#27. Radical Honesty: The How-to of Ontogenesis

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A Quick Review: My previous four postings have been about ontogenesis, a technical word for our personal growth and development as it is understood from the neurological and anthropological perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism. The emphasis has been on what I call in post #22 the "other half of person": the social, communal and relational aspects of the mystery of our personal consciousness. 

This is in contrast to a dozen or so of my earlier posts which deal with the physical connection between person and cosmos; that is, with the link between the matter of the universe and ourselves as persons.

Entry #23 offers an overview of the Biogenetic Structuralist understanding of personal development as it takes place in the communal-social context, and next three posts (#24, #25 and #26) spell out its three main stages-- both from the perspectives of the human sciences and from an essentially religious view "with help from Uncle Louie."

One of my primary concerns has been to show that myth, ritual and symbol are understood in both perspectives to be the means or tools by which we are empowered-- in the highest phase of our conscious development-- to participate in the activity of the universe. Although long dismissed conventionally because of Western culture's "disenchantment of the world," myth, ritual and symbol are critically relevant to the emerging New Cosmology.

Along with the evolutionary worldview, myth, ritual and symbol have been of life-long personal interest and I hope to share further thoughts about them in future posts. But that's not the topic here. In this post I want to talk about something more fundamental: how we grow through the earlier stages of ontogenetic development to reach that mature stage of personal growth where participation in the cosmic process via myth, ritual and symbol is the norm.

Biogenetic Structuralists (as I described in post #25) and Thomas Merton (as I described in post #26) both refer to the third phase of ontogenesis as "contemplative experience" and "the highest form of cognition." Both also understand it to be nothing less than the mature stage of our personal development where we become creative contributors to the evolution of the universe.

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As I said in post #25, the static worldview of previous centuries has been so strong and so persistent that we're simply not used to thinking about our personal growth in any context, let alone trying to make sense of it in terms of ideas such as "cosmology" and "ontogenesis."

But at the same time, the desire for personal growth and development is one of our most basic human experiences: even two and three-year olds talk about "When I get big" and "When I grow up." Ontogenetic development is in our genes; it's one of the primal forces of the cosmic process which we embody.

So the question is: If everything about us wants to grow, what holds us back? What prevents us from achieving the highest and most mature form of personal consciousness?

In the most basic sense, our personal participation in the cosmic evolutionary process begins when our neuro-gnostic conscious awareness first dawns in the embryonic bundle of nerve tissue when we are still in our mother's womb. It continues beyond birth through the stages of acquired beliefs in childhood and our ego-experiences in adolescence and young adulthood, to the full blooming of our personal mystery in the third, contemplative, phase of ontogenetic development.

At least it can do that. Obviously not all of us make it to that most mature stage of personal development which many spiritual traditions call "wisdom consciousness."

What prevents us? What holds us back?

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If we can compare our development to the growth of a seed, it's clear that a seedling doesn't just sit there; it has to do something internally to continue its development into a healthy plant and to eventually reach its full-blooming mature stage. We, too, can't just sit back waiting for growth in awareness to occur; it doesn't happen automatically. As conscious beings, we have to consciously contribute to our conscious growth. It is, in fact, a major part of our essential human dignity that we have a role to play in our own personal development. "We make ourselves," as the famous anthropologist and archeologist V. Gordon Childe expressed it back in the 1930s.

This is one of the places where the biblical idea found Luke 19:26 makes good practical sense: "Those who have much will receive more, and those who have little will lose even that."

Not much growth in consciousness can happen if we're clueless. So it's important that we understand clearly what it is we have to do in order to continue to grow beyond the stages of embryonic awareness and childhood beliefs to the more mature ego-experience of adolescence and to the fully mature stage of personal participation in the cosmic process.

The question isn't just, "What holds us back?" It's also, "What do we personally need to contribute to our development?"

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The best answer I know to that question comes, not surprisingly, from the human sciences: in this case from the world of psychotherapy. It's spelled out especially well in the writings of Washington DC psychotherapist Brad Blanton, specifically in his book Radical Honesty (Starhawk Publications, 2005).

