#45. Midnight Wisdom: Sophia as Provider

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This post is the last of four dealing with the four main groups of images of Wisdom/Sophia found in the Hebrew Bible's wisdom literature.

I find these images tremendously helpful for a renewed understanding of the western religious tradition in the context of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution. They seem especially appropriate for the major transitional period humanity is experiencing in our movement beyond the limitations of a static cosmology and the patriarchal attitudes of religious dualism.

As in the previous three posts, my efforts here are to relate this fourth group of wisdom images to the other four-fold perspectives about which I've shared my thoughts in earlier posts. This includes the Jungian consciousness functions, the imagery connected with the four directions found in pre-civilization traditions such as the Native American Medicine Wheel, the four traditional ways of being religious, Karl Rahner's existential aspects of human experience, and the Immense Transition itself.

I've called this post "Sophia as Provider" because this fourth group of images sees Sophia as the source of food, shelter and protection for the Earth's children. Alternative names might be "Sophia as Protector" or "Sophia as Caretaker." It's an image of Divine Wisdom taking care of us, Sophia providing for our life and existence.

I've also called it "Midnight Wisdom" because it relates to the North on the Medicine Wheel. "North" especially evokes the darkness of night and the cold of winter, threatening times when alert attention to potential danger is needed and there is little leeway for carelessness or error. If an emergency arises in the middle of the night or in the dead of winter, delay in immediate action can easily result in major injury or death.

The primal element associated with North is earth; in some traditions it's said to be metal. The basic idea is the rock-hard solidity of stone or a chunk of iron, which is in strong contrast to the fluidity of water (the element associated with the West) and the fleetingness of wind, air and breath (East's element).

The solidity of rock and metal represents the harsher aspects of reality, what's sometimes called the world's "obduracy." So "earth", as the North's element, is an especially good expression of our need to attend to the material aspects of our lives, particularly to the needs of our bodies and to the safety and survival of those too young, too old or too ill to take care of themselves.

The main idea is that life is fragile and we need to give our attention to the details of the rock-hard realities of our physical existence.

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On the Medicine Wheel, the animal associated with North is the White Buffalo. For the Plains Indians, the buffalo was not only the main source of food but also of many other things needed for survival. The buffalo provided its skin for covering tepees, its fur for clothing, and its bones to make necessary tools such as scrapers, needles and knives; even the bull buffalo's scrotum was used to make rattles for religious ceremonies. The buffalo quite literally gives itself for the life of the people.

And as in the archaic hunting cultures, where hunting was considered a religious activity, the buffalo was understood to give itself willingly. It's not all that different from the understanding of creation by divine kenosis-- which I described in posts #33 (Talking About God) and #34 (Talking About Us)-- at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The buffalo is indeed sacred. Even today when an occasional white buffalo is born Native Americans hold it in high honor as an image of this divine self-giving.

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It's important to keep in mind that, although the imagery is very different, contemporary scientists working in fields such as Systems Theory, Chaos Theory and Unified Field Theory are also saying something very much along these same lines. They see the world and ourselves in it as manifestations of an underlying order of reality for which they use terms like the "Cosmic Fullness," "Implicate Order" and "Quantum Sea." An Asian version of this same idea is the traditional Chinese description of the Tao as "the no-thing from which comes every thing."

As I mentioned in several previous posts, the Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov expresses a similar understanding when he describes the world and human persons as "actualizations of the divine potentialities." Jungian analyst Michael Conforti, a contemporary pioneer in matter-mind studies in the realm of psychotherapy, uses a more traditional religious term; he says "the patterns of reality are continually being incarnate in space and time." Karl Rahner says something similar, too-- that we experience ourselves as the "embodiment" of the "incomprehensible source." Perhaps the best name for this self-giving on the part of the Mystery behind the universe is cosmologist Brian Swimme's phrase, "the all-nourishing abyss."

Contemporary scientists, cosmologists, theoretical physicists, psychotherapists; Orthodox and Catholic theologians; followers of ancient traditions such as Taoism and of teachings going back to Paleolithic times-- all are attempting to express the same insight. Like the White Buffalo, the mystery behind the universe provides us with what's needed for the survival and fullness of our lives.

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In the fourth group of the Bible's wisdom images, Wisdom/Sophia is pictured in way that sounds very similar to the White Buffalo's self-giving. The Hebrew writers don't use an animal image, since the Hebrews were farmers, not hunters. In the wisdom literature, Sophia is pictured as a tree, plant or vine-- a source of food and shelter for humanity.

Here are some comments from Hal Taussig's book, Wisdom's Feast, Sophia in Study and Celebration, which I've referred to in each of these four posts dealing with images of Sophia. This group of images is especially relevant to these midnight and caretaker aspects of Divine Wisdom.

Taussig notes that in many of humanity's cultures "a tree comes eventually to symbolize almost every major mythical figure," and he suggests that this may be the reason the "Hebrew scriptures include a number of different images of Sophia as a tree or plant." Some well-known examples are Buddha under the Bo tree, Jesus on the tree of the cross, Thor hanging on the World-Tree.

Taussig says that the "most striking of these" wisdom images is in Ecclesiasticus 24. Here, Sophia herself is speaking: "I have taken root in a privileged people, in the Lord's property, in his inheritance," she says.

And this is followed with a series of wonderful images: "I have grown tall as a cedar on Lebanon, as a cypress on Mount Hermon; I have grown tall as a palm in Engedi, as the rose bushes of Jericho; as a fine olive in the plain, as a plane tree I have grown tall. I have exhaled perfume like cinnamon and acacia, I have breathed out a scent like choice myrrh, like galbanum, onzcha and stacte, like the smoke of incense in the tabernacle."

Sophia compares herself to a glorious oak tree: "I have spread my branches like a terebinth, and my branches are glorious and graceful." And also to a delicate vine: "I am like a vine putting out graceful shoots, my blossoms bear the fruit of glory and wealth."

Sophia gives of herself no less than the sacred buffalo of the Plains Indians: "Approach me, you who desire me, and take your fill of my fruits."

Taussig notes that this is likewise the case in Ecclesiasticus 1, where Sophia is described as a tree providing out of her own abundance: "She intoxicates them with her fruits; she fills their whole house with their heart's desire, and their storerooms with her produce."

Sophia also provides shelter along with her fruits; in Ecclesiasticus 14 she becomes a sheltering presence. Taussig notes that here the writer "mixes metaphors to describe Sophia's sheltering presence" as both a tree and a house. In this text, the writer is speaking of "one who meditates on Sophia."

"He peeps in at her windows, and listens at her doors; he lodges close to her house and fixes his peg in her walls... he sets his children in her shade, and camps beneath her branches, he is sheltered by her from the heat, and in her glory he makes his home."

In all of these images, Sophia gives of herself for the life of the people. She provides the food, shelter and protection especially needed in the dark of night and the cold of winter which are associated with North on the Medicine Wheel.

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It makes good sense that the Jungian consciousness-function associated with the darkness and cold of north on the Medicine Wheel is Sensation. With its attention to details, our Sensation function fits right in with the idea of care-taker and provider.

Sensation is a perception function (as is Intuition, which is associated with the west), and both Intuition and Sensation differ from the two judgment functions (Feeling and Thinking) because, rather than making a judgment about whatever environment we find ourselves in, the perception functions simply look at what's there. The difference is that while Intuition sees the forest, Sensation pays attention to the individual trees; it sees the details.

