#58. Even Religion Evolves

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Some people still have trouble accepting biological evolution as a scientific fact. For them, but also for many others as well, the idea that "even religion evolves" is just about incomprehensible. So I want to share some thoughts about that in this post.

It's complicated to talk about the fact that "religion evolves" because both words ("religion" and "evolves") have several common meanings. Those meanings are related, of course, but we need to sort them out if we are to be clear about what it means to say "even religion evolves."

"Religion," for example, has two basic meanings. It can refer to the great world religions-- those several-thousand-year-old traditions like Buddhism, Islam and Christianity. But it can also refer to something far older-- that personal religious consciousness which, as a normal part of human nature, is shared by all of us and is the basis for the world religions.

When people today say that they are "spiritual but not religious," it's that basic religious consciousness that they are referring to.

The various religious traditions of the world are communal expressions of that personal religious consciousness which is common to all of us. Their differences are due to a great extent to the fact that they have been conditioned by both the cultural and physical environment in which they began.

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The word "evolution" is a bit more complicated. Originally "evolution" had the same meaning as "revolution" (as in, "a planet revolves around a star").

But in its most basic sense today, "evolution" simply means that things change over time; things become different.

Even the most unreflective fundamentalists acknowledge "evolution" in this sense, although they don't call it that, of course. And they tend to see any change as something negative-- clocks wind down, things fall apart, people grow old.

For some, any kind of change is experienced as negative-- a betrayal of the past.

I've described this attitude in several previous posts: #29, #31, #33, #35 and #44, for example. It comes from an unbalanced dependence on that activity of our minds which Jungians call the mind's Feeling function and the Native American Medicine Wheel pictures as the Green Mouse of the South.

Our Green Mouse-Feeling function is a kind of "pack rat" which collects everything and, because it's so small, can't see very far. It has a limited vision of the world.

In our present cultural situation, there's growing awareness that we need to balance the various ways we have of being conscious. The conservative attitude of the Green Mouse, hoarding memories and holding tight to the things of the past, is only one aspect of our four-fold minds.

In the more balanced dynamic worldview beginning to dawn on us, it's clear that evolutionary change isn't something negative.

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Another complication with the word "evolution" is that what's popularly meant by it has itself changed over the last few decades.

Fifty years ago, for example, "evolution" was understood to refer to the original emergence of life on Earth and to the emergence of human life-- both things together, even though they occurred several billion years apart.

The fact that on the popular level people didn't make much of a distinction between the emergence of simple life forms and of human life is a good example of what's meant by an "anthropocentric" attitude; it shows our alienation from nature.

Today, hardly anyone-- even unreflective religious fundamentalists-- bothers denying that simple life-forms emerged on our planet out of pre-existing materials; the evidence is clear enough to anyone willing to look at it.

More recently, the word "evolution" on the popular level has come to refer specifically to the emergence of human life from those earlier life forms. And here, too, the evidence is clear, for those open to it. (One of our newly discovered primate ancestors, "Ardi," for Ardipithecus ramidus, has been in the news recently.)

Of course we also know that we're different from our primate relatives.

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In the past, that difference was expressed in terms of the presence of an immortal soul placed in each human embryo as it was conceived. And in a static worldview, that way of understanding the origin of human persons makes good sense.

But in a dynamic-evolutionary perspective we can see that it has some significant disadvantages. For one thing, it's the origin of anthropocentrism; it separates humans from the physical universe and makes us aliens on our own planet.

It's also the basis for that religious dualism which has undermined western religion for a thousand years. It even distances the creator from the creative process; it makes God an alien, too.

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So we need a bigger picture.

We need to include in our term "evolution" the development of the created world before human consciousness appeared, not just before biological life emerged on Earth but even before there was a solar system and Earth.

Here it is important to keep in mind that, while human life is several million years and pre-human life on Earth is several billion years old, the whole universe is ten times older still. Our term "evolution" needs to include all that came before us.

But we also need to include in our bigger picture those evolutionary developments which come after humans first appeared on Earth. This includes not only the growth and development of each individual person, but also-- and especially-- the on-going development of human communities and cultural groups.

