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"Behind every blade of grass is an angel telling it 'Grow! Grow!' "
That's a Medieval Jewish saying. A messenger of God is standing behind every living thing in the world, urging it to grow. It's a good image of the dynamic-developmental worldview seen within a religious context: the Mystery behind the universe desires each of us to become all that we can be.
The fact that it's a Medieval saying makes clear that the developmental worldview isn't all that new; what's new in this time of the Immense Transition is that the evolutionary perspective is entering into the conscious awareness of everyone.
My efforts with the blog to share these kinds of thoughts about the convergence of science and religion were mentioned in an article in the May 2008 issue of This Active Life, the National Education Association's magazine for retired members. The cover story is on the use of technology by retired teachers, "Retirement in the Digital Age."
As a result of that NEA article, an 85-year-old retired teacher sent a comment asking if I would explain how the people of early times could live, as the Bible says, for 700 or 800 years. I used the opportunity to talk a bit about the early Christian practice of understanding Bible stories in four different ways rather than only in a literal sense. (That ancient idea of the "four senses of scripture" is yet another-- and important-- example of the quaternary perspective.) You can read her comment and my response at the end of post #34.
The main point of my response was to say that "the Bible stories about God, Christ and the Holy Spirit," as the questioner put it, are about the same thing science is: the evolutionary development of the world.
It's a big claim-- not one that people still living in the context of a static worldview can hear easily or take seriously. But I think it makes good sense in terms of the Immense Transition. I hope to spell out some of the details of it in the next few posts.
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Many of my earlier posts are devoted to the ideas about human consciousness that we have today thanks to modern brain studies.
In the dynamic-evolutionary perspective, we see that the world shows itself at the three levels of cosmos, life, and mind. That's been a neglected area of religious thought. I offered some ideas about how mind shows itself via the biological brain in posts #10-#20.
As I see it, those findings of contemporary neurological studies which can help us most to become comfortable with this view of the human spirit (soul, person) is the understanding that consciousness is a naturally emergent result of cosmic and biological evolution. I've emphasized the ideas of Biogenetic Structuralism which calls itself "Anthropology Plus" in its attempts to understand the mystery of personal consciousness. It looks at biological evolution, neurophysiology and cultural anthropology together.
It's not an easy perspective to grasp, to be sure. My efforts to spell out basic neurological ideas in posts #12 and #13 on the Cognitive Extension of Prehension and the Cognized Environment are a challenge for many, but those concepts are essential aspects of the Immense Transition humanity is currently experiencing. The main idea is that soul (spirit, person, mind, consciousness) is the natural next step in biological evolution after the appearance of our primate relatives. And saying that in no way denies, of course, the existence of an incomprehensible source standing behind the whole evolutionary process telling us "Grow! Grow!"
In a recent op-ed piece, "The Neural Buddhists," in the New York Times (13 May 08), columnist David Brooks writes that the science-religion debate is now shifting to a focus on neuroscience. He says, "The revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world." (Indeed! It's been described as "possibly the most important cultural issue of our time.") Brooks notes specifically that "The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going end up challenging faith in the Bible."
I don't often agree with David Brooks; one of my earliest posts, #5, has some very negative things to say about his science-religion views. But I agree with his main point here, although I'd put it a little differently. I don't think the cognitive revolution is "going end up challenging faith in the Bible" so much as that it's going to end up challenging a static understanding of the Bible.
When we look at the Bible stories from the dynamic-evolutionary perspectives of contemporary science, we can see that what they are all about is nothing less than early versions of the same dynamic-evolutionary perspectives which contemporary science is making known to us. As briefly as I can say it: The evolutionary worldview is precisely what the Judeo-Christian tradition is all about. And that is the convergence I'm referring to when I call this blog "sharing thoughts about the convergence of science and religion."
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Back in post #28 ("Where I'm At") I presented three "snapshots" of where I wanted to go next with these blog efforts. The first "snapshot" had to do with spelling out the four-fold nature of the mind. For me, the quaternary perspective is of tremendous value in understanding the stages of personal and cultural development; it provides us with what I think of as the essential tools we need for understanding the Immense Transition. I've shared those thoughts in seven recent posts: #29-#31 and #33-#36.
The second "snapshot" in post #28 has to do with what I called "re-situating the Christmas story." By that I mean understanding the Judeo-Christian tradition in the context of that new Universe Story which has become available to us thanks to modern science. As I said in that post, "I'd like to share my thoughts about how different-- and indeed exciting-- the story of the coming of Jesus looks in the context of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution."
So that's "What's Next" in these blog efforts.
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I often refer to the "Judeo-Christian tradition"-- as if Jews and Christians are parts of one single religious tradition. They are, in two senses. One is that all western culture-- which until recently was the dominant culture of the world, and out of which arose major human cultural endeavors such as the quest for democracy and for an understanding of the natural world-- has its roots not only in Greek philosophy but also in the Bible stories found in what Christians call the Old and New Testaments.
C. G. Jung says that if we westerners are to understand ourselves, we have to know the Bible stories. They're in our blood. We are influenced by their images whether we're conscious of them or not.