So the White Buffalo/Sensation function is in great contrast to our Black Bear/Intuition function. While Intuition is concerned with possibilities and potentialities, with the "what might be" of the future, Sensation is concerned with the immediate details of life in the here-and-now.

The mind's Sensation function is apparently based on the activity of the brain's Frontal lobe which allows us to focus our attention on particulars and is concerned with how we make use of things. It's a part of our evolutionary heritage from the ancient past when, as the Biogenetic Structuralists like to say, the main concern of our animal ancestors was to "get food without becoming food." People with a strong Sensation function focus more easily than the rest of us on the details of everyday life. We couldn't survive without them.

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Medical people, nurses and doctors, for example, are often better than the rest of us at being able to handle the immediate details of life and death situations. So are many others who give of themselves for the safety and protection of the rest of us-- firefighters, police, crossing-guards, construction workers, those who care for patients who have highly contagious diseases-- any who have dangerous jobs and are especially good in emergencies.

Care-takers devoted to the more routine service to others are also examples of this White Buffalo ability. Those who run drug rehabs, day-care shelters and food banks, those who provide for the homeless on cold winter nights, those who maintain houses of hospitality and soup kitchens, those who keep our homes and streets clean, those who see better than the rest of us the details of climate change and help us see what we can do about it-- all are examples of our White Buffalo/Sensation function. And as I said, we couldn't survive without them.

The need for this White Buffalo quality in political leaders has recently emerged as a result of the media's references to "the 3 AM phone call." But it's just as much needed by any mother or father when responding to a child's cry in the middle of the night.

These are all examples of our White Buffalo/Sensation function in action, providing the care and protection needed, not only for our safety and survival, but for life in its fullness. They are all expressions of our providing for the shelter and protection for others just as Sophia does.

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It's not surprising that the focus of the Sensation function and the Medicine Wheel's North finds expression in one of the traditional ways of being religious, the way of service. In scholarly circles, it's referred to as "the way of cosmic harmony."

Here, social action is seen as our contribution to keeping the world in balance; service to those in need is a way of being in harmony with the cosmic flow. We take care of one another simply because that's the way the world works; it's "the right thing to do." We provide for one another, as Divine Wisdom provides for us.

This White Buffalo way of being religious contrasts greatly with devotion to the Holy Presence, the way favored by the Green Mouse/Feeling function. In the Sensation function's "way of cosmic harmony," the Holy Presence is understood to be present wherever anyone is in need.

Many of us will remember the traditional works of mercy-- feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, visiting the sick, burying the dead. Martin Luther expressed this perspective well when he said, "Ever, ever goes the Christ in stranger's garb." Mother Theresa describes a leper dying in the streets as "Jesus in a distressing form." The Dali Lama says he can describe his religion in one word, "Compassion."

The native Maori people of New Zealand have an especially simple and powerful image that captures well this way of service and cosmic harmony. They see each individual who is born into the world as something like a fragile fern frond, to be taken care of until it grows up enough so that it can take care of other fragile fern fronds. The image of fern frond is found everywhere in New Zealand. It's even used as a logo for their "All Blacks" Rugby team and the "Black Caps" Cricket team.

What this way of being religious comes down to is offering a helping hand wherever it's needed. And as a "way of cosmic harmony" it fits right in, not only with these older insights of the world's religious traditions, but also with the vision of the New Cosmology we have from modern science.

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In the perspectives of the New Cosmology the idea of service to those in need is simply extended to include our taking care of the Earth itself. The focus is still in terms of survival and protection, but now the care is extended to include endangered species of wildlife and the details of the dynamic environment. In the New Cosmology our sense of the Holy Presence is extended to everything.

It's easy to see that this inclusivity is a major aspect of the Sensation function's focus on details.

In posts #39 (on Hebrew Thought) and #40 (on Sophia/Wisdom), I mentioned the French philosopher and author of A Study of Hebrew Thought, Claude Tresmontant, teacher of medieval philosophy and the philosophy of science at the Sorbonne. Tresmontant observed that from a dynamic-evolutionary perspective, war and violence are distortions of the cosmic process. We can see better now, thanks to the New Cosmology, that patriarchy is too. I have in mind specifically those attitudes of the patriarchal mind which result in the exploitation of the Earth's resources or the exclusion of people from full participation in life because of their age, gender, educational level or ethnic background.

In the New Cosmology, we see that it's a distortion of the cosmic process to exclude anyone. In our care of the Earth and its peoples, nothing is to be overlooked, no one is to be left out.

And this is not just the concern of Peace Prize recipients such as Mother Theresa, Al Gore and Africa's Wangari Maathai. In the Immense Transition, we are coming to see that care for ourselves and for "all our relations" is one of the main practical ideas in the new view of ourselves and world that's offered us by modern science. Just as we are coming to see, too, in this time of Great Turning, that humanity's cultural history is a continuation of the embodiment-- the actualization, incarnation, manifestation-- of the cosmic fullness, the incomprehensible source and all-nourishing abyss we know as Divine Wisdom.

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This understanding of ourselves as manifestation of the Mystery behind the universe is expressed especially well in Karl Rahner's existential analysis of our experience of being "a person in the world." He says that we not only experience ourselves at the deepest level as aware, open and free, but also that we experience ourselves as "blessed" or "graced."

The blessing we experience is nothing less than the fact that we belong to the universe. We know ourselves as blessed to be part of it all, graced to be not only participants in the cosmic process but also called to personally contribute to it.

In my experience, many who are interested in the New Cosmology find it surprising that the western religious tradition has a word for our participation in and contribution to the cosmic process. They find it even more surprising to know that the word is "liturgy."

Originally, "liturgy" just meant something like "public work." In the early days of the Roman Empire, when wealthy people donated funds for public works-- for what today we would call "civic improvements" which are of benefit to all-- that work was referred to as "liturgy." Basically, the word means work done "by the people and for the people."

Christians in the Roman Empire used the word "liturgy" to express their understanding of being called to act for the benefit of the whole human community. In theological texts liturgy is still defined as "the work of the people." And even today, in the liturgical services of the Eastern Christian churches, it's said explicitly that the service is being offered "on behalf of all and for all."

It's easy to miss that we still use the word "service" to refer to a religious ceremony. And it's fascinating to see that the term "liturgy" has become more widespread as a synonym for what used to be called "divine service." Jews have long referred to the "liturgy of the synagogue" and even Buddhists nowadays sometimes refer to their gatherings for meditation as their "zen liturgy."

But the connection between the existential experience of being graced or blessed and the subsequent sense of service to the world is found even in one of the oldest known religious "services," the sweat lodge ceremony of Native Americans. 

Sweat lodge rites go back many thousands of years, perhaps to the time of the Paleolithic hunting cultures. And even today the sweat lodge structure is covered (at least ideally) with buffalo skins. But even if it's covered with plastic tarps, the participants still proclaim, as they crawl naked through the small door that leads into it, that what they are doing is for the benefit of all. Each one says, "All my relations!"

I've never heard the sweat lodge ceremony referred to as a "liturgy," but Native Americans are as explicit as are Eastern Christians in their understanding that what they are doing in the sweat lodge is service on behalf of the world: "We do this so that all the peoples might live." And by "peoples" they mean the winged nations, the finned nations and the four-legged, as well as we two-legged peoples. It's not surprising that this ancient hunting culture ritual has become an important ceremony to many in the context of the New Cosmology.