I discovered Blanton's work while reading a newsletter of Rowe Center, a human potential conference center in Western Massachusetts with ties to the Unitarian Church. The description of a weekend workshop he was offering caught my attention, so I got a copy from my local library of his Radical Honesty and recognized, to my delight, that among other things it is a practical "how-to" book for moving through the developmental stages of belief, experience and participation.

Blanton doesn't mention Biogenetic Structuralism, but many of his ideas fit well with its evolutionary and anthropological perspectives. He emphasizes, for example, that "unity is in the nature of things" and "we are each creators of the universe out of our own being"-- an especially good way to express the neurological jargon phase "cognized environment." And he describes his work as "social psychotherapy," stressing that personal development takes place in a social-political context-- an especially good way to express what anthropology means by a culture's "cosmology."

Blanton even uses the same odd term ("the being"), just as Biogenetic Structuralism does, for "person" or "consciousness." It's an odd usage which takes some getting used to; but if you have been reading my previous four blog posts, you're already used to it. You are, at least, familiar with the term "ontogenesis," which literally means "the development of the being." My point here is that Blanton's work offers some very clear ideas about what each of us must contribute to our personal ontogenesis.

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Blanton trained with Gestalt Therapy founder Fritz Pearls and started the first training program in Gestalt Therapy in 1971 in the Washington DC area, where he has been a psychotherapist in private practice for many years. He has written a half-dozen books, some translated into several languages, and he offers weekend workshops and eight-day conferences in the United States, Europe, Canada and Mexico. As a social reformer he has occasionally been arrested and spent time in jail due to his anti-war activities, all of which he says contributes to his ongoing education.

Blanton's central idea is that the primary cause of stress, depression and anger is "living in a story and lying to maintain it." Lying wears us out; and anxiety and burn-out can result in the severest kinds of psychological illness. What we have to do in order to move through the stages of our personal development is to tell the truth: we have to speak honestly about ourselves.

It sounds too easy, even simplistic, but when we hear what he's saying he is in fact providing the details for what might be called "the practice of ontogenesis." He's talking about what holds us back from personal development and what we need to do if our growth toward maturity is to continue rather than come to a premature dead end.

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Blanton's basic understanding is that what holds us back is shame, guilt and embarrassment.

We feel guilty, for example, that we frequently and consistently violate the moral principles which have been imposed on us in the belief stage of personal development. And because we attempt to hide that fact, the result is stress: everything from mild anxiety to crippling, even suicidal, depression.

Blanton's main point is quite simple: via the imposition of cultural norms, the neurognostic self is made to feel guilty for being adventurous and creative, and the only healing possible is to acknowledge what we have avoided and kept hidden. We become free-- from the stress imposed by cultural beliefs and personal ego-experiences and for more mature personal development-- simply by telling the truth. Being radically honest about ourselves is the only way to grow as a person.

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Obviously I can't do an adequate job in presenting Blanton's ideas here; I hope you might read Radical Honesty yourself. But I'm going to present a brief overview of some of his basic concepts, focusing on his understanding of what we need to do in order to move beyond the earlier stages of belief and ego-experience. This will provide, I hope, a sufficient context for an understanding of what he sees as the three levels of honesty, which I find remarkably parallel to the three stages of personal development that I've been writing about in recent blog entries. Blanton's three levels of honesty would seem to provide a kind of praxis-- a practical how-to-- for our ontogenetic development.

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Overview. For the sake of our life's survival, we need to make use of both the beliefs passed on to us in childhood and our personal ego-experiences in adolescence. We can't do without them. But due to insecurity, those childhood beliefs and adolescent ego-experiences can become a conventional routine of moralistic principles, rules and roles which lead to stress: suffocation, suffering and grief. It's especially difficult to get out of adolescence; we can easily end up living in an imaginary world-- what Blanton calls the "story"-- in which we hide and lie to make ourselves look good and to defend ourselves against shame and embarrassment. If we get stuck in adolescence, we become victims of our own mind, trapped in the prison of our own immaturity.