From my teaching experience over the years, I've found that this idea-- that human communities and cultures are part of the evolutionary process-- is especially difficult for many to accept. It just doesn't "click." It's too unfamiliar-- too new.

But that's what's needed if we are to understand that "even religion evolves."

Only when we have that big picture-- of the evolutionary process continuing after the emergence of humans on Earth-- can we appreciate that changes in religious consciousness are no less positive than the original emergence of human life itself.

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What can help us most in seeing religion awareness as part of the big picture is to keep in mind a detail about evolutionary change that's so obvious that we can easily overlook it. It's the fact that in the dynamic growth and development of everything-- from planets and stars to life on Earth and human communities-- something new emerges.

Not just change, but newness, is the essence of "evolution."

I've mentioned this central idea of the emergence of new things in many previous posts. I think they are worth listing, just to show how important the idea is: #11, #14, #17, #22, #23, #24, #25, #33, #35, #44, #46, #47, #50, #54 and #57.

Probably the best example of the emergence of newness is something I haven't talked about previously but is familiar to each of us-- our own personal experience of passing through puberty.

At puberty we experience a newness at the deepest and most intimate level. It's a physical newness, of course-- anatomical and hormonal. But it's also psychological: a new awareness of belonging and a new interest in relationships.

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In the media, puberty is usually presented as a time of unpleasant awkwardness.

I think that's because journalists, for the most part, are simply reflecting American society which is still stuck in a static worldview. We miss the obvious fact that the psychological newness each of us experiences at puberty is the foundation of our families, our communities and of human culture.

It may only be in the dynamic worldview that we can recognize puberty itself as a part of the cosmic process. Nothing else comes close to this profoundly personal new understanding of "our place in the vast scheme of things."

It's thanks to puberty that each of us can see ourselves as part of the biggest cosmic process.

It's thanks to puberty we can see that we not only are made of stardust and have primate ancestors, but that that same evolutionary process is continuing in each of us as we grow and develop, make friends and start families.

And it's thanks to puberty that we can recognize that cosmic evolution is continuing in the historical development of the whole human community on the Earth.

When we have that bigger picture, we can easily see that even religion evolves. But we're just coming to recognize it.

As Dr. Heather Eaton says in her essay, This Sacred Earth, "we are at a new religious moment in the history of the world." (I've referred to Dr. Eaton's work in four recent posts: #52, #54, #55 and #56. They are worth checking if her name is new to you.)

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I said above that "religion" can mean both religious consciousness and its cultural expressions in the various religious traditions such as Buddhism, Islam and Christianity.

It's those cultural expressions that we usually think of in connection with specific beliefs and creeds. In western culture, we also call them "institutional religions" to distinguish them from our personal religious-spiritual consciousness.

C. G. Jung notes that while the specific beliefs and creeds of institutional religions can be restrictive if they are based only on external authority rather than personal experience, spiritual awareness is in contrast a fundamental "attitude toward life."

My main point in this post is that whether we are referring to specific beliefs or to our fundamental attitude toward life, we can see in either case that as part of the cosmic process something new emerges-- that "even religion evolves."

Dr. Eaton expresses this nicely: "Seeing earth history as a decisive framework allows us to perceive that religious consciousness is itself an emerging process within the larger evolutionary processes of the earth."

And she also notes that "It is a great challenge to situate our religious traditions-- the myriad expressions and rituals mediating the sacred, the moral core and codes-- within the evolutionary processes of the earth."

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A great challenge, indeed!

I think dealing with it may the ultimate human issue of our time.

It determines whether we prefer to remain in the static worldview of the past or we choose to become co-creative participants in the world's evolutionary development.

Do we belong to the universe? Or are we alien to the cosmic process?

In our day, each of us-- and each of our religious traditions-- has to make that choice.

The very fact that-- at this "new religious moment in the history of the world"-- we have to make the choice is the best example I can offer that "even religion evolves."

sam@macspeno.com

PS. (Added 4 Nov): A friend sent this fun flowchart "for determining what religion you should follow." It wouldn't even have been possible 20 years ago.

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ARCHIVE TECHNICAL PROBLEM: Since I started this new series of posts (with post #51), each time I publish new post, an earlier one vanishes from my Archives list; they're still there, just not visible. Until tech support can deal with this, I'm putting links to those "missing" posts here.

