difficult-- maybe even more difficult-- for those of us in Western culture to believe that our personal experience establishes the validity of all religious traditions. But it's the essence of our new mode of religious understanding.

This new understanding was expressed well by the British monk Bede Griffith, who went to India in the middle of the 20th century to live in the style of Hindu ascetics.

In an essay published in 1994, Bede speaks of the need for a universal wisdom "which can unify humanity and enable us to face the problems created by Western science and technology." It is, he says, "the greatest need of humanity today." And he stresses that the "religions of the world cannot answer this need. They are themselves part of the problem of a divided world."

Bede notes explicitly that even our ancient religious traditions need to be reinterpreted in terms of the new scientific cosmology:

"The different world religions-- Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam-- have themselves to recover the ancient wisdom, which they have inherited, and this now has to be interpreted in the light of the knowledge of the world which Western science has given us."

The especially important point Bede is making here is that there is a much earlier wisdom which the present religious traditions of the Earth have inherited. The "wisdom" he is referring to is of course precisely the experience of the sacred-- the holy, the numinous-- which is still in our genes and which is the basis of all humanity's religious traditions.

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In terms of the numinous experience of our early ancestors, Thomas Berry spells out nicely this essential idea of the validity of all the Earth's religious traditions: "From these primordial indigenous experiences have come the diverse scriptures of the world, the various forms of worship, and the variety of spiritual disciplines."

Speaking to a Western audience specifically with regard to the world's religious scriptures, Berry says that it would constrict rather than expand our understanding of divine-human communication if we were to consider "only the Western Judeo-Christian Bible as revelation and eliminate the Koran of Islam, the Vedas and Upanishads of India, Buddhism's Lotus Sutra and China's Tao Te Ching."

"It would not be an improvement on our understanding of the numinous but an impoverishment," he emphasizes, if we were to eliminate "India's Shiva and Vishnu, Asia's Kuan-yin, or Native America's Manitou and Wakan-tanka."

In words that I hope will bring to readers' minds my earlier posts on the two mavericks C. G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, Berry makes an especially important point with regard to the validity of all the world religious traditions. "While every archetype needs multiple realizations," he notes, "the sacred [needs] more than any other."

Asian cultures seem to understand, better than Western people do, that the idea of the holy needs multiple expressions, that the numinous-- the Tao, the Great Mystery tremendum et fascinans-- cannot be limited. If it's in our genes to experience the sacred, we can expect that our cultural experiences will differ.

The point is that in our day we can trust, as our grandparents would never have been able to, that we don't demean the Mystery of God by recognizing-- via our recovery of reverence for the world of nature-- the validity of all humanity's religious experience.

Indeed, if anything does demean the divine mystery, it's religious conflict. I see this realization on the part of the Earth's religious traditions to be an especially significant global consequence of our recovery of reverence.

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I also see that this global consequence of recovering reverence comes just in time.

In February of this year (2011), data is scheduled to be released of the observations made by NASA's space telescope "Kepler" about the number of nearby planetary systems containing Earth-like planets.

Early word is that the data will include tentative identification of several hundred planets similar to our own. The implication is that our whole Milky Way Galaxy may contain tens of billions of planets roughly the size and mass of the Earth.

And there are billions of galaxies besides our own Milky Way Galaxy!

[Added 31 Jan 2011: An introductory background report appeared in today's New York Times: see Gazing Afar for Other Earths, and Other Beings.]

[Added 3 Feb 2011: See today's Astronomy Picture of the Day for a good diagram comparing the newly found 'solar' system containing six planets to our own solar system.]

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If "the cosmic process has a human dimension from the start," as Berry emphasizes, we can expect that biological life and reflective-- self-aware-- consciousness eventually will have emerged on some, if not many, of the billion-billion planets in the universe.

And so we can look forward to someday learning of the many forms of religious experience that have appeared on them.

Won't it be exciting to see how religious ritual, prayer, poetry and music find expression on planets other than our own!

Won't it be exciting to see how "that numinous reality whence the universe came into being and by which it is sustained in its immense journey" has shown itself to our cosmic cousins.

Surely the most significant global consequence of recovering reverence will be this truly cosmic perspective. We'll see better than ever that, as Berry says, "the universe is a vast celebration," that "it is our role to enter into it," and that "this is the purpose of all existence."

I think that will be quite literally a "transfigured cosmos."

sam@macspeno.com

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#85. Primal Religion

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In this post I want to share some thoughts about what Thomas Berry calls the "new mode of religious understanding" given to us by contemporary science.

My previous post was about how both Western religion and science had alienated us from the world we live in and out of which we have emerged, and that today we have a different picture. We're no longer "Doubly Estranged," as I called post #84. Today, we know that "evolution is our sacred story."