The only way out is grounding, says Blanton: managing our indoctrination by being honest.

Instead of living in an imaginary world, where we have to lie and hide to avoid the reality of our shame, guilt and embarrassment, we can make use of our image-making power to free ourselves from that mental jail. We have to go beyond first-stage beliefs and second-stage adolescent ego-experiences if we are not just to survive but also to thrive. Rather than being insecure, we can trust the world and ourselves; the alternative to insecurity is to trust our body and the material laws of the universe, so that we become grounded in the here and now.

This creative transformation leads to health, wholeness and meaningfulness: instead of being victims, trapped in a mental prison, we can use of our minds to become artists. But it's only radical honesty that can free us for a creative and self-reliant life.

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Level One. The first level of honesty is being honest about facts. With regard to the belief stage of our development, we need to be honest about the simple fact that we have not lived up to the ethical and moral principles passed on to us. It isn't so much our violation of those principles that is the problem; rather, what causes stress and anxiety is hiding that fact from others.

Blanton gives an example of a woman from a traditional religious family who secretly had an abortion at the age of 20. Guilt, shame and embarrassment prevented her from sharing that information with anyone for many years. She was in therapy for severe anxiety, and understood that she needed to stop hiding the fact of her past life from her parents. She tried many times to inform them, and only at the age of 35 was she finally able to do so.

Her father's reaction was, "Oh, thank God." He said, "We knew you had been wanting to tell us something for a long time; we thought that you must have a fatal illness." Note that the woman didn't need to tell anyone and everyone about the abortion, but only those from whom she had to work so hard to keep it a secret. It's the effort at lying, at hiding the data and living in a false story, that results in crippling stress, anxiety and grief.

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Level Two. The second level of honesty relates to adolescent ego-experience: it means being honest about our post-childhood thoughts and feelings.

"Thoughts and feelings" may sound trivial, and being honest about them may (again) seem simplistic, but we need to keep in mind that Blanton is talking about thoughts and feelings as conceptual judgments and emotional evaluations which have resulted from the ego-experiences of our adolescence. It's the effort it takes to hide our personal judgments and emotions that results in stress and even hatred-- just as does the effort to hide the facts about our past selves.

I don't need to give an example here; we all can provide numerous examples of overgrown adolescents who can't stop judging and criticizing themselves and for that reason have become super-critical and moralistic with regard to everyone else. Blanton says that the better we get at playing hide-and-seek during adolescence the harder it is to grow up, and that many end up trapped in perpetual adolescence.

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Level Three. At the third level of honesty we need to speak the truth not about the facts of the past or about our adolescent conceptions or emotional values but about our own self-images. If the first level of honesty looks to the past, this third level is more future-focused. Having a picture of ourselves-- as we are now, or as we want to be in the future-- isn't itself a problem; what is, is the effort needed when-- out of shame, guilt or embarrassment-- we try to keep that picture of ourselves hidden from others.

This may be the hardest level of honesty to understand. Most of us recognize that we need to grow up, to get over childhood. But in our contemporary adolescent culture, it's not easy even to see that we need to get out of adolescence. And Blanton says the odds are against us; the great majority never get beyond the stage of adolescent pretense because we use up our energies in hiding our self-image from others.

He gives an example of adolescent pretense that can be seen in cold weather at any street corner school bus stop: "Many teenagers would rather look cool, while freezing to death waiting for the school bus, than wear a warm jacket that is not as 'in' as the shirt they are wearing." We may laugh at that example, but we need to keep in mind that many people are still trying to look cool in their 30s, 40s and 50s. (If that seems like an exaggeration, just think of all the online ads that come in daily for replica watches and penis-enlargers.)

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Isn't it amazing that to get out of adolescence we have to share with others what most embarrasses us about ourselves! And that sharing our self-image-- in contrast to putting on a show-- is such hard work. Blanton says it "feels like dying."

I'm aware that my brief overview of these ideas is extremely superficial and I hope, as I said above, that you might read Blanton's book yourself. It's full of treasures. It contains, for example, the best description I've ever seen of the Buddhist understanding of annata (the no-self) and also the best description I know of what Christians call "grace" (as in Amazing Grace).