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From Paleolithic hunting cultures to theoretical physics and modern existentialist analysis of human experience, the same fundamental vision emerges. Although in very different words and expressions, they all seem to be saying something much like the perspective that's at the root of the western culture's religious tradition: Divine Wisdom gathers us, guides us and provides for us, and calls us to contribute our service on behalf of all and for all.

In Taussig's words: "Sophia calls out to us to participate in the world in which we live."

And once again the question is, in Karl Rahner's words: "Are we are willing to make the effort to be sensitive and responsive?"

sam@macspeno.com

#41. Four-fold Wisdom

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This post is the latest in my attempts to share thoughts about the Judeo-Christian tradition in the context of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution. It's the first of five (hopefully short) posts offering an introduction to the four-fold aspects of Divine Wisdom, with a separate post on each.

In posts #38 (Exodus) and #39 (Hebrew Thought) I made the point that the Exodus event, the Great Escape from Egypt, marked the beginning of the western world's evolutionary worldview and that we owe our modern dynamic-evolutionary perspective to Hebrew thought. As the French philosopher Claude Tresmontant whom I mentioned in several recent posts observed, the realization of the Hebrew sages that it is the nature of whatever exists to be continually evolving was as significant in human history as the discovery of fire.

Post #40 (Wisdom/Sophia) deals with an additional aspect of Hebrew thought especially important to the Immense Transition humanity is currently undergoing: our movement away from the patriarchal worldview which we inherited from ancient classical culture. The Bible's wisdom literature offers help in moving our understanding of God beyond the older image of a harsh patriarchal divinity.

The accumulated insights of the Hebrew scriptures with regard to Divine Wisdom are especially important at this time in history because they are at the core of the Judeo-Christian tradition and thus of western society. While the wisdom perspective was lost after the Dark Ages, and so seems unfamiliar to us in our still-rationalist and patriarchal situation, it is in fact nothing less than the religious source of the western evolutionary view of cosmos and life on Earth, and so is of tremendous relevance to our continued cultural development at this crisis time in our history.

So far, Western culture has shied away from dealing with the meaning and purpose of our existence in a non-static and non-patriarchal context. But the wisdom literature provides us with just what we need: an in-depth understanding of the significance of our lives in an evolutionary perspective.

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While many religious traditions have a feminine divinity dating back to Neolithic times, in the Judeo-Christian tradition the image of Divine Wisdom seems to have emerged first among the Diaspora Jews living in Alexandria, Egypt, several centuries before the Common Era. It apparently emerged as a way of tempering the more rigid and harsh aspects of the distant and transcendent-only divinity of earlier Judaism. It is an important part of the evolution of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and more generally of western culture's understanding of God.

Jesus and the early Christians understood themselves in the wisdom context, but patriarchal perspectives within Christianity have kept it submerged for many centuries. It has appeared spontaneously, however, many times throughout Christian history. Byzantine art and architecture in the earlier Christian centuries are good examples. Other examples include the famous Lutheran shoemaker Jacob Boehm, the French Catholic saint Louis de Montfort, and the early 19th-century German Romanticist philosopher Frederick von Schelling.

An especially significant example of the spontaneous appearance of Divine Wisdom is the 20th-century religious thought of Russian Orthodoxy. Russian Orthodox thinkers led the way from the mid-1800s right up until the end of World War II. Some of their names may be familiar: Feodor Bukharev, Vladimir Soloviev and, especially, Sergius Bulgakov.

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The wisdom perspective is emerging once again in our day, as we move-- ever so slowly-- beyond the values and attitudes of patriarchy. It is especially relevant to the insights and perspectives of the New Cosmology because this dynamic religious understanding converges with the scientific-evolutionary view. It allows us to bring together our contemporary concerns for peace, social justice and environmental integrity into a non-static, non-dualistic, and non-patriarchal perspective.

As Tresmontant observed, violence and war are a distortion of the cosmic process. A recovery of the wisdom perspective which lies at the heart of our western culture can bring us back to valuing human life, individual persons and our relatedness to the Earth. In the wisdom literature, Divine Wisdom not only helps to fashion the world but also delights in it. "How happy I was with God's earth and its people," says Sophia in The Book of Proverbs.

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The loss of the wisdom perspective is especially clear in the variety of names and words we need to express these ideas. We're not yet comfortable with either the words or the insights presently available to us. Wisdom is called hochma in Hebrew, sophia in Greek, for example, but referred to as logos by the gospel writers.

In the old-fashioned language of the King James Bible, The Book of the Wisdom of Solomon says: "Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily: and sweetly doth she order all things." ("Sweetly" here has the old meaning of "skillfully" or "proficiently." We still have this meaning today, although it sounds to us like slang, as in "He has a sweet golf swing.")

When Wisdom herself speaks in Ecclesiasticus (also called The Book of Sirach), she says: "Then the creator of all things commanded [and he that made me, rested in my tabernacle. And he said to me]: Let thy dwelling be in Jacob, and thy inheritance in Israel, and take root in my elect."

It's not easy to connect that sentence with the words from the Prologue of the Gospel of John which say: "The logos pitched its tent (his tabernacle) among us." (That's the literal translation of the familiar words, "the Word became flesh and dwelled among us.")

So the archaic words and the old languages don't help as much as they might. One thing that can help us a lot, as I see it, is our contemporary quaternary understanding of human consciousness which I wrote about in post #29 (The Four-fold Mind). The quaternary perspective can help us to a far richer understanding of that Divine Wisdom which pitched its tent among us.

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Because of my long-time interest in the fact that our minds function in four different ways, I was delighted to find references to it in the work of Brad Blanton which I described in post #27 (Radical Honesty: The "How-to" of Ontogenesis). I found Blanton's work a help in understanding the Biogenetic Structuralist view of the stages of human development which I described in three earlier posts on ontogenesis, #23, #24 & #25.

As I said in post #29, "We may not know exactly what the mind is, but we do know that it's not something static: it's not so much a thing as a dynamic process. We also know-- although it's less commonly understood-- that it operates in four distinct ways."

As I also said in that post, "The basic idea of the four-fold mind comes from the human sciences, specifically psychology and cultural anthropology." In the Immense Transition we are undergoing-- from the static worldviews of rationalist science and dualistic religion to the dynamic, evolutionary and unitive perspectives of the New Cosmology-- the quaternary perspective is invaluable for our self-understanding.

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Both the Jungian view of the four-fold mind and the teachings connected with the Native American Medicine Wheel insist that, if we are to be complete persons with an integrated rather than lopsided consciousness, all four functions are needed. It is the lopsidedness of western culture which accounts for the great damage that patriarchal attitudes inflict on women, children and the environment, and is the cause of much of our racial and religious conflict.

So what I'm hoping to do in the next four posts is to bring together the various quaternary perspectives of Jung and the four directions of the Native American tradition with the wisdom of the wisdom literature of the Hebrews. I also want to link those views with the four traditional ways of being religious that I described in post #30 (Ways of Being Religious) and with German theologian Karl Rahner's existential analysis of human experience as self-presence, freedom, transcendence and grace that I described in post #34 (Talking About Us).