A good example is the Adam and Eve story. It has had a tremendous impact on how almost everyone in the western world understands our human origins. A better example, in the sense that its influence is less obvious, is the story of Jonah. Everyone in the world-- at least everyone in Europe, North and South America, and all those parts of the world which were influenced by European colonization-- knows something about the ancient story of a man who was swallowed by a whale. We may not know what it means, but we all know the story.
The second sense in which the Judeo-Christian tradition is one tradition is that Christianity really is a branch of the Jewish religion. Jesus was Jewish, of course, and so were his early followers in the first few decades of the Christian church. It was a major event when those early Jewish-Christians were confronted with non-Jews wanting to be part of their communities.
We can see just how Jewish those early Christians were in the question that arose which sounds very odd today: Did a non-Jewish male have to be circumcised if he wanted to become a Christian? (Luckily for generations of European males, the answer decided on was "no.")
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My plan with regard to looking at the Judeo-Christian tradition in the context of that New Cosmology is to start at the beginning by asking: What is the origin of the dynamic-developmental worldview? Where did the idea of evolution come from in the first place?
The answer is not "Darwin" but "the Bible." It turns out that monotheism and evolution go together. They characterize the Hebrew perspective. The developmental worldview began with the Jewish Exodus, with reflections by the Hebrew sages on the Great Escape from Egypt.
So that's going to be my starting point. I want to look first at the stories of the Jewish Bible within an evolutionary worldview context, then look at the New Testament stories about the coming of Jesus in that same context, and eventually look at the understanding of his followers in that same evolutionary worldview.
I don't intend to introduce any new ideas or images, but rather to look at those stories on their own terms-- but always in a dynamic rather than static context. It will seem to many like new ideas.
The briefest overview I can offer is to say that from beginning to end-- Old Testament, New Testament and early church-- it's all one consistent picture. "One single design," as the early 20th century theologian Henri de Lubac put it.
I wish "one single design" didn't sound so much like "intelligent design"! But once again, we're stuck with the words. We have to make do with less than ideal terminology.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
#37. What's Next
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
#20. Resurrection of the Dead
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I was especially delighted when I discovered the efforts of the Biogenetic Structuralists to understand our human condition in light of the scientific findings of cultural anthropology, neurophysiology and biological evolution because it brings together the two big interests in my life, science and religion. And it's a non-dualist perspective: it does not put humans in a unique category outside the rest of the natural world but sees us, rather, an integral part of the evolution of the universe. And it doesn't dismiss religion and ritual, as rationalist science does: it understands them to be a natural part of human life.
The Biogenetic Structuralist concept of cognized environment especially caught my attention because, among other things, it sounds much like what the Russian Sophiologist, Sergius Bulgakov, has to say about the relationship of personal consciousness to the external world.
Bulgakov was talking in the context of a theological understanding of the early Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, so it's an unlikely combination, to be sure. But I found it a remarkable convergence. In this blog post I want to share the two understandings. I'll just put them side by side, and you can see what you think.
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I've mentioned the Biogenetic Structuralism concept of cognized environment in many previous posts and it is the focus of entry #13. Unfortunately, these research scientists did not come up with better names for their ideas-- names which would be more clear-- and we have to deal with their scientific jargon.
The main idea of cognized environment is that personal consciousness, when understood in terms of the functions of the brain at the third level of the cosmic process, is seen to be nothing less than the matter of the Earth become alive and self-aware.
The great value of seeing the human spirit from this neurological perspective is that it doesn't separate us from the rest of the living world, as religious and rationalist dualism does, but helps us to see that the human spirit is rooted in the Earth and the cosmic process-- that the human mind and heart is, indeed, "the universe become conscious of itself."
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Here's a quick review of the main point. In trying to respond to the question, "What's going on in the brain?" the Biogenetic Structuralists distinguish between the operational environment and cognized environment. Operational environment is their jargon term for the external world outside ourselves: the physical universe as the environment (the world) in which we exist-- and within which, of course, our brain operates.
In contrast, they use the term cognized environment to refer to the inner world which is continually being created by the structural activities of the brain. That inner world is our personal awareness. These research scientists like to call it "neuro-gnosis", meaning personal awareness-- "knowledge" in a broad sense-- which arises from the activity of the brain's living cells.
We need to keep in mind that, as the most complex thing in the dynamic universe, our brain's neural cells and networks are a dynamic field of electro-chemical reactions, and that neuro-gnosis-- our personal consciousness-- is the result of that dynamic activity of the neuro-gnostic structures.
It also helps to remind ourselves that we're talking about the third level of complexity in the cosmic process.
Since we're not used to thinking in terms of levels of complexity, here's an easy example: At one level, the letters of the alphabet are only bits of colored ink on a piece of paper, or dark marks on a computer screen. When joined together in various combinations, however, meaning emerges even at a very simple level of complexity: the letters D, G and O, for example, can be put together to mean "dog" or "God." It's clear that meaning emerges via complexity. We can, of course, put those words together to make sentences and put the sentences together to make stories, so that at greater levels of complexity ever greater levels of meaning emerge.