Another "treasure" is the quaternary perspective which shows up in Blanton's presentation of the three levels of honesty. If you are familiar with the Jungian idea of the four-fold functions of consciousness or with the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, you may have noticed that the progression in the levels of honesty goes from Sensing (in the belief stage) to the judgment functions of Thinking and Feeling (in the ego-experience stage) and to the image-making Intuitive function (in the most mature stage). This quaternary perspective allows us a wholistic understanding of conscious awareness that is invaluable for our self-understanding. I hope talk about it in some detail in a future post.

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I have several additional thoughts about Blanton's work which I also want to share. They don't seem to fit elsewhere in my brief overview, but they seem important enough not to leave out.

One thought is that, as Blanton puts it, "freedom is a psychological achievement." He mentions in his Introduction that according to Hugh Thomas, author of A History of the World (Harpercollins, 1982), the greatest medical advance in history has been garbage collection!

And Blanton says that the greatest psychological advance in history (which he optimistically sees as "just around the corner") will involve a similar awareness of our need to clean up our communal world. (Never before has our global need been so obvious to achieve a cleaned-up environment and a cleaned-up psycho-social situation-- especially in terms of our political and religious leadership. Obvious, at least, to everyone beyond the belief stage of personal development. So Blanton's optimism may not be as unfounded as it first might seem.)

A second interesting point is the question that probably comes to each of us when we are thinking about the various levels of honesty: Where am I? Which level best describes "where I'm at" in terms of my growth and development? Blanton offers a clear criterion: "The sound of freedom is laughter."

A third interesting point is Blanton's comment that underlying all of our stress, depression and grief, there also may be found a layer of joy. Freedom, laughter and joy! Those words don't often appear in science writing-- even in the literature of the human sciences.

Finally, in sharing my thoughts via this blog about the convergence of science and religion, I have consistently tried to provide examples of how similar ideas, although usually expressed quite differently, can be found in the two very different perspectives of contemporary science and religion. For this posting on the "how-to" of personal development, a religious expression is readily available similar to the understanding from the human sciences of our need for radical honesty to grow and develop. Most likely it has already come to your mind.

"Don't be afraid. Speaking honestly will set you free." John 8:32

sam@macspeno.com

#25. Ontogenesis: Phase Three

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On first hearing, the third phase of ontogenetic development makes little sense for many people today. The static worldview of previous centuries has been so strong and so persistent that we're simply not used to thinking about our personal growth in any context, let alone trying to make sense of it in terms of ideas such as "culture," "cosmology" and "ontogenesis." So here's a quick review of those key terms.

"Ontogenesis" is a fancy word from anthropology which recognizes that our growth and development takes place within the context of a culture's cosmology. Psychology also deals with personal development, of course. In the Jungian perspective it's called "individuation," but the focus is more on an inner sense of personal development rather than on the fact that our personal growth takes place within a cultural context.

"Culture," for anthropologists, includes everything which is not part of our genetic inheritance: all the knowledge and understanding we have which is passed on to us from older and more experienced members of our group.

"Cosmology" refers to a culture's response to the basic question of our place in the scheme of things; the focus of any cosmology is on how we are related to the rest of reality.

As I said, these ideas make little sense to many people today, and once we begin thinking in terms of "our place in the scheme of things" the reason becomes obvious: for many centuries western culture has lacked a coherent cosmology. It's for this reason that the emergence of the New Cosmology is of such great significance.

Thanks to modern science, the New Cosmology can be shared by all humanity. And it offers a perspective which includes the whole of the cosmic process-- from the Big Bang and the formation of stars and planets to the emergence of life on earth, the eventual emergence of self-awareness in humans and the continuation of the evolutionary process via the creativity of the human spirit.

That's the broad cultural and cosmological context in which Biogenetic Structuralism sees our personal growth and development taking place. Easy tags for the three stages (or levels or phases) of the development of consciousness are belief, experience and participation.

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I described the first two stages in the previous post (#24). This one deals with the third phase, participation.