In Rahner's language we experience ourselves as aware, open, free and given; but those four words can only hint at the depth of Rahner's understanding, just as C. G. Jung's names-- Thinking, Feeling, Intuition and Sensation-- for the four functions of consciousness can only give us tags for the concepts and insights Jung provides. In contrast to these ideas and concepts, the Bible's wisdom literature provides us with images of Divine Wisdom, just as the Medicine Wheel teachings provide us with images of ways of being human.

And images touch us at a very deep level.

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As I mentioned above, I described the Biogenetic Structuralist understanding of the ontogenetic process in posts #23-25. It is a scientific understanding of the growth and development of human consciousness as it takes place in the context of a culture's cosmology; it happens via the three stages of belief, experience and participation. That participatory phase of conscious development is also referred to by the term "contemplation" and, perhaps surprisingly, it has the same meaning there that it does in a religious context.

In post #26 (Help from Uncle Louie), I described some of Thomas Merton's especially helpful ideas about religious experience available to us via images. He says, among other things, that it is "the result of personal experience at a deeper than rational level" and he calls it "the highest form of cognition." It brings us, he says, "into living participation with an experience of basic and universal human values."

While ideas provide us with understanding, something else results from images: communion. Images, says Merton, "put us in communion with our deepest selves." They "deepen our communion with the concrete" and they put us in communion with the real world: images "bring us to an awareness of our place in the scheme of things."

And they empower us to participate in the cosmic process: "images bring us into harmony with world and its energies," says Uncle Louie. In contrast to concepts, images give "a privileged status as a conscious participant in communion with the energies of the cosmos."

That's what the biblical images of Divine Wisdom can do for us. And they are especially valuable because they come from the same Hebrew source that provides us with humanity's initial insights about evolutionary development and creative newness.

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Back in post #34 (Talking About Us), I mentioned the work of a contemporary pioneer in matter-mind studies in the realm of the psychotherapy, Jungian analyst Michael Conforti. He observes in his book Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, & Psyche that "The patterns of reality are continually being incarnate in space and time." I noted there that this insight sounds a lot like Karl Rahner's analysis that we experience ourselves as the "embodiment" of an "incomprehensible source." And it sounds a lot like the Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov's phrase that we are "actualizations of the divine potentialities."

In chapter 9 of Conforti's book he notes that "every nation and culture has recognized the presence" of the archetypal energies of the cosmos (in the form of gods, spirits, powers) and that "we too need to find some way for including again in our notions of consciousness the relationship between the personal and the non-personally acquired transpersonal."

As he says, "In this way, we create the opportunity to reconnect to the generative matrix of human and global experience" and this "capacity to recognize and understand the meaning of archetypal fields offers important opportunities for resolving conflicts on the personal and collective, or global, levels."

"Clearly," says Conforti, "the time is ripe to apply our understanding of archetypal dynamics to global concerns." As I see it, the biblical images of wisdom at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition provide western culture the opportunity to do just that.

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The Bible's images of Divine Wisdom fall into four main groupings. They correspond, as I've said, with Jung's four-fold functions of consciousness, with the four traditional ways of being religious, with Rahner's analysis of human experience, and with the images of the Native American Medicine Wheel. My plan is to spell out one of these four groups of correspondences in each of the next four posts. (I'm well-aware that this is an ambitious project!)

If you're also feeling ambitious, there are innumerable web sites dealing with Sophia from every imaginable slant-- New Age, Feminist, Christian, Gnostic, Sophiological-- except, as far as I know, the quaternary perspective. Meanwhile, I want to mention three especially good books about Wisdom which you might like to know about.

For a strong academic perspective on the history of wisdom, there's Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza's In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (Herder & Herder, 1994). Fiorenza is a feminist Catholic theologian and Professor at Harvard Divinity School.

In terms of depth, breadth and vision, the best book I know of is The Future of Wisdom: Toward a Rebirth of Sapiential Christianity (Continuum, 2007) by Bruno Barnhart. Bruno is a monk at the Camaldolese Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California. I visited him there in the spring of 2002. [Bruno and his fellow monks were evacuated from their monastery during the recent fires in June-July 2008. So were the monks of the near-by Buddhist monastery at Tassajara. Both sets of buildings were still standing, last I heard. (Update: As of 22 July, the evacuations were lifted for both monasteries.)]

And for a wonderful collection of texts from the Bible's wisdom literature, with lots of practical down-to-earth ideas for making use of them, see Hal Taussig's Wisdom's Feast: Sophia in Study and Celebration (Harpercollins, 1989). It's coauthored with Susan Cole, Marian Ronan and Susan Cady. Taussig is a New Testament scholar, Near East historian and Methodist pastor. I heard him speak at few years ago at a Jungian gathering in Media, Pennsylvania. It's a sign of the times that he's been interviewed on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

In the Byzantine churches, before the scriptures are read aloud the deacon cries out, "Wisdom! Let us attend!" Bruno notes in The Future of Wisdom that it's as if the Earth itself is ripening in our time. "The time is ripe," Michael Conforti says. Indeed! Let us attend!

sam@macspeno.com

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

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I've used the term "Immense Transition" many times in these postings. This seems to be a good time to share my understanding of it in some detail. I'm doing it in two parts because spelling it out in one post would be far too demanding of even the most good-willed readers.

It feels like a good time because, while there's a lot involved in trying to talk about the Immense Transition, I now have the tools to do a decent job with it. I'll make use of Karl Rahner's existential aspects of human experience which I described in post #34 (Talking about Us) and I'll draw on the Jungian functions of consciousness along with their Medicine Wheel images which I described in three recent posts: #29 (The Four-fold Mind), #30 (Ways Of Being Religious) and #31 (Integrating the Four Functions).

The main idea of the Immense Transition is that we-- global humanity, all the people of planet Earth-- are presently experiencing a change in our awareness of ourselves and the world which is as immense as anything which has occurred previously in all of human history.

As I've often noted, Teilhard de Chardin describes it as the biggest change in human consciousness since human consciousness first appeared on Earth several million years ago.

Although his church wrote him off, Teilhard knew what he was talking about. He envisioned the world-wide web many years before its technology became available. He called it the "noosphere,"  which he pictured as an interconnected thinking layer or web of consciousness surrounding the earth, just as there is a layer of water (the hydrosphere) and a layer of air (the atmosphere). "Noos" comes from gnosis, the Greek word for cognition or knowledge. (If we exchange the "g" and "k" we can easily see the identity of those words: gnowledge and knosis.)

A good way to summarize what the Immense Transition is all about is to say that it is the Earth's people's increasingly conscious awareness of the significance of conscious awareness. And the best example of that change in global consciousness is the internet. Even those who in earlier times simply took human consciousness for granted are nowadays becoming increasingly aware-- thanks to the web-- of the mystery of our existence as conscious persons.

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In academic circles, the Immense Transition is referred to as the "Second Axial Period." The term "axial" comes from the German philosopher, Karl Jaspers, who was first to note that a major turning point in human culture occurred throughout the world around 500 BCE. He called the period between 800 and 200 BCE the Axial Age.

Jaspers observed that during those six centuries the philosophies behind the world's major religions came into existence. It happened in the various centers of civilization-- China, India and the Mediterranean world-- and it happened without any apparent or obvious direct transmission of ideas from one region to the other.

This is a significant example of the fact that cultural evolution occurs as autonomously as does biological evolution. The cosmic process doesn't stop on Earth with the emergence of life or with the emergence of human consciousness. It is continuing at this moment as human culture.