Living things, including ourselves, work the same way. Chemical compounds make up cells, cells make up tissues, tissues make up organs, organs make up systems, and organ systems combine to make up a whale or a maple tree. At each level of complexity, something "more" emerges.
In our brain-- the greatest level of complexity known to us-- the "more" that emerges is what Biogenetic Structuralism calls "neuro-gnosis"-- and the rest of us call conscious awareness.
The rudimentary gnosis-structure we're born with results from natural selection and the cosmic evolutionary process, and as we grow and develop, our personal consciousness grows by corrections and modifications based on data coming in from the operational (i.e., external) environment.
It's an evolutionary survival mechanism. The main idea is that the brain's primary function is to construct an internal version of the external environment, which it does in order to moderate input from and response to that external world. It allows us to recognize what's potentially hurtful or helpful in the operational environment.
It provides an evolutionary advantage because the sense data is processed in terms of how it fits with previous information already stored in the brain and nervous system. From a biogenetic (evolutionary) perspective, neuro-gnosis is the "informational content" of the neurological structures, and the neuro-gnostic structures are the media of nerve cells and their networks in which this information is "coded" and by way of which it can be modified.
And as I've said before, all this wouldn't sound so strange if it wasn't ourselves that we're talking about. But the point of it all is that personal consciousness is the "environment, cognized." Our consciousness is the world, internalized. We are the cosmos become conscious of itself.
And ours is the first age in humanity's cultural development in which we can understand ourselves this way, based on objective data from scientific studies of brain and nervous system. The main thing I want to emphasize here is that the mystery which we are as persons is the result of the physical matter of the universe; at the third level of complexity in the cosmic process, we are the matter of the cosmos showing itself as persons, each of us utterly unique in the history of the world.
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In his discussion of the resurrection of the dead, Sergius Bulgakov says something that sounds very similar. A little background will help show why what he has to say is important.
Bulgakov was born in 1871 into what was still the medieval culture of Central Russia. He became an atheist in early adolescence, studied law at the University of Moscow and eventually became a noted Marxist economist. At the age of twenty-four he began a religious conversion. It's of great interest that his conversion was not occasioned by any church-related experience but by an experience of nature: his first sight of the Caucasus mountains while he was driving with friends in a sleigh across the southern steppes of Russia.
In his autobiography, The Unfading Light, he says, "Suddenly and joyfully in that evening hour my soul was stirred. O mountains of the Caucasus! I saw your ice sparkling from sea to sea, your snows reddening under the morning dawn, the peaks which pierced the sky, and my soul melted in ecstasy.... The first day of creation shone before my eyes. Everything was clear, everything was at peace and full of ringing joy. My heart was ready to break with bliss." He describes this was "my first encounter with Sophia-Wisdom." (The autobiography is not yet available in English, but quotes from it can be found in Christopher Bamford's forward to Bulgakov's Sophia, The Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology .
He eventually rejected Marxism for the idealist philosophy of the famous poet of the divine feminine, Vladimir Soloviev. After he was ordained he was exiled from his homeland by the Communists and he spent many years as dean of the Orthodox seminary in Paris. He was well aware of the scientific developments of his day, had a special interest in cosmology and anthropology, and was on good terms with religious thinkers in the English-speaking world, including the United States. He died in 1944. He is considered by many to be the greatest Orthodox thinker of the 20th century.
His most famous and comprehensive work is his book on the nature of the church, The Bride of the Lamb. Because of his educational background in law and economics, he wrote in a heavy Germanic philosophical style-- and originally in Russian-- so his work is not easy reading. Only in the last few years has it been published in English.
He helped to recover the sapiential religious thought of the first thousand years of Christian history. It differs from the static, dualistic and rationalist worldview familiar to western Christians in that is sees the universe as one dynamic process, moving from creation to fulfillment. This includes our personal development and the persistence of our relationships. If he were writing today, Bulgakov would say something like: We have to see that there is a fourth stage to the evolutionary process, the final completion and fulfillment of all things.
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What Bulgakov has to say about the resurrection of the dead is found in the Section III, Eschatology, in his book on the church, The Bride of the Lamb. Eschaton means "last" or "end" or "final things."
He begins by noting that there are no defined dogmas concerning the eschaton, although four statements concerning the Last Things are familiar from the ancient creeds: "He will come again in glory... Of his kingdom there will be no end... We believe in the resurrection of the dead ... and life in the world to come."
Much of what Bulgakov has to say is commentary on the many scriptural passages which deal with these four articles of the creed. His first point is basic and he makes it strongly: the “end of the world” does not mean that the universe will be annulled but that it will be renewed: it will be transformed and transfigured. “It will be, but in a new way.” Our world and the world to come are one and the same world, but it will be in a different state. This, he insists, is what scripture means by a “new heaven and a new earth.”
Bulgakov notes that our language is “helpless in trying to describe the reality” of the New Creation. He nevertheless has a good bit to say about it, and much of it is commentary on various eschatological passages in the New Testament, especially in the Book of Revelations. Of these, Bulgakov says clearly, “the images of this symbolic language are not to be taken literally.”