#8. Background to Biogenetic Structuralism

#7. Brief Autobiography

#6. Tai Chi

#5. Alternative to "Human Nature Redux"

#4. The "Biogenetic" Perspective

#3. High School 50th-Anniversary Report

#2. Spirituality Research Symposium

#1. On Recent Developments in Science and Religion

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#56. A Saner Approach to Nature

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In Latin, "sane" means healthy. So, this post is about a more healthy approach to nature-- more healthy, physically and mentally, than those negative attitudes toward the natural world which were the norm for centuries in western religion and culture and which, in our day, have resulted in the environmental crisis.

The thoughts I'm sharing in this post are based on an essay, "Shaping a New Ecological Consciousness: Insights from the Spirituality of Interreligious Dialogue," by Dr. Fabrice Blée, a Professor on the Faculty of Theology at the University of Saint Paul, Ottawa.

My thoughts here extend the ideas expressed in the three previous posts about a better understanding of the natural world, so needed in this time of ecological crisis. Dr. Blée is a colleague of Dr. Heather Eaton; his views complement both hers and those of Jakob Wolf which I described in post #53 (Bridging the Gap).

It was a footnote in Dr. Blée''s article that first lead me to Dr. Eaton's work. I mentioned her work in post #52 and shared some of her very significant ideas in my two most recent posts: #54 (We Take Care of What We Value) and #55 ("All we have to do...").

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I originally saw Dr. Blée's article in the July 2009 issue of the Bulletin of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, published online. Since "monastic interreligious dialogue" is hardly an familiar phrase, I need to say a few words about it.

When I first heard of it, I thought "monastic interreligious dialogue" referred to Catholic monks getting together to talk about things like how long their monastic robes should be or how early they got up for their morning services. Not too interesting!

Turns out it's something completely different: Christian monks and nuns talking with Asian monks and nuns (primarily Hindu and Buddhist). And what they're talking about is nothing less than their understanding of how to best go about being fully human beings.

Even more surprising is that these monastic individuals of East and West have been at it for a half-century and that they have been learning a lot from one another.

It seems monastic people have a great deal in common, no matter what their cultural background and religious beliefs. Their basic orientation to life-- and even much of their monastic practice-- is surprisingly similar. 

It seems "monasticism" isn't-- as I'd thought-- an intensified way of being religious so much as an intensified way of being human.

While the origin of the word "monk" isn't clear, it probably comes from "monos" (meaning "one," as in "monotone"), and for that reason monks and nuns are sometimes described as persons who live alone-- or, more generally, "go it alone."

But a much better understanding is that they are simply people who are working hard at being integrated within themselves, at being whole-- "together," fully human-- persons. "Single hearted" or "undivided," as the nuns of Green Mountain Monastery, where Thomas Berry was buried, say on their website. (Do see their website for some beautiful photos of Thomas Berry's funeral.)

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The focus of Fabrice Blée's academic work is the dialogue between Asian and western 'monastics' (as they are being called nowadays to include both men and women). But in this essay he is specifically addressing Christian monks and nuns and specifically with regard to their need for a "New Ecological Consciousness."

I'm aware that this sounds like odd stuff. If you're thinking that Blée's claim to offer a new slant on the natural world based on "insights from the spirituality of inter-religious dialogue" seems a bit of a stretch, I agree. I had my doubts.

But I read his essay anyway because I was interested in seeing where he was coming from and what he was going to come up with. And as it turns out, I was not disappointed.

I think it's precisely because Dr. Blée is speaking from a context in which most of us may not be comfortable that what he has to say can be of value to all of us. It wasn't so long ago that Eastern spiritual practices like tai chi and yoga were considered "odd stuff."

So today maybe we can also learn from the experience of western monks-- especially if it has to do with the ecological crisis and acquiring a "more healthy attitude toward nature."

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For me, anything that offers a new slant on things is something to look at. The more perspectives we have-- about anything-- the more meaningful they become. And in this case, the religious perspectives being offered here can help us to see our own personal attitudes in the broadest context-- as part of global humanity's cultural development.