And this scientific understanding-- of ourselves and of the world together-- provides us in with a better than ever perspective on the spiritual aspects of human nature. Especially important is the idea that this "new mode of religious understanding" doesn't negate our previous understanding. It deepens and enhances it.

Today we know that religion is in our genes. That's what the title of this post refers to: "Primal Religion." If it didn't sound so strange, I'd call it "Genetic Religion."

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In any case, to be clear about it, we need to take into account two important facts. One is that, in Berry's words, "the cosmic process has a human dimension from the start." The other is that human consciousness first appeared on Earth during the Cenozoic era. That's the last 65 million years of the Earth's history-- which Berry calls "the great lyric period in the Earth's development" because it's when flowers, birds and butterflies, among many other living things, first appeared.

These two ideas are the context for our "new mode of religious understanding."

It's the fact that the evolutionary universe has a human dimension from the start that accounts for "our unique spiritual aspects." Note that Berry emphasizes that it's science, not religion, which has established that we are the result of the cosmic process and that we humans are its conscious expression.

It is this point about which Berry himself says, "we can hardly believe it." It seems so unbelievable precisely because we have been "doubly estranged" from the physical cosmos by many centuries of religious dualism and scientific materialism.

The second big idea for our "new mode of religious understanding" is that humanity first emerged during the Cenozoic era. The "Earth's great lyric period" is the sacred world of our origins. We are "genetically coded" to it-- attuned to it in terms of our outer and inner realities. And as Berry says, because "our genes are integral with the Cenozoic, so is our soul life."

Traditional religion knew almost nothing about genetics; it's from science that we know that our primal religious instincts are "in our genes."

These two ideas-- that the cosmic process has a human dimension from the start and that human consciousness first appeared on Earth during the Cenozoic era-- are the context for our new mode of religious understanding. Together, they provide a new way to understand the basic religious-spiritual orientation we find in our minds and hearts.

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I noted in post #84 that Berry stresses that this new cosmology-- the story of our place in the universe-- is being told to us by the universe itself. "Modern science," he says, "gives us the story of who we are, how we came to be, and what our lives are all about."

And so in our day, "we are recovering reverence," says Berry. We are learning again to appreciate and trust the Earth; we're learning that we need to listen to the voices of the Earth. Without those voices of the Earth-- "the stars at night, songs of birds at dawn, the smell of honeysuckle on a summer evening"-- our souls shrivel.

Berry describes it quite explicitly: "Our inner world cannot be activated without these outer experiences of wonder for the mind, beauty for the imagination, and intimacy for the emotions." These, he says, are experiences of "that numinous reality whence the universe came into being and by which it is sustained in its immense journey."

Wonder, beauty and intimacy allow us see "that the universe is a vast celebration"-- which, as Berry emphasizes, it is our role to enter into in our specifically human way -- and that "this is the purpose of all existence."

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This profound perspective makes the New Science Story an authentic cosmology in the anthropological as well as in the physical-astronomical sense. I know from my many years as a teacher, however, that the term Berry uses with regard to wonder, beauty and intimacy-- "numinous"-- is neither familiar to many nor easily explainable.

It's not that numinous experiences are rare; studies indicate that they are common. But to the extent that our culture remains stuck at the bottom rung of the Great Ladder, many people-- mistakenly thinking that science still claims "there's only matter"-- are embarrassed or bewildered by such experiences and do their best to suppress them.

"The numinous" is not easy to talk about, but because it's the basis for our "new mode of religious understanding," my strong teacher-instincts make me want to give it a try.

There are two basic concepts involved here. One is easy enough to understand: that just about anything-- any person, place, thing, happening-- can be the occasion for a numinous experience.

The second, much less easy to understand, is that the experience is a combination of two opposite feelings. That's what makes it so difficult to express in words; our logical Thinking function is simply of no help when it comes to numinous experience.

The two opposite feelings which constitute a numinous experience were originally described by the early 20th-century German scholar Rudolf Otto. If his name is unfamiliar, you might like to read the Wikipedia article about him. The English title of his famous book is The Idea of the Holy. Today, he would more likely have called it "The Idea of the Numinous" or "The Idea of the Sacred."

That Wikipedia entry notes that, since Rudolph Otto's time, references to numinous experience have appeared in the work of numerous intellectuals in many fields-- from the fiction of C. S. Lewis and the psychology of Carl Jung to the religious studies of Mircea Eliade.

Even the writings of the cosmologist Carl Sagan and a number of contemporary spokesmen for atheism such as Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris contain positive references to numinous experience.

While we may not have been explicitly conscious of it in a conceptual sense before the 20th century, the numinous is obviously an important part of human experience.

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Rudolph Otto uses Latin words to describe it: the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

Tremendum means fearful or awesome: something that evokes fear and trembling-- something from which we want to keep our distance.