The term "Second Axial Period" was first used, as far as I know, by Ewert Cousins, professor emeritus at Fordham University and general editor of the 25-volume series World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest. He is the author of many books and papers on global religious understanding; among them is his especially interesting essay, "Religions of the World: Teilhard and the Second Axial Turning." Also of interest is his brief but stimulating 1994 book, Christ of the 21st Century.

There are some excellent essays on the web from a Buddhist perspective by the New Cosmology writer Joanna Macy. She calls the transition we're in "a time of the Great Turning.

There's also a book with that same title: The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, by David C. Korten. It presents the Immense Transition from a political and economic viewpoint. As Korten notes in his prologue, however, "the Great Turning begins with a cultural and spiritual awakening." And that's where we are, right now.

I came up with the term "Immense Transition" because of my interest in the work of the famous University of Pennsylvania anthropologist and nature writer Loren Eiseley. His book, The Immense Journey, is an especially moving description of the development of human beings from our earliest primate ancestors.

Whatever we call it, it's clear that we are currently in a major turning point in the human story, one that is of far greater significance even than that of the first Axial Period. The evidence is at our fingertips. If you are reading this on a computer, you need only move your fingers an inch or so to have access to knosis or gnowledge about almost anything in the world. The communication network of humanity's wisdom and knowledge surrounds the Earth.

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In what follows I offer some thoughts about the Immense Transition using the quaternary perspectives of both Jungian concepts and Native American imagery, while focusing on Karl Rahner's existential analysis of human experience that I spell out in the previous post.

This post (#35) deals with the Immense Transition in terms of Rahner's existentials of "self-awareness" and "self-transcendence"; the next post (#36) deals with it in terms of his existentials of "freedom" and "grace."

Just as is true in discussions of Jung's four consciousness functions, none of Rahner's existentials is considered more important or valuable than the others. Even the sequence in which they are discussed varies considerably; since most discussions start with what he calls "self-presence" and end with what he calls "grace," I'll follow that same pattern.

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1. The Immense Transition and Our Experience of Self-awareness.
In the history of western religious thinking, after the Dark Ages the surviving biblical-liturgical perspectives of the Patristic period were thought to be less and less meaningful and they were eventually replaced to a great extent by the rational mode of thinking we call Scholasticism. But with the development of experimental science, that metaphysical focus too was seen to be of less value, and with the coming of the modern scientific concern for the world of nature, scientists like Copernicus in astronomy and Darwin in biology radically changed western consciousness.

So did Freud and Jung with their work in the human sciences. With the scientific study of our own minds, we see now that rationalism, too-- whether physical or meta-physical-- has had its day. What began in European culture around the time of Dante and Francis of Assisi, but is just coming into its own in our time, is the scientific study of personal awareness.

This whole historical development is sometimes called a "turn toward episteme" or the "turn to the subject." It is an awakening of human consciousness to human consciousness.

Both Karl Rahner and Biogenetic Structuralism attempt to spell out this new perspective in detail. Rahner uses an analysis of our most intimate personal experience, while the Biogenetic Structuralists use the scientific knowledge accumulated by the areas of evolutionary science, neuro-physiology, and cultural anthropology. But both seek to "understand understanding."

In the concluding chapter of Brain, Symbol and Experience, for example, the Biogenetic Structuralist authors say, "Epistemology is a genetic, evolutionary process... involving the evolution, development, and conditioning of the nervous system." This means, as they point out, that any experience or perception on the part of an individual "is generated by [the brain's] neural organizations that have been influenced by the evolution of the species, the development of the individual, and the forces of social conditioning."

Our growing awareness of all of those factors-- and of all them taken together-- is what the Immense Transition is all about. What it comes down to in practical terms is that when we ask, "What is our place in the scheme of things?" the answer is: "We are the scheme of things." This new understanding of ourselves is the essence of the Immense Transition. It is the New Cosmology.

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The experience of ourselves as self-aware has two major aspects: one is that we are conscious of our participation in the cosmic evolutionary process, the other is that we are thereby conscious of our relationship with everything else that exists. It's especially important to note that both of these aspects of self-awareness come together in our understanding of cultural evolution as the continuation-- by us, on our planet-- of the evolution of the universe.

The majority of Americans still claim not to believe in biological evolution and even persons who are aware of the scientific evidence accumulated in the last several centuries find the idea of cultural evolution difficult to grasp-- simply because it's such a radically new way of seeing ourselves.

As descendants of the rugged individualism of America's pioneer days, we are just not used to recognizing that there is a level to the cosmic process beyond the emergence of individual consciousness: that there is, as I spelled out in post #22, "The Other Half of Person."

This is where an understanding of the conscious activity Jung called "Feeling" and the Medicine Wheel imagery associated with it is especially useful. Feeling-consciousness has been written off by patriarchal attitudes as irrelevant, so we need all the help we can get in understanding it.

As I described in post #30 (Ways of Being Religious), the Feeling function asks of anything, "Do I like it?" and "How do I relate to it?" It apparently comes from the activity of the brain's Parietal lobe, which focuses on spatial relationships, and it's the word "relationships" that is the key to understanding Feeling-awareness. As an activity of the conscious mind, Feeling is concerned with belonging, participation, togetherness, closeness, with holding on to the good things of the past, with loyalty and inclusiveness, with leaving out nothing and no one-- with everything that might be summed up by "heart."

As a traditional way of being religious, Feeling focuses on loving acts of devotion to the Holy Presence. A significant aspect of the Immense Transition is not an abandonment of this perspective but a recognition that the Holy Presence resides in all things, so that the issues of peace and justice and a concern for equality and ecology come together in our recognition of the significance of the fact that nothing and no one is excluded from our awareness of "all our relations."

While Rahner's abstract expression of the existential of self-presence is something like "one possesses the thing known and one’s own self together," the implications are much clearer in the Medicine Wheel's image of the Green Mouse who is located at the south-- the place of summer, mid-day heat, fire and warmth-- and who always remains close to the Earth.

The acceptance of ourselves as close to the Earth and one with the natural world is also expressed well in other cultural traditions such as the Green Man imagery of Europe's pre-Christian times, the Wildman imagery of a renewed post-patriarchal masculine, and the feminine image of Divine Sophia as the Lover of humanity who delights to be with us and excludes no one. I hope to explore these broader cultural images in later posts.

In post #26, "Help From Uncle Louie," I offered some preliminary thoughts about the value of images over concepts in helping us come in contact with the deepest aspects of our existence. While abstract words like "gnosis," "episteme" and "subject" are certainly helpful at some level in our understanding of this aspect of the Immense Transition, the single word-image "green" seems to bring it all together nicely.

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2. The Immense Transition and Our Experience of Self-transcendence.

The "turn to the subject" which characterizes the contemporary moment in the history of western religious thought includes not only a degree of consciousness of self-awareness which our ancestors lacked, but also a focus on our relatedness to all else. Rahner's existential of self-transcendence differs from his existential of self-presence in that self-transcendence emphasizes our openness to all that is not our self. At a very deep level, we experience ourselves to be open to everything that is or can be.

While western religion certainly paid attention to other human beings-- as do all the world's religious traditions, especially in meeting their immediate needs for food and shelter-- it tended to ignore the things of the world. The "world," in fact, became a name for something to be avoided, as in "the world, the flesh and the devil." The world was the source of occasions of sin and thus a threat to eternal salvation.