To some, it's extremely challenging to accept the fact that our religious perspectives have a history, since it means that we may very well be "faced with the task," as Dr. Eaton says in her essay, "of allowing [our] theological understanding to be transformed."

But that kind of transformation is a big part of the Immense Transition we're experiencing It's why I think, as I said in post #52, that we do indeed live in "Exciting Times."

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But can we really say that the changing views of monks are "exciting"?

In this case, I think we can. If even western monks are moving away from Christianity's long-held negative views of the natural world-- which, as Dr. Eaton says, "belittled the Earth as a spiritual reality"-- then what Dr. Blée has to say may in fact be of great value.

His article first appeared in the April 2008 issue of a French-language review published by the Faculty of Theology of the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Parts of it sound as if it may have originally been given as a lecture. If so, what we have is an online translation of a transcript of a talk originally given in French to a monastic audience-- which may explain why some of it is difficult to follow. But it's valuable.

It's filled with profoundly significant thoughts for those seeking to promote care of the Earth in the context of both the Judeo-Christian tradition and the New Cosmology.

While we may not be interested in inter-religious monastic dialogue in itself, what the Christian monks and nuns of western civilization are learning with regard to the environmental crisis may, in fact, be quite valuable for all of us.

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Dr. Blée begins by noting that, with few exceptions, Christian participants in the monastic East-West dialogue hadn't given much attention to the ecological crisis. As he says, "It took them 30 years to get around to it."

The basic point of his essay is that the new attitudes which are emerging in the monastic world are in fact inherent in the principles of inter-religious dialogue and that they have something of great significance to contribute with regard to healing the Earth.

It's important to keep in mind that he's talking here to a Christian audience. While he never uses the word "dualism," his use of terms like "new consciousness" and "new approach to nature" refer precisely a post-dualistic Christian perspective on the material world.

His goal, as he says, is nothing less than "to describe a way of establishing a relationship with nature that can give support to informed [ecological] action."

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Dr. Blée focuses on one of the most central practices of Christian monastic life: hospitality. In his early Rule for Monasteries, "the father of monks" Saint Benedict of Nursia notes that "guests are never lacking in a monastery" and that they "are to be received as Christ."

Dr. Blée says that the monastic emphasis on hospitality is the very essence of the perspectives which have emerged from the inter-religious dialogue. Hospitality requires participants to welcome the stranger, "the one in whom we cannot immediately recognize ourselves and who [we see] as a threat to everything we stand for."

He adds that "nothing else is so difficult as entering into someone else’s world and receiving that person into our own, regardless of what we think about the individual and his or her beliefs."

The main point of Fabrice Blée's "saner approach to nature" is that just as monks are to welcome guests "even without having any positive perspectives on their views," so this same welcoming attitude needs to be extended to nature itself.

Needless to say-- given the pervasiveness of religious dualism in Christianity for the last 1,000 years-- this is a radical view.

But welcoming the natural world-- and welcoming it precisely "in its very otherness," as Dr. Blée stresses-- is the needed perspective which he says will enable Christians to "incorporate a saner approach to nature in their life of faith."

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Welcoming others means having respect for their "otherness." Just as we "must allow ourselves to be questioned and challenged by our guests," says Dr. Blée, in the same way "we must allow ourselves to be affected by the cosmic process."

Hospitality and respect for "otherness," when applied to the natural world, means "taking the cosmic process on its own." The heart and soul of the environmental issue isn't just biological survival, Dr. Blée says, but nothing less than "communion with nature."

This is, indeed, a totally new and different perspective for western Christianity.

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Dr. Blée makes an especially good point when he observes that Christians engaged in inter-religious dialogue never encounter Islam or Buddhism in an abstract sense. We always meet specific persons, followers of specific religious traditions.

In the same way, he says, we never encounter nature in the abstract. We always meet the cosmic process in terms of "the disparate elements that constitute it."

His heavy academic language here can get in the way, but his point is clear enough: "evolution" is no more of an abstraction than are individuals who practice Buddhism or Islam. In the same way that we encounter specific persons, we also encounter specific aspects of the natural world. And in neither case may we write them off as insignificant.

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Dr. Blée makes a very profound point about hospitality toward nature when he says that we need to welcome the cosmic process even though we may be afraid of it. Otherwise, we miss something important about ourselves, our "capacity for wonder."

