#103. "Nature's Magic"

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ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 

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This is the third in my series of blog entries beginning with #101. It's a collection of notes and essays from my files all dealing in one way or another with the emerging new religious consciousness. They are mostly things I've written over the last decade or so to clarify my own thoughts but which I now want to make available for anyone who might be interested.

This post #103 is about an especially significant book.


If you have questions and think I might help, you're welcome to send me a note: sam@macspeno.com

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Some thoughts I wrote out in July '04 for a friend; a review of Nature's Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind, by Peter Corning ISBN: 0521825474 (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

As I’ve already said, this is the most interesting book about the evolutionary worldview I’ve seen since I first read Teilhard’s Phenomenon Of Man forty years ago. Corning calls synergy “magic,” and if “the working together of things to produce results otherwise not possible” isn’t magic, I don’t know what is. The cooperative relationship between things, or more correctly, the creative results produced by such cooperation, is what makes evolution happen: “The synergies produced at one level become the building blocks for the next level.”

It seems to me that the very appearance in our time of the idea of synergy is itself an example of synergy. Such a concept isn’t even possible in a static worldview. We are, indeed, in the midst of an “immense transition.”

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the awareness of synergy is that it is also, among many other things, the discovery of creativity. In the evolutionary process, the new forms that emerge were previously unpredictable, so that, as Corning says, “the whole process of cosmic evolution is profoundly creative.” In a static perspective, we were able to use the passive tense to say that the world “was created.” But then we came to see that creation “is still going on.” And with an understanding of synergy as a central aspect of the evolutionary process, we can now say something even more significant: the world itself is creative.

We’ve come a long way from saying creation “happened six thousand years ago.” But there’s still more to this synergy perspective. Not only is creation creative, we now see ourselves as the central agents of that creative process. Human persons have a major role in the cosmic process of things “working together to produce results otherwise not possible.”

If the transition from static to dynamic cosmos is a great challenge to many, the transition from what Bruno calls the “suppression of the image of person” to seeing that image located at the very heart of the evolving universe is far more challenging.

The British scholar (and now-retired Orthodox bishop Kallistos of Patmos), Timothy Ware, said in a talk at Princeton a few years that the great task of the 21st century is that we should finally come to an adequate understanding of ‘person.’ The synergy-perspective helps tremendously. It sees persons called both to their individual uniqueness and to communion with others. And called to bring about-- precisely via those cooperative relationships-- new things at new levels of complexity.

What a contrast from “the suppression of the image of the person” that prevailed through most of the history of Western culture.

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Corning asks at some point, “If synergy is everywhere, why are we not more aware of it?” His response is that “it seems to have to do with the way our minds work.” We can perceive parts or wholes fairly easily, he says, but not the relationships between the parts.

To put it in Jungian terms: the Sensation function allows us to perceive parts and the Intuitive function lets us perceive wholes, but our consciousness apparently does not operate in such a way that we can directly perceive relationships. Certainly the Feeling function focuses on relationships, but it’s an evaluative activity: we don’t so much “perceive” as judge relationships (in terms of whether or not they are agreeable to us). In dealing with the relationship of parts to wholes, it looks like conscious awareness “skips a step.”

That thought got me wondering whether something similar might also be true about the Thinking function. Do we skip a step there, too? I think we do. What the Thinking function evaluates seems to be the agreeability of words (spoken or visual) with data (facts). If that’s so, it explains why there can be many different versions of what’s considered to be the truth about something. It looks like we don’t directly “perceive” thoughts (and their verbal expression) any more than we directly perceive relationships.

Most of us readily accept that “we can not dispute taste.” But we are very far from accepting that, similarly, we can’t dispute what people hold to be true, either. If nothing else, this perspective lets us see why pluralism is an acceptable, and indeed necessary, contemporary attitude. De veritas, non disputandum.