As the third stage of ontogenetic development, participation differs from both belief-- the conscious understanding of ourselves and of our place in the world which we have received from others-- and from that kind of personal experience we have by which we compare what we have been told with what we have personally observed to be true.

Working out the relationship between knowledge which has been passed on to us and knowledge we have from our personal experience is, of course, a major part of growing up.

In earlier cultures, where awareness of this third phase of development was still part of the culture's tradition, the growing up process was usually completed during the teenage years. By contrast, as a result of the several-centuries-old divorce between science and religion, in modern western society the maturing process often continues well into an individual's 30s.

The problem is that western culture has been caught in the trap of thinking that we have to make a choice between science and religion. That was, unfortunately, the one thing early science and traditional religion agreed on. The reason I find the insights of Biogenetic Structuralism to be of such great value is that these insights make clear-- from a scientific perspective-- that we don't have to make that choice.

Because it combines evolutionary and anthropological understandings with neurological information, Biogenetic Structuralism allows us to recover this third phase of ontogenetic development as a normal part of our personal growth and development.

And it's precisely the perspectives of the New Cosmology-- which sees the world not as static but as developmental, and recognizes that we do indeed have a place in the evolutionary cosmos-- that allow us to move beyond the impasse of scientific rationalism and religious fundamentalism.

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By referring to the third phase of ontogenetic development as participation, Biogenetic Structuralism intends to indicate that it means something more than personal experience.

As usual, the words we have available tend to get in the way. In this case, however, the distinction really isn't a difficult one. It's a distinction we make every day. Participation means doing something, not just talking about it.

When we're first learning to drive, for example, we have a lot of conscious information about how to drive, but it's only when we're behind the wheel and actually driving that we are participating in the driving process.

That phrase-- "participating in the driving process"-- sounds strange because we don't usually talk that way. But we need to here, if we are to understand clearly the difference between knowledge about the evolution of the universe and personally participating in it.

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It sounds confusing because we still lack good terms for this third phase of ontogenetic development. Biogenetic Structuralism uses words like "trans-personal experience," "advanced individuation" and "contemplation" to talk about our conscious participation in the cosmic process. While none is the ideal term, each is worth our attention.

"Advanced individuation" is a reference to the Jungian term for personal development. Calling it "advanced" is a way of saying that Biogenetic Structuralism is referring to the same growth process but is looking at it, as I mentioned earlier, in the very broadest cultural, cosmological and evolutionary context.

"Contemplation" is a more explicitly religious term; for many it brings to mind spiritual writers such as Teresa of Avila or Thomas Merton. Its original meaning is something like what's meant by the familiar saying, "as above, so below." The image evoked is the construction of a temple being built on Earth in accordance with the architectural plan of the temple in heaven. So it's contemporary meaning is something like "making myself in accordance with the divine plan."

That contemporary meaning is similar to the meaning of "meditation" as it's used in Eastern religious thought: coming into contact with ultimate reality and ultimate values. So the contemporary and the ancient meanings of "contemplation" aren't all that different. And neither is the Biogenetic Structuralist use of it-- except that the emphasis in the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective is, again, on the fact that the construction process (or contact with ultimate values) takes place in the broadest cosmic context: the evolution of the universe.

The third term, "trans-personal experience," has been in use for several decades; there are academic journals devoted to Transpersonal Psychology and some schools offer courses in it. But it's a misleading term in the sense that the third level of ontogenetic development isn't something beyond personal experience so much as personal experience which takes place in a much larger than usual context. That context is described well in Native American tradition by the phrase "all my relations." So the term "trans-person" is meant to emphasize that the context for our personal development includes all of reality.

Perhaps a better term than "trans-personal experience" might be "trans-ego experience." But even that isn't quite right. As with the jargon found in every branch of science, we need to keep in mind that "trans-personal" is shorthand for an idea-- just as are "contemplation" and "advanced individuation." In this case, it's shorthand for the concept of conscious participation in the developmental process specifically as it's taking place in a relational-- rather than ego-isolated-- context, and that the relational context excludes nothing.