If you have been asking yourself why I think these views of Fabrice Blée's are so important, I hope you will see here how they relate completely to the thoughts of Heather Eaton and Jakob Wolf which I described in my three previous posts.

Dr. Eaton stresses awe and wonder, Pastor Wolf stresses our "apprehension" of nature's intelligibility, and Dr. Blée stresses welcoming the cosmic process even when we experience the threatening aspects of its "disparate elements." All three offer different slants on what's needed if we are to heal the Earth.

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Dr. Blée, however, emphasizes one important point the others don't. It concerns what he calls "liberation of the body." He says that the ecological crisis is forcing Christians to deal with their many-centuries-long "negation of the body."

He notes that it's precisely because we have cut ourselves off from nature in terms of our bodies that we in the west are so alienated from ourselves, and that "this alienation from self is precisely what characterizes modern society."

If we are to deal properly with the ecological crisis, we need to understand ourselves physically as part of "nature." We need to recognize that our own bodies are part of the cosmic evolutionary process.

In one especially good paragraph he notes that Christian monks in dialogue with the Asian contemplative traditions have "re-discovered"-- thanks to Asian practices such as zazen and yoga-- that the body has a part to play in the process of what Christian monks call “divinization."

"Divinization" (theosis, in Greek) is an ancient term for union with the divine. Blée says it "does not take place in spite of the body, but in its very depths, in a body that is totally accepted." Healing the Earth depends on our "total acceptance" of our own bodies!

There's a famous statement by the 10th-century eastern saint, Symeon the New Theologian, about total acceptance of the body. In his Hymns of Divine Love, he says that we are divinized even in our genitals-- and adds that thinking otherwise is blasphemous! (When Symeon's work was being translated into Latin back in the 1600s, the western translators deleted that passage.)

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Probably the most profound implication of this understanding of acceptance of the body as part of the evolutionary process is that it allows us, in Dr. Blée's words, "to be reconciled to two of nature’s characteristics: its impermanence and the irrationality of its power."

"Impermanence" doesn't mean that things don't last. It means, rather, that everything in nature-- the environment, our bodies and our very selves-- is always changing.

This understanding of the world as dynamic is a major aspect of the Immense Transition presently happening in human culture. I described it in posts #35 and #36. An especially important part of this tremendous change is the fact that, as Heather Eaton says in This Sacred Earth, we are at "new religious moment in the history of the world."

Today, we can see better than previous generations that each of the world's religions has distinct contributions to make and that we need to identify the "transformative and prophetic insights of each tradition." As we search for the "common ground" that's "necessary for the world to face such a global and intertwined [environmental] crisis," we need "to appreciate each religious tradition as offering specific insights and teachings within a tapestry of revelations."

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One especially strong example of a transformative insight that's found in the Buddhist tradition in a scripture, chanted regularly in the monasteries, which bluntly describes nature's irrational power. The text begins, "Thus we should frequently recollect..."

I am of the nature to age, I have not gone beyond aging.

I am of the nature to sicken, I have not gone beyond sickness.

I am of the nature to die, I have not gone beyond dying.

All that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will become otherwise, will become separated from me.

I am the owner of my kamma, heir to my kamma, born of my kamma, related to my kamma, abide supported by my kamma. Whatever kamma I shall do, for good or ill, of that I will be the heir.

We are told to "thus frequently recollect" these facts because most of us would prefer not to. But it is precisely this irrational power of the evolutionary process which we are called to welcome. As Dr. Blée says, we are to "allow ourselves to be challenged and transformed by it."

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"Transformation," like divinization or theosis, is not a conventional aspect of spirituality in western religion's dualistic view, however. The emphasis has been far more on morality and redemption (getting to heaven, escaping eternal punishment). The Earth has not been understood to be our home; any concern for healing the Earth was irrelevant.

But emphasis on transformation is, in fact, one of the basic insights of the Judeo-Christian Wisdom tradition. It was lost for a thousand years but, with its "transformative and prophetic insights," it is precisely this Wisdom tradition at the core of western religion that Christians needs to recover at this time of ecological crisis.