In any case, so what if we can see parts and wholes but not relationships? From an evolutionary perspective, the Thinking and Feeling functions of consciousness are thought to be later developments than Sensation and Intuition (which functions it’s understood we share with pre-human animals). With the emergence of the synergy perspectives, we would seem to be not only witnessing first hand, but indeed experiencing within ourselves, a newly emerging aspect of consciousness. I.e., We have first hand experiential evidence of the evolution of consciousness.

My point is that whether my thoughts about the Thinking function are right or not, the emphasis of synergy on cooperative relationships seems to be, in itself, a further evolution of human awareness. And, in this sense, consciousness of synergy really is a very big step away from the rationalism of the patriarchal worldview, which so neglects (and indeed suppresses) of the Feeling function.

We not only can know by inner experience that the universe is evolving but also that, as personal centers of consciousness, we humans are at the creative heart of it. The book by Mary Coelho, Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood, is precisely about this dawning emergence of our understanding of the central place of ‘person’ in cosmic evolution. We are well on our way to fulfilling the task Bishop Kallistos spelled out so clearly.

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The immense transition also has a third important aspect. It’s not only movement from a static to a dynamic cosmos and from the suppression of the image of person to recognition of our central participatory role in the cosmic process. The immense transition also includes movement from a dualistic understanding of God to a non-dual or unitive sense of the divine mystery.

When Corning says synergy is “a fundamental property of the universe and of human societies” [italics added], it’s clear that he intends no dualism between nature and culture: the synergy perspective moves us well beyond the patriarchal alienation of anthropos from cosmos. And it is equally clear, when Corning makes the point that synergy is the creative source of the world’s evolution, that it sees no dualism between the creative mystery we call theos and the manifest world of anthropos at the heart of cosmos.

Synergy offers us a worldview that is just the opposite of patriarchal dualism. Corning describes synergy as “the wellspring of creativity which makes evolution happen.” In older (if, alas, still unfamiliar) language, that same thought would sound something like, “Synergy is the manifestation of eternal wisdom.” Synergy is nothing less than the inner wisdom of God, the divine Sophia, manifesting in the workings of the universe. The early 20th century Russian Sophiologist, Sergius Bulgakov, even uses the same word, synergy, when he talks about the results of what he calls Bogochelovechestvo, the cooperative inter-action of the world and God.

A fascinating aspect of Corning’s book is its emphasis on economics (“in a broad sense,” as he says) with regard to how the world works, and Bulgakov began his career as an economist.

Corning’s economic perspective is that the “payoff” of synergy at the biological and anthropological level is “simply” those results which contribute to life’s on-going survival and reproduction. This is a radical change from the patriarchal perspective. It puts fairness and cooperation, rather than competition and violence, at the center of human life and cultural evolution. It’s no small thing to recognize that what causes evolution to happen on the biological level is “simply” life itself working at keeping itself going. It’s even more significant to see that this understanding of synergy-- as yielding an economic payoff-- is valid at the cultural level as well.

Life makes use of the helpful new things that result when at one level things join together to become parts of a more complex new thing at the next level. And what promotes the on-going survival of human life is nothing other than cooperation. What a positive outlook! And, in our troubled times, what an extremely hopeful one! As I mentioned in the review, the synergy perspective provides us with a straightforward ethics and morality, a way to be human based on the clearly observable fact that what succeeds is cooperation: on how the universe works.

So, here we have a “rationally-based norm for human life in an evolutionary world: cooperation rather than competition, creativity rather than conventionality, awe and wonder rather than dullness and boredom.” But also-- and especially-- a non-dualistic and participatory (person-centered) understanding of the workings of the world. This is realistic and down-to-earth view couldn’t be more different from those of competition and alienation on which patriarchy is based.

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I have a half-dozen or so other thoughts about Nature’s Magic which I need to mention. I don’t know how to put them into any meaningful sequence.

1. While it results from the serious study of the scientific worldview of the last few centuries, the synergy perspective would seem to be a validation of the intuitive wisdom of Israel and early Christianity (and also of India). The emergence of the synergy perspective is the beginnings of a rational understanding, from the “science of history,” of the intuitions of those ancient cultures about “how the world works.” That’s real progress.