What a contrast to see Teilhard de Chardin dedicate his book The Divine Milieu "to those who love the world." The very fact of that he did so is itself an example of the Immense Transition currently happening in western religious consciousness. And when we realize that Teilhard is quoting from the gospel of John, we see how far we have to go in recovering the roots of western religion. This aspect of the Immense Transition is indeed immense!

And to a great extent, it's science that leads the way. It's science, not the religious traditions, that allows us to be open to the world. And to love the world.

Michael Conforti's book, Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, & Psyche, that I mentioned in the previous post, offers a fine description of what "love for the world" means.

Conforti quotes from an article by Rudolf Ritsema, a long-time director of the annual psychology meetings begun in Europe in 1933 known as the Eranos Conferences. Ritsema distinguishes between the three familiar forms of love: eros, philo and agape. He calls eros and philo "subject-object love," in which, as he says, "there is personal involvement and an expectation of something in return." In contrast, says Ritsema, agape is love without any specific focus: "an overflowing fullness of heart which cannot but be shared with whomever comes in contact with it, without expecting anything in return." And it results in a sense of one-ness "with everything and with the origins of creativity."

This is an especially helpful example of Rahner's existential of our self-transcendence as an openness to all things. Traditionally, agape is considered divine love, but just as Rahner uses "transcendence" (usually used of theos) to describe human experience, so here the kind of love usually attributed to theos is attributed to anthropos as well. Indeed, it is precisely self-transcendence-- our human openness to everything-- which allows us to love of the world.

And it's also this openness to the world which allows us to take our place in the cosmic process. As Rudolf Ritsema noted, agape puts us in communion with "the origins of creativity." It is precisely our love of the world which empowers us to take our place as co-creative participants in the evolutionary process as it continues in the cultural development of humanity on Earth.

The recognition of this link between our openness and our participation in cultural evolution is a major aspect of the Immense Transition. It makes clear that what happens on our planet-- in terms of human rights or global warming, for example-- is in our hands. It's up to us!

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Reflection on the Jungian functions and Medicine Wheel imagery also help us to understand the depths of this experience of self-transcendence and of its significance in the Immense Transition.

The function of consciousness called Intuition apparently has its origin in the activity of the brain's Occipital lobe which is associated with sight and vision. And unlike Feeling (which is a judgment function), Intuition is a perception activity. The key word here is vision, in two senses: physical sight and our ability to see mentally in pictures. Imagery and our image-making ability ("image-ination") are central aspects of this Intuitive Black Bear function of consciousness.

It's important to note that this visionary ability differs from Sensation, the other perception function, in that it sees the forest rather than the trees. The Intuitive function is oriented to the whole picture-- to the pattern that the details make, rather than the details themselves. And this ability to see patterns is especially significant in our understanding of the importance of intuitive imagery in contrast to rational concepts. Intuition operates not via ideas but by pictures, and seeing the whole picture is a major aspect of the Immense Transition.

Because it asks of any pattern that it sees, "What does it mean? What is its significance?", the Intuition function is imaged well by the shamanic Black Bear at the west of the Medicine Wheel. It looks to the future, especially to the potential for wholeness and healing, and is associated with water and the torrential flow of late afternoon thunder storms, as well as with autumn and the twilight of evening-- all situations when our sense of awe, wonder, reverence and mystery are especially strong.

As I noted in post #30 (Ways of Being Religious), the traditional way of being religious associated with intuitive imagery is Myth and Ritual. Sacred story and symbol are the very means of the healing and wholeness which empowers our participation in the cosmic process.

We can see this same concern for empowerment and healing expressed in the images of other cultural traditions such as the Druids of the Celtic lore, Merlin in the Grail stories, and the feminine image of Divine Sophia as the Artificer or Fashioner of our identity found in the Hebrew scriptures. (And these again are topics for future posts.)

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Our intuitive vision of our deepest identity and significance is critically important if we are to understand and live out the meaning of our lives. I mentioned Teilhard's words in the previous post: "Seeing is being."

If western patriarchal culture dismisses the relationship-oriented Feeling function as feminine, it denies the very existence of the meaning-oriented Intuition function. It's easy to see why patriarchy fears and suppresses this aspect of human experience!

As I noted in post #31 (Integrating the Four Functions), "in its desire to explore possibilities for the future and its seeking to have an authentic ("wholistic") perception of reality, truth, and the meaning of life beyond the conventional... our Black Bear intuitive-imagery function is the very opposite of the attitudes of the institutional churches and governmental and educational organizations which seek to censor and silence creative expressions which depart from the well-established conventional norms."

I also noted there that "We need to keep in mind that the Black Bear function is a way of seeing in the broadest, widest and most comprehensive sense, and that it is the realm not only of artists, musicians and poets but of all creative individuals. (And, in the perspectives of the New Universe Story, that includes you and me.)"

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In practical terms, probably the most significant aspect of the Immense Transition for western people is the opening this existential of self-transcendence affords us to the unitive worldview of the Asian religious traditions. It can easily escape our awareness because it has already become commonplace. Zen meditation and tai chi, for example, are available everywhere nowadays and even local churches offer courses in yoga. This represents an immense change in the cultural consciousness of the western world.

The essence of the unitive worldview of the East, that the existential of self-transcendence opens us to, is expressed well in a famous story in the Hindu tradition of a father offering his young son what today we would call "religious instruction." (In contemporary scientific jargon we would say that the father is teaching his child their people's cosmology.)

The child's name is Śvetaketu. The father is telling him about God, the Divine Fullness, the Ultimate Mystery behind the universe. He ends his comments with these words: "And that, Śvetaketu, is what you are."

In Sanskrit, the father's words are tat twam asi: "you are that." Their meaning isn't all that different from what theoretical physicists are talking about when they refer to the  cosmic plenum or the Implicate Order manifesting itself as the things of the world. And it's not at all different from what Jesus is recorded as saying at the Last Supper when he prayed for his friends that they might be, as he is, one with God.

This recognition of our non-duality ("not-two"-ness) with the creative source of the world is the major aspect of Immense Transition which is ours via our personal experience of what Karl Rahner calls self-transcendence.

If "green" can summarize what the Immense Transition means in terms of the experience of self-presence, maybe what might serve to summarize what the Immense Transition means in terms of our experience of self-transcendence is to recall the famous saying of the 19th century adventure writer Rudyard Kipling.

He said that "East is east and west and west and never the twain shall meet."

And it's no longer true.

sam@macspeno.com

(Look for the other two aspects of the Immense Transition in the next post.)

#34. Talking About Us

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Talking about God means talking about us." That's how I ended the previous post.

While bumper stickers proclaim "God is the answer," many today recognize that "God" is part of the problem. In the dynamic worldview that's ours thanks to modern science, a static understanding of God doesn't work. We need a participatory understanding of the anthropos-theos relationship to go with our participatory understanding of the anthropos-cosmos relationship.

In the dynamic worldview, we can see not only that cosmos, anthropos and theos go together, but also that anthropos has a central position. It's obvious that we can't say much either about the world or about God without talking about ourselves. That's what this post is about.

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In sharing my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion via this blog, I've mentioned many times how valuable I find the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective, with its combination of insights from the three big scientific areas of evolutionary biology, neurophysiology and cultural anthropology. It's called a "structuralism" because it looks at the underlying structural aspects of all human cultures; it focuses on what groups of persons, from small communities to large ethnic groups, have in common.