Dr. Blée expresses the Wisdom perspective well when he notes that the irrational power of nature, which appears as such a threat to us, "is the same divine power that Christian faith sees present and active at the heart of all creation."

It is this same dynamic energy (spiritus) which the book of Genesis describes as "hovering over the face of the deep" at the beginning of the world.

Karl Rahner expresses this Wisdom perspective more explicitly when he says that the divine spiritus present in the world is the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead.

The Wisdom perspective has been preserved by Eastern Christians. Their understanding of the transformational power of nature is expressed most explicitly in their Easter hymn, sung repeatedly throughout the Pascha ("pass-over") season:

Christ is risen from the dead,

trampling out death by death

and upon those in the tombs

bestowing life.

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At this new religious moment in the history of the world, welcoming nature-- confidently accepting its transformative power even in our bodies-- is the "saner approach to nature" we need if we are to heal the Earth.

sam@macspeno.com

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ARCHIVE TECHNICAL PROBLEM: Since I started this new series of posts, each time I publish one, an earlier one vanishes from my Archives list; they're still there, just not visible. Until tech support can deal with this, I'm putting links to those "missing" posts here.

#6. Tai Chi

#5. Alternative to "Human Nature Redux"

#4. The "Biogenetic" Perspective

#3. High School 50th-Anniversary Report

#2. Spirituality Research Symposium

#1. On Recent Developments in Science and Religion

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

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We take care of what we value. That's the main point of the very different thinkers, Jakob Wolf and Heather Eaton, whose ideas I described in my two most recent posts.

This post is a followup. It's about the importance of personal experience in taking care of the Earth in this time of environmental crisis. From their distinctive perspectives and in very different languages these two thinkers agree that neither western science, with its intentionally rationalist thought, nor the western religious tradition, with its disdain for the Earth, can help much.

As I described in post #53 (Bridging the Gap), from a philosophical point of view, Professor Jakob Wolf of the University of Copenhagen says we need a third thing. He calls it the "phenomenological apprehension of intelligent design in nature."

He makes clear why science can't provide us with a sense of what's important to us. That's simply not what science is about. It's neither what science was invented for, back in the time of the ancient Greeks, nor what science has been doing for the last five centuries.

As I described in post #54 (We Take Care of What We Value), Dr. Heather Eaton of St. Paul University in Ottawa comes from another starting point, but she too agrees that neither science nor religion are sufficient in themselves.

"The ecological crisis has not made much of a dent in the western religious consciousness," says Dr. Eaton. "The Christian tradition has not been able to deal effectively with evolution." The insight that the earth is our home is "an enormous challenge to our ecologically dysfunctional patriarchal religious traditions."

What's needed in this time of environmental crisis, Dr. Eaton says, is the coming together of humanity's ancient religious traditions with the much more recent evolutionary cosmology of 20th-century science. It's their convergence that we need.

Why? Because "we take care of what we value" and what leads us to ethical responsibility is personal experience.

Whether we call it "the apprehension of intelligent design" or "the experience of the sacred"-- or use more familiar words like "reverence," "mysticism," or "contemplation"-- it's that experience that we need if we are to contribute to the healing of the Earth.

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Probably most of us don't respond positively to Professor Wolf's term, the "phenomenological apprehension of intelligent design"-- even though he makes very clear that it's nothing more than a philosophical name for the personal experience of nature's intelligibility.

It's difficult to relate to the idea well, as he says, because the term has been "compromised" by Christian fundamentalists in the USA who use it in support of their creationist views.

For many of us, Dr. Eaton's words speak more strongly when she says that to heal the Earth we need to recover the age-old basis of all religious experience "in the experience of the sacred."

But most of us aren't much more comfortable with a term like "the sacred"-- or even with the traditional religious words such as "contemplation" and "mysticism"-- than we are with Dr. Wolf's "phenomenological apprehension of nature's intelligibility."

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What about "wonder and awe"?

Those are good words. I think we need to hold on to them; they may be the best we have to talk about the experience of the sacred.

But even "wonder and awe" has been compromised in our day by the similar-sounding phrase "shock and awe" used by America's political and military leaders to describe what they hoped would happen when they invaded Iraq.