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In any case, whatever name we give to it, this third phase of conscious development is understood to be a shift in awareness; and it's a shift so radical that its results are often described as an "altered state of consciousness."

Even that term comes from the mental framework of 19th-century science, however, where our mind's thinking function was considered as the norm of ordinary awareness, and the other functions of consciousness, such as feeling and intuition, were dismissed as being of little significance. (Or even worse: as being feminine!)

But there's really nothing extra-ordinary about the third stage of conscious awareness. From the broader evolutionary and neurological perspectives available to us today, it is as normal and ordinary as are the other phases of our growth and development. It does, however, feel extra-ordinary when we first get into it, in much the same way that puberty, for example, feels like an extra-ordinary development for a teenager.

Even the reason why the third phase of ontogenetic development feels so extraordinary is similar to the early adolescent experience of puberty: they both take us out of the very narrow focus of our ego-centered concerns and allow us to enter into a world of relationships which were previously unimaginable.

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What's going on in the brain during the third phase of our developmental experience is fascinating. Just as in the biological evolutionary process generally, living things survive via adaptation (assimilation and/or accommodation) to the external world, so ego-consciousness develops in precisely the same way at the second phase of ontogenesis. But in the third stage there's a difference in that, while the same process is operative at both levels, it's the process itself (rather than the external environment) that's the focus at the contemplative level. I hope to spell out this kind of fascinating information in some detail in future posts. (Such optimism!)

Meanwhile, I'd like to offer some basic thoughts about what Biogenetic Structuralism understands to be the very means by which we enter into our participatory experience of the cosmic process. I'm referring, of course, to symbol, myth and ritual.

In post #22 (The Other Half of Person) I called myth, ritual and symbol "in-between" ideas because on one hand they are found in every culture on the Earth and are part of every religious tradition; even religious groups which formally shy away from them make use of them in practice (the Quaker "meeting for worship" would be a good example), and of course anyone involved in a regular meditation practice makes use of them. On the other hand, precisely because symbol, myth and ritual are significant aspects of religious practice throughout the world, they are also objects of study in the human sciences.

So as odd as it may sound, what bridges the gap between science and religion is ritual, symbol and myth.

As I also pointed out in post #22, they are "in-between" concepts in a second sense: they tend to be dismissed by the rationalist-materialist worldview-- along with belief and the intuitive and feeling functions of consciousness -- as little more than childish superstitions.

It's important that we recognize that the dismissal is itself a belief. In academic circles, this major component of western culture's materialist-rationalist cosmology has been described as the "disenchantment of the world". In the mid-20th century it was considered a sign of progress, a gain for humanity.

But while that disenchantment continues to pervade western culture, it is itself in the process of being deconstructed, as a result of the findings of post-rationalist science.

A central aspect of the re-enchantment of the world is that we are rediscovering the "other half of person": the fact that we are communal-relational beings. And along with it we are seeing a recovery of an understanding of the place of myth and ritual in our lives.

As I observed in an earlier post (#21 Struggling with Words), for most of us, the terms we have available to talk about these things are both familiar and fuzzy. We're in the process of updating basic words such as "science," "religion" and "person." And we're also in the early stages of updating our understanding of myth, ritual and symbol.

I need to emphasize that it really is a kind of "deconstruction of the deconstruction" that's happening. So before sharing some thoughts about a positive understanding of myth, ritual and symbol, I first want to say a few words about what they are not. Since I began these blog postings in the last days of 2006, I have intentionally avoided expressing negative attitudes as much as possible; but this is one place where some negative thoughts are appropriate. Think of them, if you will, as a contribution toward the effort to "disenchant" rationalist materialism's disenchantment of the world.

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In that disenchanted worldview, "myth" only means "something which is not true." It can refer to anything from a deliberate lie to common misunderstandings, but also to stories like urban legends and tall tales told for our entertainment (such as stories about Paul Bunyan or Bigfoot). "Myths" usually refer to events of the past, involving Greek gods, magic swords and flying dragons, but Santa Claus, King Arthur and the Parting of the Red Sea are also "myths" in this sense.