The resurrection of the dead and the presence of Christ at the Second Coming are one identical thing; Bulgakov emphasizes that “All rise in Christ.” Just as our one human nature shared by multiple persons was assumed in the Incarnation, so it is resurrected in the Universal Resurrection. Here, once again however, Bulgakov acknowledges that we can’t get any “real ideas about all this on this side of death and resurrection.”
At the same time, he reminds us that the essence of the Christian faith is that the body will be restored and the person will be changed. This is “the hope” without which, as St Paul says, “our faith is in vain.” This means, says Bulgakov, that the risen body “will be proper to each person.” It’s our body. At the same time, he says, it will also be “the one universal corporality which is the entire natural world.”
His heavy language can get in the way, but what he's saying is that each of us will have the entire transfigured cosmos as our own risen body, and that it will be held in a way that it is personal and unique to each of us.
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Both Bulgakov and the Biogenetic Structuralists are speaking from within an non-static and non-dualistic context. And while the scientists are talking about one thing (a neurological understanding of consciousness) and the theologian about another (the "new way we will be" at the eschaton of the world), they both share the same insights within that evolutionary and post-rationalist perspective: that human beings are the universe become aware of itself and that each of us is a unique manifestation of it.
Bulgakov says, "The risen body will be the entire natural world, held in a way that it is proper to each person." The Biogenetic Structuralists say, "Personal consciousness is the external world uniquely cognized by each of us."
I find the convergence of these insights remarkable.
However, considering that we're just coming out of several centuries of rationalist positivism, it's understandable that even many New Cosmologists are somewhat reluctant to deal with the idea of a "fourth level of the evolutionary process." But if I'm understanding the neurological data correctly, as I mentioned in blog #8 about the functioning of the brain's neocortical lobes resulting in our need for endings as well as beginnings: "it would seem that our hope for a final outcome to the cosmic process is generated by the cosmic process itself."
And in that context, the promised resurrection of the dead doesn't seem so unreasonable.
sam@macspeno.com
Monday, September 10, 2007
#18. Called By the Universe
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Each of us has been gathered for all time and from the four corners of space.... We have our own inner world; we are its center and we are called upon to introduce harmony into it.
The words are Teilhard's, from his Writings in Time of War, written in the trenches of France during World War One. They were formulated as scientific concepts a half-century later, thanks to Biogenetic Structuralism's perspectives combining biological evolution, neuro-physiology and cultural anthropology.
I describe them in posting #12, on the Cognitive Extension of Prehension, and #13, on the Cognized Environment. They are central ideas in the contemporary scientific understanding of personal self-awareness, but they are difficult concepts to keep in mind; we're simply not used to thinking of ourselves in terms of our brain's activities.
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In my most recent post (#17, What Is the Universe Doing?), I offered some thoughts about how the neurological idea of cognized environment helps us to understand that we have been gathered by the cosmic process; it allows us a better understanding of the traditional religious idea of creation in an evolutionary context.
In this posting I want to share some thoughts about what it means to say that we are called to introduce harmony into our own inner world of which we are the center. The Biogenetic Structuralist concept of the cognitive extension of prehension helps us to have a deeper understanding, in an evolutionary context, of the age-old religious idea of vocation.
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In the static worldview of religious dualism, creation is understood as something which happened a long time ago, but in the evolutionary and neurological perspective, we can see that it is a process which has been going on for billions of years.
At the first level of complexity the cosmic process produces the chemical elements and compounds of which the stars and the Earth and our bodies are made, at the second level it produces the Earth's living creatures, and at the third level it doubles back on itself allowing human consciousness to emerge.
In the static worldview, humans didn't really belong to the universe; the world was only a backdrop for our existence, and our main purpose was to escape from it. In contrast, the dynamic perspective allows us to see that we have indeed been "gathered for all time and from the four corners of space," as Teilhard says, so that the resulting "wondrous knot" is nothing less than our personal subjectivity and interiority; each of us is indeed an utterly unique-in-all-the-world expression of the universe become conscious of itself.
In the dynamic view we see that our real lives in the real world have meaning and purpose, that we are called forth by the universe to do something. We have a cosmic vocation.
I see three ideas to sort out with regard to this idea of being called by the universe. One is the fact that we are called. A second is to what we are called. And the third is how we are to go about responding to that calling. Each of these ideas provides us with a greatly enriched religious understanding of our place in the universe.
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The fact that we have been called by the universe makes good sense in terms of the neurological concept which Biogenetic Structuralism refers to the cognitive extension of prehension.
But it's not an easy concept to keep in mind, as I said above, so you might like to look back at posting #12. The main idea is that thanks to the structural organization and functioning of the human brain, we have a degree of freedom from the instinctual responses to things in the environment which even our closest animal relatives don't have.
In blog entry #11, on the End of Dualism, I emphasized that the idea of the cognitive extension of prehension allows us to see that the human spirit is rooted in the Earth and the cosmic process, that personal awareness is not something alien to the physical universe.
In this entry I want to emphasize the other side of the concept, that human consciousness is indeed free. While we are rooted in the material world like all other creatures, we also can imagine things not present in the physical environment, we can create tools and complex technology and we can make choices.
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It may not be obvious at first that it's our freedom to choose that indicates that we are called by the universe. But we need only think for a moment about our experience of calling in the broadest sense in everyday life to see that freedom and vocation go together.