When it comes to "awe," our only everyday use is the exclamation even my five-year-old grandson says often, "Awesome!" And while we know what the experience of "wonder" is, we also know that it's not what we mean when we describe something as "wonderful."

"Sacred" is the one word we still use to describe things that are important to us. When we hear something mocked or treated more lightly than it should be, for example, we tend to say (or maybe just think quietly to ourselves), "Is nothing sacred?"

Clearly, we use "sacred" to refer to things that are of value to us. So our experience of the Earth-- as sacred-- is important for its healing simply because, as both Dr. Eaton and Dr. Wolf each in their own way say, "we take care of what we value."

In this time of environmental crisis, their point is a very practical one.

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A major problem, however, is that in our culture the experience of wonder and awe is usually considered a purely personal matter. It is "acceptable as a private experience," says Dr. Eaton, "yet it is often belittled, ignored or dismissed as socially relevant."

Obviously it's not a purely personal matter, however-- not if dealing well with the environmental crisis depends on it. Dr. Eaton points this out even in the very title of her paper: sacred awe and wonder is at the nexus of religion, ecology and politics.

As I mentioned in the previous post, her paper, "This Sacred Earth: At the Nexus of Religion, Ecology and Politics," isn't readily available in print form, but she gave me an OK to share it with friends. If you would like a copy, send me a note: sam@macspeno.com.

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One of the main reasons why the experience of the sacred isn't readily understood in our culture is because, as Dr. Eaton says, "the primary mode of knowing in Western societies is analytic" and, as a way of being aware of reality, "analysis has its limits."

The experience of awe and wonder is a different kind of awareness.

The fact that there are different kind of conscious awareness is something I've talked about in many previous posts. Because there are four distinct kinds of conscious knowing, this perspective is often referred to as a quaternary or mandalic understanding. I described it in detail in post #29 (The Four-fold Mind).

I've made use of it (in post #30) to talk about the traditional ways of being religious, in a half-dozen posts (#40 through #45) to describe the Sophia/Wisdom perspectives at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and (in posts #35 and #36) to help make sense of the many aspects of the Immense Transition we are presently experiencing.

These four functions of the conscious mind were spelled out explicitly early in the 20th century by Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung. Today they are known to almost everyone in terms of the Myers-Briggs personality typology. It's even on Facebook. (You can find "What's Your Myers-Briggs Personality Type?" on the Facebook Apps page-- along with "Which Teletubbie Are You?")

Long before C. G. Jung, Myers-Briggs and Facebook, however, the fact that we have a four-fold mind was known to the people of many earlier cultures.

On the Native American Medicine Wheel, for example, each of the mind's functions is pictured by an animal and associated with one of the four directions, the four seasons and the four times of day. I've made use of that imagery in many posts. I think it's one of the best tools we have for our self-understanding.

It is especially helpful in understanding wonder and awe.

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Our ability to experience the sacred via awe and wonder is pictured on the Medicine Wheel as a shamanic Black Bear. It's an image of the same function of the conscious mind which C. G. Jung calls "Intuition," the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant refers to as "archetypal intuition," and Jakob Wolf calls "phenomenological apprehension."

Black Bear is located on the west on the Medicine Wheel, directly opposite the Gold Eagle of the east. It's this Gold Eagle awareness-- Jung calls it simply our "Thinking function"-- which deals with the rational cause-and-effect workings of patterns in nature and is the very essence of scientific analysis.

It's because "the primary mode of knowing in Western societies is analytic," as Dr. Eaton says, that the experience of the sacred via our Black Bear (Intuition) ability isn't readily understood in our culture. We need to balance our Gold Eagle (Thinking) ability with our Black Bear (Intuition) capacity if we are to heal our home, the sacred Earth.

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Jung calls Black Bear (Intuition) "the religious function" because it doesn't make distinctions as Gold Eagle (Thinking) awareness does. It makes connections. Native Americans express this experience of the sacred with the phrase "All my relations!"

One of the most helpful understandings I know of the mind's Black Bear (Intuition) ability comes, rather surprisingly, from the eminent 20th-century German Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner. He calls this capacity we have to experience awe and wonder "self-transcendence."