The word "ritual" in this same disenchanted worldview almost always includes the idea of repetition. From the rationalist perspective, "ritual" is the name for any kind of repetitive gesture or any activity which is repeated on a regular basis. Rituals are usually described as being "empty gestures" and are often considered compulsive or even pathological.

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The word "symbol" is a little more complicated. It has a valid use in science and math where it means "something which stands for something else." In this use, symbols are a shorthand for more complex meanings. We couldn't do chemistry, for example, without chemical symbols such as NaCl and H₂O, and we couldn't easily summarize Einstein's understanding of the physical equivalence of matter and energy without his famous equation, e = mc².

But when this legitimate use of "symbol" is extended into other areas, we end up with silliness and nonsense: that a circle, for example, "stands for eternity" or that a dove "is a symbol for peace." This use of "symbol" exemplifies the rationalist disenchantment of the world. We need to keep in mind that like the conventional meanings of "myth" and "ritual," it has nothing to do with our ontogenetic development or with our participation in the evolution of the universe.

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For that reason, I want to conclude this blog entry with at least a brief introduction to a positive understanding of myth, ritual and symbol. I hope to spell out why the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective sees myth and ritual as the tools by which we participate in the cosmic process in the third stage of our ontogenetic development.

In this more positive understanding, myth simply means a story: a description of anything that has happened or that people are involved in, and which illustrates or expresses in some way the culture's cosmology. Gods or spirits may be involved, but the story is not about them, it's about us. Myths in this anthropological sense help us to understand our place in the scheme of things; they are stories which help us to enter into the mystery of our human condition.

And ritual in this anthropological sense simply means telling the story. The telling can be around a primitive campfire or a Thanksgiving table, and be as complicated as a three-day Tibetan Buddhist rite or the three-hour Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom. It doesn't even have to include words. It can be told in gestures and actions, like a dance, or even by no action, like the zazen practice of "sitting quietly doing nothing."

While "mythos" is a Greek word, "ritual" comes from a Sanskrit term: rita. The basic meaning of rita is something like "the order of the universe" and "the round of the seasons." It's the way the world works: what we call today the scientific rules by which the universe operates.

Clearly, the meanings of "myth" and "ritual" aren't all that different. They each have to do with the telling or acting out of a story which is of significance for our human self-understanding. A good brief definition of both might be simply: enacting a story which has meaning.

What makes the story significant is that it somehow allows us to enter into the meaning of our lives. It somehow speaks to us in such a way that we are transformed beyond what's conventionally called "ordinary" consciousness to an "altered" state of awareness. Which is, of course, what the third phase of ontogenetic development is all about.

I've no doubt that my use of the word "somehow" twice in the previous paragraph resulted in a strong response from many readers: "Somehow? Well... HOW?"

That's where symbol comes in.

We can easily understand "myth" as a story and "ritual" as its telling, but there is no similar equivalent term for "symbol." Symbols seem to be neither things nor actions but can be perhaps best described as a kind of communication. They are like body language-- in this case, the "language" of myth and ritual.

As a form of communication, symbols are the mechanism by which a story influences us. They are whatever grabs our attention. So symbols can be anything: words, actions, pictures, gestures, things, places, persons-- whatever helps us to enter into the meaning of our existence. 

They are whatever aspects of the story touch us and affect us at a deep level. This is why Biogenetic Structuralism understands symbol to be the means by which the mind-brain works to bring about our personal transformation.

I am aware that these are greatly oversimplified ideas with regard to symbol, myth and ritual, but I don't think they are inaccurate. I offer them as basic ideas to build on in our attempts to understand symbol, myth and ritual as means by which we participate in the cosmic process.

Nowadays, most traditional religious rituals are understood from the secular perspective to be nothing more than empty gestures; and for large numbers of contemporary people, traditional religious symbols have become what T. S. Eliot calls them, "a heap of broken images." 

They have been lost to western culture with the rationalist-materialist disenchantment of the world.

But they are being recovered again, thanks to the New Cosmology.

sam@macspeno.com

#24. Ontogenesis: Phases One & Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sam@macspeno.com