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2. The whole idea of creativity is much clearer from the synergy perspective. We humans create, in a literal sense. By our cooperative interaction with others, increased complexity allows newness to emerge.

At its deepest level, this creative newness seems to me to be what Meister Eckhart meant when he talked about “releasement” (sometimes translated as “waiting”). Eckhart’s understanding seems to be an intuitive sense of the synergy process precisely in its aspect of allowing newness to emerge via the cooperative synergy of anthropos and theos.

To put it in obviously inadequate language, our cooperative inter-action with God (via Eckhart’s “waiting”) allows what’s in the divine unconscious to seep out (leak out, be released) into the world.

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3. With regard specifically to Christianity, the evolutionary-synergy perspective allows us a deeper understanding of traditional ecclesiology and eschatology. If synergy is the creative source of the dynamic evolutionary universe, and if the relationships between things is that out of which newness emerges, then relationship is the very essence of cosmic creativity: the world creates itself, precisely by forming relationships. If human persons are that world become conscious of itself and, now, with the synergy perspective, we see ourselves as the world become conscious of itself as self-creative, then ecclesia would seem to be a name for that segment of humanity that is aware of humanity’s central self-creative role in the cosmos.

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4. The evolutionary-synergy perspective also opens up once again the long-neglected area of eschatology. Thomas Berry names the ultimate goals of the universe to be “differentiation, subjectivity and communion.”

In response to a question about these abstract terms, Brian Swimme said once in a note that the ideas are Teilhard’s, although the terms themselves are Berry’s. The synergy perspective offers us a much less abstract but still conceptual expression of the ultimate eschaton: something like “the on-going cooperative relationships between (uniquely differentiated) persons.” Swimme expands on Berry’s terms nicely: “the fullness of differentiation, the deepest subjectivity and the most intimate communion.” Personally, I like Bruno’s Teilhardian phrase even better, “eucharistic omega.” But, in any case, being able to talk about the eschaton in terms of creative personal relationships in an evolutionary cosmos is a delight. And it makes clear, as nothing else I know does, the traditional understanding of the ecclesia as already the beginnings of the eschaton.

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5. Thomas Berry repeatedly describes patriarchal culture as being under a spell with regard to its alienation from the natural world. One of the best things about Corning’s work is that it makes clear how we can break the spell. The means by which we can step out of the patriarchal prison is nothing other than our awe and wonder at synergy’s magic. We need only look and see the real world as it is, see that we are active participants in the creative evolutionary process, to replace patriarchal dualism’s feelings of anger and rage at not being wanted by Mother Earth.

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6. Personally, it’s a delight for me to realize that helping others experience that awe and wonder at the natural world is the essential task of the shamanic personality. I find the understanding of complexity and synergy to be a profoundly liberating and validating affirmation of my life-long focus on both science (nature, evolution) and religion (spirituality, shamanism).

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7. Finally, a thought that keeps impinging on me is that while the focus on cosmic evolution is a tremendous breakthrough for human culture, these synergy perspectives of the New Cosmology need artistic expression. Science education is obviously essential; so is a serious understanding of the nature of religious ritual (although that would seem to be still a long time coming). But the invitation to awe and wonder seems to require something else, something “earlier” or prior to such things. I’m thinking especially in terms of fiction. Since I retired, I’ve been reading several contemporary works of fiction weekly; that’s hundreds of books in the last four years. Not once did I ever see a reference to humanity’s creative role in cosmic evolution. I wish I could write a novel.

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#60. Symbol, Myth & Meaning

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This is the second of several posts dealing with an understanding of religious ritual in the context of cosmic evolution.

I'm aware that the very idea that there might be a connection between religious ritual and the evolution of the universe sounds strange to many readers, so it's important that we keep in mind that humanity is in the midst of an Immense Transition-- from a static to a dynamic worldview-- and that we are now at a new religious moment in the history of the world.