In our daily life, we don't address non-living objects or plants and animals such as fish or frogs. We only address living things that, because they have a sufficiently complex brain and nervous system, are able to respond.
We even address very young children, once their brain and nervous system have reached a level of development which allows for a response. We also address our family pets, animals who have been in close relationships with humans for many thousands of years, but we never make phone calls even to them.
It's human freedom, thanks to the cognitive extension of prehension, that allows us to see that we are in fact addressed by the universe. We know we are called by the cosmic process because it has given us the ability to respond.
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What we are called to is nothing less than participation in the cosmic process. Again, the neurological concept of cognitive extension of prehension lets us see that we are not alienated from the material universe but a part of it.
And, as I described in posting #17, what the universe is doing is making persons. We are called to participate in the cosmic process by contributing our own person to it. We are part of the cosmic process simply by being ourselves.
At first, it sounds almost trite to say that what the universe calls us to do is simply to be ourselves. How can we not be ourselves? And yet we know that it's no small task to be who and what we can be. It is in fact quite a tough job to be responsible for ourselves and to live up to our potential. Teilhard calls this "our work of works."
It's important to see that recognizing that we are called by the universe to take charge of ourselves is a very big step away from the dualistic mentality of former times. There, external authority told us what to do and how to do it. In the contemporary scientific perspective, we see that we are called by the universe to take responsibility for ourselves.
It is our own inner world, our personal cognized environment, which we are called to contribute to the evolutionary process. And no one can do it for us.
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The third idea I proposed above-- how we are to go about responding to our calling from the universe-- is difficult to talk about. We don't yet have proper words for it. But even here, significant help is available, both from contemporary science and from the inner core of traditional religion.
As I've mentioned in two previous postings-- #10, an Overview of Biogenetic Structuralism, and #14, on Person as Process-- we know that our personal consciousness is constantly being transformed via what Biogenetic Structuralism calls the Empirical Modification Cycle. By way of the structural organization and activities of the brain, we incorporate the external world, what Biogenetic Structuralism calls the operational environment, into our own inner world, the cognized environment.
The jargon is a major obstacle to easy understanding, to be sure. But once again, Teilhard is helpful. He has some good images of what it means to make ourselves by incorporating the external world into our unique personal world. TIME magazine, in an article on Teilhard which appeared when his works were first being published in English, referred to the process as "the spiritualization of the universe." It's a good name for it.
Teilhard says: "The labor of seaweed as it concentrates in its tissues the substances dispersed, in infinitesimal quantities, throughout the vast layers of the ocean; the industry of bees as they make honey from the juices scattered in so many flowers-- these are but pale images of the continuous process of elaboration which all the forces of the universe undergo in us in order to become spirit."
The TIME article dates from the early 1960s, but it's available on-line. You might like to look at it; its title is "Passionate Indifference."
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What I find most fascinating about this evolutionary understanding of cosmic vocation is that it's the working of the universe and ourselves together that makes us who-and-what we are. It is especially satisfying to see that the mystery of our personal consciousness is brought about both by the entire cosmic process and by our personal participation in it.
When we're first born, we get lots of help from our parents and family, but at some point we have to take charge of ourselves. It's up to us. In words attributed both to Abraham Lincoln and Albert Camus, "After a certain age, each of us is responsible for the look on our face."
The main idea here is that even though our existence is given to us, it's up to us to accept it and to make something of ourselves. In answering our call from the universe, we have both to accept ourselves as we find ourselves to be and also to create ourselves as our personal contribution to the cosmic process.
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And what an empowering vision this is! It offers a sense of meaning and purpose for our life which is simply not possible in the old static worldview.
As I said in post #15 (Pre-view and Re-view), I think that of all the various aspects and implications of the modern scientific worldview, the idea that each of us has a personal contribution to make to the world's development will be the most significant in the long run.
To know that we have something to offer the world, to know in the innermost depths of our being that we count, we matter-- that our existence isn't meaningless-- is a tremendously empowering perspective.
Within the evolutionary context of the New Cosmology, the age-old religious valuation of person is confirmed, affirmed and greatly enhanced. It's one of the clearest examples we have of the contemporary convergence of science and religion.
sam@macspeno.com
Thursday, August 30, 2007
#17. What Is the Universe Doing?
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"Always remember that you're unique. Just like everyone else."
I found that saying recently in a list labeled "Zen Sarcasm." But it's more than just a wisecrack. It's a good summary of one of the most significant-- and easily overlooked-- ideas in the contemporary convergence of science and religion. I especially like it because it lets us step back a bit and take the broad view.
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The immense transition which global humanity is currently experiencing is a great turning from the static worldview of former centuries to the dynamic-evolutionary perspectives of contemporary science.
Thanks to this New Cosmology, we are coming to recognize that the world has been developing for fourteen billion years, and that life on the Earth represents a second level of complexity in the cosmic process. Most significantly, we recognize that we ourselves have emerged at the third level of cosmic complexity.