In the realm of religious thought, Karl Rahner, a great genius of 20th century theological and philosophical understanding, does something similar. He too tries to analyze what all humans have in common; his emphasis is not on human culture, however, but on personal experience. Rahner focuses on the underlying structural aspects of the most basic experience we human have: our awareness of being a human being. (It's so basic it even sounds odd to say it!)

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As an attempt to analyze the fundamental structural aspects of our experience of being human, Rahner's work is a kind of "experiential structuralism."

I want to emphasize that this is no small example of the contemporary convergence of science and religion. Just as Biogenetic Structuralism asks, "What do we come up with when we take into account biology, brain studies and the Earth's cultures?" so Rahner asks, "What do we come up with when we reflect on our experience of ourselves as a person?" The creative growing edge of scientific thought and the creative growing edge of religious thought are using very similar methods to enlarge and enhance our self-understanding.

"What's it like to be a person?" is not a question that most of us ask ourselves often, not only because we are taken up with the practical details of living, but also because we live in what has been called-- in a recent book, The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby-- a "culture of distraction." The superficiality of so much in contemporary society prevents us from focusing on the deeper aspects of our lives.

Such questions are, however, the ones that matter most to all of us in the long run. They matter because how we understand ourselves shapes how we act. As Teilhard de Chardin expresses it, "Seeing is being." How we see ourselves determines how we live our lives.

Creative thinkers on the growing edge of both scientific and religious understanding are offering us new ways of seeing and offering us, therefore, new ways of being. They help us to a new understanding of our own existence, which we need in order to deal with our contemporary problems. It has always been the case in the Earth's cultural evolution that every evolutionary advance is the result of people dealing with new problems. Individuals and groups who don't deal with their problems eventually die off.

Rahner's starting point is to ask, " What touches all of us? What can everyone agree on about what's basic to human experience?" He attempts to articulate what all humans experience-- whether young, old, male, female, Christian, Jew, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, secularist, atheist or agnostic-- simply because they are human.

The great power of this effort is that, in looking at the underlying basics of personal experience always and everywhere, it allows us to link the static worldview of the past with the present dynamic perspectives of evolutionary science, and to see the world's various religious and cultural traditions, even contemporary secular values, in terms of our common human experiences.

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I've emphasized repeatedly in these posts that we are a mystery to ourselves. Rahner's effort is to ask what aspects or structures of the experience of being a mystery to ourselves we can make explicit. What can we put into words about what's basic and common to the conscious experience of every human being who ever lived?

Rahner sees four underlying structural aspects to the mystery of being a person; he calls them "existentials" and names them self-presence, freedom, transcendence and grace.

His terms aren't as helpful as they might be. They come from a basically Germanic philosophical tradition, and just as C. G. Jung's German names for the functions of the four-fold mind (as I mentioned in post #29) don't really convey their meaning well in English, neither do those of Rahner.

Because at least two of them sound like traditional religious terms, it's especially important to recognize that Rahner is not relying on the traditional religious thinking of the past to talk about human experience.

He is relying neither on biblical and liturgical imagery (as was done in the Patristic period of western religious reflection) nor on abstract rational thought (as was done in the later Thomistic-Scholastic period). Rahner is doing something new.

His analysis of concrete human experience is part of the very broad movement in the modern world called the "turn to the subject" or "turn to the person." This "turn" toward episteme (personal consciousness), comes out of the more or less "Germanic" philosophical tradition which includes Descartes, Kant, Heidegger and the Enlightenment thinkers; it earliest roots go back to the time of Dante. It might best be described as an increasing awareness of awareness.

Karl Rahner calls this "turn to the subject" the "awakening of person in the world." In a way that our ancestors of past centuries never were, we are aware of ourselves today as autonomous and responsible "subjects." Rahner's focus is the anthropos-cosmos relationship which I have frequently referred to in these blog postings. And it's this awareness of the mystery of ourselves as conscious participants in an evolving universe that leads to new spiritual-religious perspectives appropriate to the New Cosmology. It really is a new start.

One important note. In Rahner's "structural" analysis of our experience of being a person in the world, it is you and I who are the authorities. Rahner can help us-- and he helps a great deal-- in putting words on our experience of being a person. But we're the ones who decide. In what follows, I'll describe as well as I can my understanding of Rahner's four "existentials." You can see if you think they fit your experience-- and whether, as Rahner says, all human experience.

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[1] Self-presence. The first of Rahner's existentials-- of the fundamental aspects of the experience of being a human being-- is the easiest to understand; it is that we are aware of ourselves. Rahner calls this self-possession or self-presence.

As is the case for each of Rahner's existential aspects of human experience, we can express what he's trying to say in many ways: we are in possession of ourselves, we are present to ourselves, we experience ourselves as experiencing ourselves, we are conscious of ourselves as being conscious of ourselves, we know ourselves as knowing ourselves....

And although we can't give a simple definition of consciousness, we know what we mean by it. We understand what we're talking about, even though it's understanding that we are trying to understand. That's why we have so many names for the mystery of being a person: "mind," "consciousness," "experience," "gnosis," "knowledge," "awareness," "episteme"....

The problem is that a satisfying definition always has two parts: we always define something by saying it's "like such and such, but it differs in some way." A familiar scientific example is defining a plant by naming its genius and species. At familiar example at the cultural level is the term first used for a self-moving (auto-mobile) machine: a "horse-less carriage."

But we haven't anything to compare our conscious awareness with. We can say we experience ourselves as "subject" in contrast to being an "object," but that only distinguishes us as being self-aware from things which are not self-aware; it doesn't really help us to understand what self-awareness is in itself.

Probably the best and truest thing we can say about our consciousness is that "it's the same thing as God, but created." That's not helpful either, of course, unless-- as the Asian religious traditions have done-- we do some serious reflection on what we mean by "God." All the Eastern traditions begin with the insight that we and the Ultimate are a-dva: "not two."

And maybe that's the best we can do. And maybe, also, that's not so bad. Thinking about our self-presence leads us to an awareness of our own deepest mystery: our non-duality with the Great Mystery. (Clearly, "Talking About God" and "Talking About Us" go together.)

It's important to note that in Rahner's view, the awareness of the non-dual nature of personal awareness has nothing to do with religious doctrines as such.

He specifically mentions that while many people today reject religious beliefs, it's "not because they abhor the incomprehensible." What contemporary people reject, he says, is "the complications of human reasoning which has tied itself up in knots." It's the rationalism of religion and theology that they reject, not mystery.

Rahner stresses that people "sense and revere the nameless and inexpressible." It is "a mysterious simple thing of infinite fullness," he says, that, based on our experience of being a person, we find ourselves to be "a being in face of the nameless mystery."

This takes us well-beyond the rationalism of recent centuries in the western world, where the mind is "tied up in knots." As anthropos-in-cosmos-- "person in the world"-- we know ourselves in a new way. And this allows us to be in a new way.

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[2] Transcendence. Rahner names his second existential aspect of human experience "transcendence." While the word is traditionally used to describe a creator who is above, apart from and independent of the world-- utterly different than anything we know or imagine-- Rahner uses it to describe human experience. He says we are self-transcendent.