I see giving our attention, at this time, to the place of religious ritual in the evolutionary worldview as a creative activity on the growing edge of the immense Transition.

My main point is that religious ritual is how we humans plug into the energy of the cosmos; it's the means by which we are empowered to participate in the evolution of the universe.

A major problem in talking about all this is that most of the words we have available only have meanings left over from the static worldview. 

In post #59, I listed six of them.

Three are familiar: symbol, myth and meaning. I'm sharing my thoughts about them in this post. The other three-- wisdom, cosmology and creativity-- are much less familiar and I plan to talk about them in the next post.

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One of the main difficulties with all this is that the more familiar terms are often used in less than precise ways in everyday life. And the first two ("symbol" and "myth") are commonly used with meanings which are the very opposite of the ways we need to understand them in order to make sense of the links between cosmic evolution and religious ritual.

An added difficulty is that all three terms are frequently used in confusing pairs; examples include "myth and symbol," "symbolic ritual" and "meaningful symbols." And Myth and Meaning is the title of one of the most significant books for contemporary religious studies.

Of that first group, the word "meaning" offers a special challenge. I think it's the key to sorting out all the other words. My experience has been that it's only when we're comfortable with what "meaning" means that "myth," "symbol" and "ritual" make good sense.

So I'm going to tackle the meaning of "meaning" first.

But a caution: It's important not to get lost in words here. My intention is not philosophical or linguistic analysis, but simply to clarify the meanings of these words in order to share my thoughts about the connections between religious ritual and cosmic evolution.

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MEANING. As I said in the previous post, "Of course, we know what 'meaning' means. At least we feel that we do." In that post I asked readers to think about how they would describe the meaning of "meaning" for an intelligent high school student. (I received one anonymous comment in response that was quite good.)

The best understanding I have of "meaning" comes from Claude Levi-Strauss, the "father of modern anthropology" and author of the book Myth and Meaning I mentioned above. His name is familiar even to many who've no idea what he may have been saying. (He died only recently, in October, 2009, at age 101. The New York Times has a good obituary.)

Essentially, Levi-Strauss says that what we mean by "meaning" is how we understand anything-- that the meaning of something is our understanding of it.

At first hearing, this sounds simplistic-- or maybe even incomprehensible. But the more we think about it, the more good sense it makes.

Whether we're talking about a physical object, an event, or a story, what makes something important to us is the depth of our understanding of it.

Note that what's being said here is that things do not have meaning in themselves. We tend to think they do, but when we reflect on it we can see that it's our understanding of something, not the thing in itself, which gives us its meaning. And we can also see, then, that the more ways we understand anything, the more "meaningful" it becomes for us.

The classic example is a wedding ring. It's not the gold or silver but our understanding that makes a wedding ring meaningful. In our rationalist patriarchal culture-- still preoccupied with money and afraid of relationships-- the best we can do in expressing "meaning" in this case is to say that the wedding ring has "sentimental value." It's almost a dismissal.

Patriarchal cultural does a bit better with its use of the term "significant other." What makes a person "significant" is our depth of understanding of them. Although you won't find CEOs and politicians talking about relationships with "significant others," it is precisely our understanding of our relationships which makes persons "meaningful" or "significant" for us.

Both tribal peoples and traditional religious language offer some good terms for expressing the meaning of "meaning." Plains Indians use the word "wakan," for example, to say that the buffalo is of great significance to them. And in English we have familiar religious words like "sacred" or "holy" to say the same thing.

In a dualistic religious context, such words are usually reserved for "spiritual" (non-material) things; but most people probably wouldn't give you an argument if you referred to something as sacred as a photo of your long-dead mother as a "holy" picture.

In any case, we need to keep in mind that whether we say "holy," "sacred," "wakan," or use a less religious-sounding term such as "important" or "significant," the "meaning" of something isn't in the thing itself but in our understanding of it.