For me, the findings of contemporary neurological studies and their background in Biogenetic Structuralism are an especially satisfying part of this New Science Story. Thanks to it, we can see as never before that human consciousness is at the very center of the cosmic process, and that personal self-awareness is what the evolution of the universe is all about. We can see that the human spirit is rooted in the Earth and the cosmic process, and that each of us is nothing less than the universe become conscious of itself, internalized in a unique way in each individual human being.
Such a radical change in human self-understanding cannot but have a major impact on global humanity's religious perspectives.
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As I mentioned in the previous post (#16, Our Own Inner World), the fascinating fact that we each have our own inner world is something we experience all the time, although we rarely give much thought to it.
It may be that, when we get hints of it, we push it back into the depths of our un-consciousness precisely because it's such a profound thought.
We have a tough time handling heavy ideas, and certainly we don't get much help from contemporary society in thinking about things like the meaning of life and purpose of our existence.
One of the best ways I've found to make sense of these kinds of thoughts is to ask a question, one we often ask in everyday life: "What's going on? What's happening?"
In this case, we can ask it about the universe itself: "What's going on with the universe? What's the universe been up to, over the last several million years?"
The question sounds strange because it's the kind of question which simply would never come up in a static worldview. There, the universe was not thought to be doing anything. Only in the dynamic, evolutionary perspectives provided by contemporary science does it occur to us to ask-- and now with some urgency-- "What is the universe doing?"
The question is what I like to refer to as a cosmos-anthropos issue. And Biogenetic Structuralism's combination of evolutionary biology and neuro-physiology provides us with exactly the right context to think about it.
In the context of the dynamic worldview, we know that at the third level of cosmic complexity the evolutionary process produces personal consciousness, and that each person is the universe doubled back on itself in reflective self-awareness. "Remember that you are unique" is in fact good advice: each of us truly is the universe internalized (cognized) in our own utterly unique way.
So if we ask, in that neurologically-informed evolutionary context, "What's the universe doing?" the answer seems to be fairly clear: it's making persons.
From a slightly different viewpoint, we can also say that it's making multiple versions of itself. By "making persons," the universe is manifesting itself in innumerable unique ways.
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Saying that the universe is manifesting itself-- expressing itself, showing itself, revealing itself-- sounds like a religious statement.
And it is. One of the most significant thinkers of our time, Thomas Berry, says that the very first principle of the New Cosmology is that the world itself is the primary revelation: “The universe, the solar system, and planet earth in themselves and in their evolutionary emergence constitute for the human community the primary revelation of that ultimate mystery whence all things emerge into being.”
The traditional Greek term for revelation and manifestation is epiphany. An even more familiar term is incarnation. If we use religious words to express the neurological idea of personal consciousness as an internalized (cognized) world, we can say that what's going on-- what the cosmic process is doing-- is that the mystery of the universe is incarnating itself as human persons.
Such a thought, while incomprehensible both to scientific rationalism and to religious dualism, fits well with the ancient Asian religions. In religious studies, it's called the unitive perspective.
It also fits well with the inner core of the Judeo-Christian tradition, although that thought is much less familiar to most of us.
It's unfamiliar because-- although the unitive (non-dualistic) perspective emerged roughly twenty-five centuries ago in various cultural centers around the world (China, India and the Mediterranean region)-- it was lost to European culture following the Dark Ages. In our time of immense transition it is being recovered once again. It's one of the main things I hope to spell out in future postings.
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The objective data of contemporary science-- specifically of the biological sciences and neurophysiology-- seems to lead us quite directly to the unitive perspectives of those age-old religious traditions.
As I see it, the practical task at hand is to understand what it means for everyday life that we humans are the universe become conscious of itself and that each of us is a unique epiphany of the evolutionary universe.
If our views are not grounded-- if they're not realistic in terms of everyday life-- then they're not worth paying attention to. The old dualistic religious perspectives of the last thousand years have been dismissed by large numbers in modern times precisely because they have nothing to say about real life in the real world.
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For me, Teilhard's thought is enormously helpful. He is, unquestionably, a major link between old and new in terms of the contemporary convergence of science and religion. I've quoted him many times in previous blog entries, and as I mentioned in posting #11 (End of Dualism), Biogenetic Structuralism's major text, Brain, Symbol & Experience, opens with a quote from his The Future of Man.
One of Teilhard's most significant comments has to do with the idea that each of us has been gathered "from all time and the four corners of space" into a unique inner world of which we are the center.
A second highly significant comment of Teilhard's is that we are called upon "to introduce harmony" into our own inner world. We don't just exist; we have something to do, a role to play, a task to accomplish.
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Gathered seems to be a good way to understand in the evolutionary context what, in the pre-evolutionary perspectives, was referred to as creation (understood not as a noun but as a verb).
In the static worldview, the creation of the world was thought to be a one-time event, over and done with a long time ago. The creation of each human being was also seen as a one-time event; but it was the inserting of something which didn't quite belong, something which was in fact alien to the static world. This sense of humanity's alienation from the rest of the universe is the essence of dualism, both religious and rationalist.
In the evolutionary worldview, creation can be better understood as an on-going process, and the creation of each of us is understood to be integral to the entire process. We belong to the universe, so Teilhard's term "gathered" seems especially useful.