Fascinans means just the opposite; it refers to what we find attractive, compelling, wonder-full-- something that keeps grabbing our attention and calling us back to itself.

Beside being tremendum and fascinans, the numinous is also experienced as mysterium. It is especially important to note that the numinous has a personal quality to it. When we are experiencing it, we feel that we are somehow related to it-- that we are in communion with it.

You can see why this is so difficult to put into words. But doesn't it sound familiar?

Feeling both attracted and repelled by something we're part of is not an uncommon experience-- even if we don't, or can't, talk much about it.

Rudolph Otto's point is that it's the basis for all religious experience. 

And Berry's point is that "our souls shrivel" without it. Our inner world, our "soul-life" as he calls it, simply cannot be activated without these experiences of "wonder for the mind, beauty for the imagination, and intimacy for the emotions." This is why we need to listen to the voices of the Earth.

I quoted Berry's words about listening to the voices of the Earth in the previous post. I think they are worth presenting again here in this context:

"We need to listen to the stars, the sun and moon, the mountains and plains, the forests and rivers and seas, the meadows and the flowering grasses, the songbirds and insects that sing in the evenings. We need to experience, to feel, to see this celebration of life. They are dimensions of the human soul, revelations of the divine being communicated to us, and inspiration for our spiritual life."

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To put the main idea of this post as simply as possible: whether we call it the experience of the holy or the sacred or the divine or the numinous, this kind of experience is what religion has been all about since human awareness first emerged on Earth. It was the religion of our earliest human ancestors.

More poetically, this kind of experience-- of "the stars at night, the songs of birds at dawn, the smell of honeysuckle on a summer evening"-- is the primal religion that's "in our genes."

Berry says early humans, and to a great extent indigenous peoples still today, are attuned to the natural world and the numinous nature of the cosmos spontaneously. "Mountains were spiritual modes of being. Sunrise and sunset were sacred moments. Animals were spirit presences."

And it's from this experience, he adds, "that religious ritual, prayer, poetry and music were born."

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I think we need one more idea to have a good overall view of primal religion. Even when we can see clearly that this kind of religious experience is in our genes, there's another question that some of us can't resist asking: How did it get there in the first place?

Why did the biological process of natural selection select for numinous experience? What was it about these primal experiences of the sacred that promoted the survival and thrival of our earliest human ancestors?

Berry offers some deep and especially helpful thoughts along these lines in a 1987 essay entitled "Spiritual Traditions and the Human Community."

In antiquity, he says, all human activity was done in alliance with "the human, spiritual and natural" together. He's says that humans have been shaped by natural selection to deal with our existence in the natural world in union with the divine.

Using the Greek terms-- anthropos, theos and cosmos-- which I have used in many previous posts for trying to express these ideas without the emotional connotations words like "world" and "God" have, I would say it this way: that anthropos is shaped by natural selection to deal with our existence in the cosmos in union with theos.

And then, using Raimundo Panikkar's phase which I've used in several recent posts, I would say that it's clear, then, that we are genetically oriented to living in the cosmo-the-andric unity. Our very existence is defined by the union of cosmos, anthropos and theos.

Berry says we evolved this way because we are "too fragile" to handle the terror of our existence by ourselves. He says that without a sense of our union with theos, we are annihilated by cosmos-- it's just too harsh in itself, too overwhelming.

And it is our sense of the cosmo-the-andric unity that lets us see that while reality is indeed terrifying, it also has a positive, good side. It is "beneficent," Berry says, and notes that we experience this benign providence "as ready to align with humanity." It "assures us of an inner tranquility in the larger pattern" of the cosmic process.

We can trust it in the long run.

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Such profound thoughts! We need to remind ourselves again where our primal religious experience comes from: "Seeing the stars at night, hearing the birds at dawn, smelling honeysuckle on a summer evening."

Fifty years ago, an Eastern Orthodox Christian writer, Jon Gregerson, put his description of numinous experience in a wonderfully simple and explicit way. He said, "We can see and hear and taste and smell God."

It is that experience-- of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans-- which empowers us, via the coming together of cosmos, anthropos and theos, not just to survive but to thrive in this world.

And it's that experience-- the recovery of our primal (genetic, Cenozoic) spirituality-- which is the essence of the "new mode of religious understanding" that's ours now, thanks to contemporary science.

These are, indeed, profound thoughts!

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As in the previous post, most of my quotes from Thomas Berry in this post are taken from a small collection of essays he wrote in the last quarter of the 20th century which have been recently published under the title The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth.

Jon Gregerson's book, in contrast, is a half century older. But, in yet another example of the contemporary convergence of science and religion, a new paperback edition was published just three years ago. Its title is The Transfigured Cosmos.

To me, that title is a wonderful summary of Berry's "new mode of religious understanding." It's saying that when we recover reverence, our world is transfigured.

sam@macspeno.com

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