It's this thought that we need if we are to make good sense of the terms "symbol" and "myth," and-- eventually-- of the connections between religious ritual and cosmic evolution.

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MYTH. In the fitness center where I attend tai chi classes several times a week, a large poster recently appeared advertising a "Workshop on Cardiac Myths." It wasn't necessary to explain that the topic was "commonly held but incorrect ideas about heart-related exercise."

We need a more positive understanding of "myth" if we are to make sense of religious ritual and its connections with cosmic evolution.

While most of us are familiar with the classical Greek myths (stories about Zeus and Athena, for example), many of us are only vaguely aware that every cultural group-- from the tribal peoples of Tierra del Fuego to 21st-century North Americans-- has such stories.

One of the best known myth-stories, found throughout all the world's cultures, is that of a Great Flood. In the western world we know it, of course, as the story of Noah and the Ark; it is included in the sacred scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

When early anthropologists first began to study mythology back in the 1800s, they made several unconscious assumptions about the stories of the tribal peoples they were studying.

One assumption was that the myth-stories of these "primitive" peoples were attempts at what today we would call "scientific" explanations of the workings of the world. These 19th-century scientists assumed that tribal myths are descriptions of the behavior of stars and planets and especially of the animal herds on which the people's lives depended.

They also presumed-- in their rationalist arrogance-- that they were superior to the primitive peoples they were studying. As typical products of their time, the early anthropologists saw tribal stories as attempts at primitive science on the part of people who lacked the skills, talents and superior intelligence which those 19th-century scientists assumed they had.

Today, we know better. For a start, we know that "primitive" people weren't all that primitive: we know that human beings who lived five or ten thousand years ago had exactly the same kind of bodies, brains and mental ability we do today. We also know, now, that their attempts to make sense of the world by way of stories wasn't so far off the track.

While tribal myths are indeed about the behavior of stars, planets and game animals, we can see much better today that humanity's myth-stories are also-- and primarily-- about the workings of the human mind. 

Their central concern is psychology and social life.

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If you are interested in these ideas, you might like to read Levi-Strauss' Myth and Meaning. It's readily available in libraries, short (only 50 pages!) and quite easy to follow.

It's comes from a series of radio talks he gave for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the 1970s. In them he expresses such a wonderfully broad, human, concerned viewpoint and depth of understanding that he leaves most talk along those lines-- from church people and politicians, for example-- in the dust.

It's so impressive to see a person like this actually talking to real people. 

He is able to be not only clear but quite precise about the results of our attempts at understanding ourselves and the world. I can promise that if you're interested in religion or science, you'll like this book.

For a more difficult challenge, there's Levi-Strauss's earlier 1958 work, Structural Anthropology. If nothing else, I urge you to look at the Wikipedia article about his significance with regard to those perspectives in the human sciences known as structuralism.

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Structuralism is defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity." Levi-Strauss was one of the first to see that humanity's mythical stories have an underlying structure that in fact makes good sense, even though that underlying structure isn't obvious on the surface. It's that underlying structure that we understand.

The Biogenetic Structuralism perspective I've mentioned many times in these posts is a similar structuralist understanding, but it's a further advance, in that its context is the neurologically-informed evolutionary worldview that was not yet available to Levi-Strauss.

When we see ourselves as part of the naturally evolving world, we can see that even our minds are a part of the cosmic process, so that our myths are not just stories about our understanding of the workings of the world but also about our understanding of ourselves.

It's easy to lose track of the main points here, simply because most of these thoughts are so unfamiliar. For the record: my main point is that the world's myth-stories are precisely about meaning. Myths are the expressions of global humanity's self-understanding.

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In the New Cosmology's dynamic-evolutionary context, that self-understanding is quite rich! When we ask, What is the cosmic process about? ("What is the Universe Doing?" as I put it in post #17), we can see that the universe is making persons. We know ourselves as nothing less than personal and unique expressions of the universe become conscious of itself.