Teilhard didn't have available the neurological information we have today; he wrote those words while he was working as a stretcher-bearer in the trenches of the First World War. But they express well the perspectives coming from the findings of contemporary neuro-science.
To describe individual human beings as having been "gathered from all time and the four corners of space into a wondrous knot" is describing the same reality Biogenetic Structuralism refers to as the "cognized environment." It is the mystery that we are: the universe reflecting back on itself at the third level of cosmic complexity and internalized by each of us, each in our own unique way.
These ideas are not easy to keep in mind, so once again you might like to check back to post #12 where I tried to spell out the Biogenetic Structuralist understanding of personal consciousness as a "cognized environment."
To see ourselves as having been gathered by the cosmic process "from all time and the four corners of space" is an empowering vision; it gives us a sense of personal meaning and significance simply not possible in the old static worldview.
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Called upon, Teilhard's second especially significant term, is an obvious expression of the old religious idea of vocation.
Not in the specialized sense of belonging to a religious order, however, but in the more basic sense of having a practical skill which we're especially good at and by which we can an earn a living. It also includes the deeper sense that each person has a job to do in life, a task to be fulfilled, a work to be accomplished.
In the dualistic religious context, where human beings really didn't belong to this world, the main task of each individual was to escape from it. Contemporary obituaries are still filled with phrases like "She is in a better place" and "He has gone home."
It's a very different view to say, as Teilhard does, that we are "called upon to introduce harmony into" that world to which we belong. I hope to address this cosmic idea of vocation as seen in an evolutionary context in some detail in my next blog entry.
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Here, I want to emphasize the significance, for the convergence of science and religion, of the thought that "what the universe is doing is producing multiple versions of itself."
In a nutshell: it means that, for the universe, persons are of ultimate value.
It's difficult to think of the physical universe as having any values at all in a dualistic context; it's just a static backdrop for human existence in that context. But in an evolutionary context, it's clear that universe is doing something, it's going somewhere.
And what's it doing? As I've said, it's making persons.
We're not used to thinking of ourselves that way. And still less are we used to thinking of the universe as "producing multiple versions of itself in the form of personal consciousness."
But it's clear enough that that's what, in fact, is happening. At the highest level of complexity in the cosmic process, the universe is producing persons.
For the universe, persons matter. Persons count.
The important point I want to emphasize is that this is one place where the convergence of global religious practice and contemporary evolutionary science is especially obvious.
At their best, humanity's age-old religious traditions have always proclaimed the ultimate value of each human being, and they did so not as a theoretical doctrine but as a practical teaching for everyday life. It's known throughout the world as the Golden Rule: we are to care no less for others than we care for ourselves.
There's a familiar gospel story that says that doing something as ordinary as giving a drink of water to a thirsty person-- no matter how insignificant that person's social status is thought to be-- is an act that puts us in touch with what Thomas Berry calls, in the quote above, "that ultimate mystery whence all things emerge into being.”
Neurological jargon about cognized environment and a gospel story about a cup of cold water may not seem to go together but, once we think about it, we see that they do.
The fact that this radical sense of the central place of "person" is common to the findings of the contemporary science story as well as to a centuries-old religious story is a very significant point in the convergence of science and religion.
It's so basic, it's easy to overlook what the universe is doing.
sam@macspeno.com
Monday, August 20, 2007
#16. Our Own Inner World
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One of the most fascinating findings uncovered for us by contemporary neurological studies is the fact that we each have our own inner world. That's what this posting is about.
As I mentioned in the previous post (#15. Pre-view and Re-view), it's something we experience all the time but rarely give any attention to.
It has to do with how we are related to the rest of the universe, to what I've called in that posting (#15) the anthropos-cosmos relationship, so it has a number of significant religious implications. It's worthy of our attention.
And of course it's challenging, as are so many of these ideas that deal with the convergence of science and religion.
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It isn't easy, for example, to identify the most personal and private aspect of ourselves with the scientific jargon term "cognized environment." But from the point of view of brain and nervous system studies, we indeed are the external world "cognized" (internalized), "the world become conscious of itself."
This same concept is also the basis for understanding that each of us has our own inner world. You might like to look back at post #13 where I tried to spell out the concept of "cognized environment" in some detail.
In previous centuries our spiritual nature was expressed by terms such as interiority and subjectivity. Today, thanks to the modern evolutionary worldview, we can have an even better understanding of personal consciousness.
We know that there are three levels of complexity to the cosmic process-- matter, life and mind-- and that at the level of mind, via the workings of the most complex thing we know (the human brain), the world is doubled back on itself, resulting in personal self-awareness.
Understanding this reflexive process also helps us to understand that each of us has our own inner world. The details are a bit involved, but if we can hang in there, we can see that it really does make a lot of sense. It is, in fact, both awesome and delightful.
And it has profound implications for understanding the meaning of our existence. It's precisely in this fundamental understanding of the fact that each of us has our own inner world that the findings of contemporary science and the insights of ancient religions converge.
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To begin with, the neurological account of consciousness represented by the phase "cognized environment" makes clear that we do not have direct access to the external world.