It sounds as if he's saying that we experience ourselves as being beyond or separate from ourselves, but that's not what he means. He's saying that our deepest personal experience is something more profound than that of our everyday ordinary consciousness. There's more to us than the awareness we have when we are carrying out the normal everyday aspects of living. We are conscious that we have (or are) a deeper (or higher or bigger or truer) self. (Again, how we struggle with words!)

Probably the best word to use to express what Rahner means is "open." As a "person in the world," we experience ourselves at a deep level as being utterly open to everything that exists.

Another way to say it is that we experience ourselves as being "many-sided." Very many-sided.

This experience of being unlimited-- open to everything, unbounded, infinite-- is what Thomas Aquinas meant when he said that a person is "that which can become all things." We are potentially open to everything. We don't have any limits. We participate in infinity.

At first hearing, this may seems difficult to make sense of, but in fact it's something we experience all the time. As Aristotle said, "We desire to know." And everyone has had the experience, for example, of being interested in something-- whether it's growing roses or the structure of atoms or major league batting averages-- and wanting to know everything about it.

And as anyone with a passionate interest in anything has experienced, the more we learn, the less we know. The more we realize, that is, how little we know.

A good example is how we feel when we look up something on the internet. There are millions of sites and many millions of topics. Just now I checked out "Abraham Lincoln" and got 24 million entries. If I looked at one per minute, it would take me 500 years.

We may not be especially interested in Abraham Lincoln, but there are many things that we are interested in, and some of us seem to be interested in everything. The experience of wanting to know everything, to experience everything, to go everywhere, to see every interesting place in the world, to try every thing at least one, maybe even to go into outer space or certainly to go into the bigger world of inner space-- all of this is the kind of thing Rahner means when he says we experience ourselves as "transcendent."

Maybe the best way to say it is that nothing exists outside the realm of our possible experience. We really are open-ended. We are in some way one with all things. We experience ourselves as infinite, unlimited, unbounded, potentially present to all of reality, participants in infinity. We do not exist apart from the infinite unbounded reality underlying everything.

Western people are not at ease with such understanding of ourselves, even though it is a familiar experience when we reflect on it. But it, too, appears clearly in the Asian traditions, and this is, as I mentioned in the previous post, one of the main reasons westerners today are so interested in those ancient traditions.

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[3] Freedom. Rahner's third existential is the very opposite of experiencing ourselves as open to all things: it's knowing ourselves to be limited, finite, particular, to be "this" but not "that."

This aspect of the experience of being a person is just as familiar as that of being open to and participating in infinite reality. And it, too, is an aspect of our being participants in the cosmic process. As "person in the world" we are not apart from and separate from the world. Indeed, as anthropos, we are the cosmos become aware of itself.

This means that we have a specific place in the world. We have a history. Each of us can say something like... "I'm male. I'm American. I have a mixed Scotch, German and Polish ancestry. I'm 5 feet, 9 inches tall. I'm 70 years old. I live in New Jersey. I'm married. I have two adult married children and two grandsons. I'm not good at languages, but I can do math fairly well. I don't like broccoli...."

Each of us can fill many pages with this kind of specific information about ourselves, but no other person in all the world can say exactly the same things we can. Rahner calls this "existential" aspect of ourselves, which is the opposite of openness or self-transcendence, our "historicity."

It has to do with "actualizing"-- making actual or real-- our uniqueness, our individuality, our creativity and freedom.

At first, "freedom" may seem to be the wrong word, but it's not. Rahner is talking here about what he calls our "awareness of the unbounded scope of the human spirit" and of bringing it down to earth.

It is precisely this experience of being a free and autonomous person which allows one to know one's self as a responsible subject. In the conventional religious context, "responsibility" usually has negative connotations; it readily evokes guilt feelings which religious authorities abusively exploit. But Rahner's emphasis is on the experience of being responsible for and to ourselves.

At a very deep level, we know we really are free, at least to some extent, to choose who and what we will be. And it is this freedom, which is ours precisely because we are specific and finite, that makes us a mystery to ourselves.

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[4] Grace. Rahner's fourth existential is less easy to express clearly than the others. Not because it's difficult to understand, but because it's difficult to put into words that aren't easily misunderstood.

In responding to the question, "What is the experience I have of being a mystery to myself?" Rahner says we experience ourselves as "graced" or "blessed." A better English term might be "given." We experience ourselves as having been "given" to ourselves.

This is precisely the point that I made in the previous post (#33) when I noted that, in contrast to the idea of creation ex nihilo, the idea of creation by kenosis sees the creative source of the world as bringing us into existence by pouring itself out as the world and us.

In that post I quoted the pioneer 20th century theologian Henri de Lubac who explicitly says with regard to the Mystery's creative out-pouring that "there is no prior recipient." In calling this fourth existential "grace," Rahner is making the point that at a very deep level we do in fact experience ourselves as the "embodiment of an incomprehensible source."

I want to emphasize again that Rahner is not proposing a theological doctrine. It's what might be called a "pre-theology." He is intending a description of our experience of being a "person in the world" and offering an insight about human self-understanding which is independent of any specific religious or cultural tradition. A problem is that in our rationalist culture we can hardly hear it except as a theological concept.

But of much greater interest is the fact that the growing-edge scientists who have moved beyond the rationalism of 19th century science are saying something very similar to what Rahner is saying. I described some of these ideas in my very first blog entry.

In talking about what they call the "mind-matter issue," theoretical scientists working in fields with still-unfamiliar names such as "Systems Theory," Chaos Theory" and "Unified Field Theory," conclude that we and the world appear to be expressions (or manifestations) of an underlying order of reality for which they use terms like the "Vacuum Plenum," the "Quantum Sea" and the "Implicate Order."

Rahner says we experience ourselves as the "embodiment" of an "incomprehensible source." Back in the 1930s, the Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov used the phase "actualizations of the divine potentialities." And Jungian analyst Michael Conforti, a contemporary pioneer in matter-mind studies in the realm of the psychotherapy, uses a more traditional religious term. "The patterns of reality," he says, "are continually being incarnate in space and time."

Conforti's book, Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, & Psyche, is an especially good collection of many of these concepts. (It was published in 1999, but it is recently new to me. My thanks to Mary Conrow Coelho for pointing it out to me.)

Once more, I want to emphasize, with regard to this existential aspect of being a person Rahner calls "grace," that he is not talking theory or theology. He says it's a matter of personal experience.

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Some last thoughts. If you feel that Rahner's existentials aren't all that different from one another, I agree. They seem to be different ways of looking at the one same experience, of being a human person, from slightly different points of view.

And if you're thinking that this sounds a lot like the ideas about the four-fold mind that I've talked about in recent posts (#29-31), again, I agree. And there's even more to it: I've found that seeing Rahner's existentials in the light of quaternary consciousness is especially helpful for understanding the Immense Transition global humanity is in the midst of. I hope to share some thoughts about that in a future post.

My final thought is that whether we're talking theoretical science or personal experience, we are in fact "talking about us." These insights are available to all humanity, no matter what our ethnic and cultural and religious background. In recognizing ourselves as self-aware, open, free and blessed, we find ourselves not only to be mystery in the face of mystery, but personal participants in the progressive embodiment of the Great Mystery.

The New Science Story of the cosmos, life and anthropos-- of seeing ourselves as "person in the cosmos"-- is the heritage of all the people of the Earth. And it really is something new.

sam@macspeno.com