As a conscious person in the material cosmos, says Rahner, each of us experiences ourselves at a deep level as being utterly open to all things. We don't have any limits; we are connected with everything that exists; we simply do not exist apart from the infinite unbounded reality underlying the whole universe. I've described this more fully in post #34 (Talking About Us).

Obviously, many people in Western culture are not at ease with such an understanding of themselves. But it's much more familiar to people in Asian cultures, and it is one of the reasons why westerners, in this time of Immense Transition, are turning to the religious traditions and spiritual practices of the East.

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So, this is not only a time of Immense Transition due to the discovery of the new scientific cosmology, it is also a time of Great Turning for the world's religions themselves. We live in nothing less, says Dr. Eaton, than a "new religious moment" in the history of the world.

And because of the environmental crisis, says Dr. Eaton, "it is pressing for all religious traditions to reclaim their roots in the natural world."

She notes that, East and West, "Each tradition has an awareness that the natural world is a primary place of revelation and religious experience" and that "it is only in recent history that this has not been so."

With regard to the West, for example, she says that the Christian faith in its recent history "has belittled the earth as a religious reality." And that this "diminished Christian awareness of a sacred indwelling presence in the natural world" is "one of the central causes of the ecological crisis and the excessive domination and exploitation of the earth."

Christians are "faced with the task of allowing their theological understanding to be transformed," and as Dr. Eaton notes, this task is "an enormous challenge to our ecologically dysfunctional patriarchal religious traditions."

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But it's not the western religious tradition alone that's being challenged by the environmental crisis. All the world religions , she says, "need to reclaim their heritage"-- to rediscover their roots in the world of awe and wonder.

If we are to heal the Earth, we have to "reacquaint ourselves with the divine presence revealed within the natural world." Because we take care of what we value, "to encounter the sacred in the natural world moves us to resist its destruction."

The question, then, is a very practical one: How do we "reacquaint ourselves with the divine presence revealed within the natural world." How are we to "encounter the sacred"?

Dr. Eaton says simply, "Awareness of the power of wonder and awe is available to anyone who spends time in the natural world."

Is it as simple as that?

I think it is.

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The experience of the sacred isn't considered socially acceptable but, as Dr. Eaton says, "the capacity for awe remains omnipresent." Awe and wonder is a normal aspect of human experience. It's in our hearts. It's part of our DNA.

C. G. Jung says it. Native Americans say it. Karl Rahner says it.

There's one catch. In Dr. Eaton's words: "To marvel at the natural world requires a transcendence of our superficial worldviews and beliefs."

We may be potentially open to everything, as Rahner says, but we'll never actually experience awe and wonder if we don't literally spend time with nature. We need to "phenomenologically apprehend, " as Jakob Wolf would say, the intelligible patterns operating in the natural world.

Dr. Eaton quotes the famous Jewish theologian who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Selma in 1965, Abraham Heschel, about the difference between what happens to us when we do, and don't, spend time in nature.

"Away from the immense," says Rabbi Heschel, "cloistered in our own concepts, we may scorn and revile everything. But standing between earth and sky, we are silenced by the sight. We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn or scoff at the totality of being."

When we spend time in the world of nature and find ourselves aware of our connectedness to everything-- when we experience that all things are "our relations"-- we simply cannot sneer, or mock, or scoff at our own experience. We just need to let the experience happen.

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For many years, my wife Anne and I have included on our Christmas cards a few words from Teilhard de Chardin's essay "In Expectation of the Parousia" found at the conclusion of his early work, The Divine Milieu.

Teilhard's words are his way of expressing the profound idea that Heather Eaton and Jakob Wolf are trying to spell out for us.

His words may sound simplistic. But in terms of taking care of what we value, they are profound.

How do we experience the Earth as sacred?

Teilhard says, "All we have to do is let the heart of the earth beat within us."

sam@macspeno.com

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ARCHIVE TECHNICAL PROBLEM: Since I started this new series of posts, each time I publish one, an earlier one vanishes from my Archives list; they're still there, just not visible. Until tech support can deal with this, I'm putting links to those "missing" posts here.

#5. Alternative to "Human Nature Redux"

#4. The "Biogenetic" Perspective

#3. High School 50th-Anniversary Report

#2. Spirituality Research Symposium

#1. On Recent Developments in Science and Religion