We can also recognize that there is much in us that has not yet become conscious. While we can "phenomenologically apprehend" many of the patterns of the way the world works-- in terms of cause and effect, as Dr. Jakob Wolf, whose ideas I discussed in post #53 (Bridging the Gap), helps us so well to understand-- it is also the case that many of those patterns of the world's workings remain unconscious to us.

What psychologists call the "unconscious psyche" is nothing less than the entire universe other than our conscious awareness. C. G. Jung says that the unconscious world within us is even bigger than the physical world outside us.

Jung and Freud were the first in modern times to recognize that the cosmic process shows itself in our dreams and unconscious waking behavior-- that the patterns of the way the world works seep out, even if barely, into conscious expression-- and that that is where our myth-stories come from.

Far from being "commonly held but incorrect ideas," humanity's myths are meaningful-- important, significant, sacred-- because they are expressions of the underlying patterns of the way our minds work. And it's because our myth-stories allow us to understand ourselves as unique expressions of the evolution of the universe that "myth" and "meaning" go together.

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SYMBOL. The word "symbol," too, is often paired with "meaning" (as in "symbolic meaning" or "meaningful symbol"), so that at first glance there seems to be little difference between myth and symbol. It's confusing because we have two different kinds of things we call "symbols." Some occur in nature, while others are the inventions of human culture.

Culturally invented symbols are like myths in that their meaning is our understanding of them. The arbitrary arrangement of letters and numbers in the symbol "H₂0" is a good example. We culturally agree to understand it as standing for water, just as we do with the sequence of the five letters w, a, t, e, and r.

But water itself-- the stuff that falls from the sky, that we swim in, wash ourselves with and drink-- can also be a symbol. So can food. So can fire.

It's these naturally occurring symbols that we need to understand if we are to make sense of ritual. What's so special about things like water, food and fire is that they grab our attention.

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People have known for many thousands of years that naturally occurring symbols like food, fire and water are "attention-grabbers." But it's only in modern times-- thanks to our understanding of natural selection at the primate level-- that we know how they work.

We know today that the minds and brains of our animal ancestors evolved to continually scan their environment; their very survival-- both as individuals and as a species-- depended on their finding food and water and avoiding danger.

We are not the descendents of those animals who, for some genetic reason, lacked that scanning ability; they didn't live long enough to pass on their genes to us. We are the descendents of the ones who survived because their attention shifted every few seconds.

We know from experience that our attention, too, is constantly shifting from one thing to another-- just like that of our primate ancestors. We also know that we can help ourselves stay focused-- to be "mindful," as Buddhists say-- by practicing meditation exercises.

Those things in nature which powerfully grab our attention also make it easier for us to be mindful. Think of how water in almost any form-- a heavy rain, a stream, a river, a lake, a pond, or the ocean--holds our attention. And how we are fascinated by flames and fire-- from the smallest birthday candle to a burning building or a glorious sunset.

Note that such natural symbols are different from myths as well as from the kind of symbols we use in math and science: while myths are expressions of our understanding of ourselves, these natural symbols are tools which help us to focus on our self-understanding.

In religious ritual we use the psychological, attention-grabbing power of natural symbols to counteract our brains' constant scanning activity. 

Calling them "tools" doesn't demean them. The reverse is true: they help us to consciously enter into the very meaning of our existence.

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If you're thinking that none of this sounds much like the religious rituals you have recently experienced, you're right. Ours is still a patriarchal culture-- alienated from the world and seeking escape from it-- so most of our conventional religious rituals involve only minimal use of these powerful natural symbols, and some church services omit them totally.

But we are now at a new religious moment in the history of the world: we're coming to see ourselves as belonging to the evolutionary universe and called to creatively contribute to it.

That's why creativity and cosmology are the topics of my next post. They are as essential as symbol, myth and meaning for understanding the relationship between evolution and ritual.

Meanwhile, you might like to share how you feel about what I've had to say in this post.

Do these thoughts about symbol, myth and meaning make much sense? Any at all?

Send me a note!

sam@macspeno.com

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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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