Rather, data coming in via the senses from the external world (the "operational environment," as Biogenetic Structuralism calls it), gets taken in and organized by the brain's activities in terms of what's already there in the organizational structures of the brain. And this "cognized environment" is what constantly gets modified by our life-experience.
Biogenetic Structuralists refer to this process as the Empirical Modification Cycle; I spelled it out a bit in post #14 (on Person as Process). The main idea is that, via physical ("anatomical") changes in the physical links and electrochemical activities in the brain, in-coming data from the operational environment (the external world) constantly modifies the already-there structural organization of the brain.
It sounds awfully complicated, but it's not an unfamiliar experience. We "live and learn," as we often say after an especially significant modification of our personal awareness. We just don't usually think about that kind of experience in terms of brain functioning.
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With regard to understanding that we each have our own inner world, we need to keep in mind that, when we come into the world, something is "already there." The basic structural organization of our brain and nervous system is there right from the start; it's in-born.
To appreciate this perspective, we need to take the long view, precisely the view offered to us by evolutionary science. At the second level of evolutionary complexity, life results from the organization of atoms and molecules in the DNA of living cells; at the third level of complexity, mind-- gnosis (our personal consciousness)-- results from the organization of living nerve-cells in our brain's structural systems.
And the brain's neural structures are, of course, the result of our genes. As we grow through our nine-month gestation period, from a one-celled zygote to an embryo and fetus, the development of our brain and nervous system has its source (just as do physical characteristics like our body-build and hair color) in the genetic material we receive from our parents.
And it's this genetically-based organizational structure of the brain which is constantly being modified by our life-experiences.
Because our brain and nervous system comes from our DNA, we are born with an "already-there," genetically-based, neuro-gnostic brain structure. We are unique from the start.
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Three enormously significant ideas-- awesome ideas, really-- come from this combined evolutionary, genetic and neurological perspective. Each has to do with one of the three levels of the cosmic process: matter, life and mind.
The first, with regard to physical matter, is that our personal in-born consciousness is the result of millions of years of cosmic evolution.
Not just the chemical elements in our bodies and their structural arrangements in our DNA, but also the subsequent structural arrangements in our brain and nervous system, have a long history.
Human beings emerge at the third level of the cosmic process, but in terms of the cosmic matter of which we are made, that process started a long time ago; it started with the Big Bang. Each of us personally has been "gathered," as Teilhard puts it, "from all time and the four corners of space."
Teilhard describes us as having been gathered "into a wondrous knot." I imagine the "knot" he had in mind was an immensely complicated and beautiful Celtic knot. It's a good image for the material complexity that is the basis of our personal consciousness which has been in the making for many billions of years.
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The second "awesome thought" coming out of the combined evolutionary, genetic and neurological perspective has to do with life, the second level of complexity in the cosmic process. It is that the DNA of every human being is different.
While the general structure of human and chimpanzee DNA differs by less than two percent, and in fact all things on Earth have a great deal of their DNA in common, it is also the case that the specific structure of each human being's DNA differs from that of every other human being.
Statistically, the chance that any two persons might have exactly the same DNA structure has been calculated to be about one out of 1080. That number is larger than all the stars thought to exist in the universe.
So each of us is genetically unique. Right from the start, even as a one-celled organism-- even before we have a brain and nervous system out of which our consciousness emerges-- we are called forth by the cosmic process ("from all time and the four corners of space") as utterly unique beings. (Even identical twins cease being totally identical once the one-celled zygote from which they are forming begins to divide.)
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The third "awesome thought" has to do with the level of mind. It's a specifically neurological concept.
We need to remember that, as I said above, data coming in via the senses from the external world (the "operational environment") is organized by the brain's activities in terms of what's already in the brain.
This means that not only do each of us start out as utterly unique, but that as we grow and develop, our in-born, genetically-based consciousness constantly gets modified by incoming data from the external world. Each life-experience, each thing we do, each choice we make, modifies who and what we are even more, so that as we live out our life we become even "more unique."
This is probably one place where "more unique" is a correct expression.
If, when we're born, our genetically-given uniqueness is such that there's only one chance in 1080 that anyone else might have DNA identical to ours, then by the time we're two or three years old, the innumerable modifications of our inborn uniqueness-- via the Empirical Modification Cycle-- would make the chances that anyone else would have the same personal consciousness as ours would be far less likely than one in 1080.
Mathematically, it's probably more like one chance in 1080 raised to the eightieth power; i.e., (1080)80!
The point is that our in-born uniqueness is so modified by our life experience that there never was, and never will be-- indeed, never can be-- anyone like the utterly unique individual that each of us is. No one else-- past, present or future-- has or will experience the world exactly the way each of us does.
No one else-- ever, in the whole history of the cosmos-- is "the world become conscious of itself" in exactly the same way.
It seems like a strange idea, when we first think about it, that each of us has (or is) our own inner world, and yet, as I mentioned earlier, it really is a familiar experience.
In everyday life, it usually gets expressed in negative terms. We often say, of people we find difficult to understand or be sympathetic to, "She lives in a different world than I do." Or we easily dismiss someone's thoughts with words like, "He lives in his own world."
But it's a profoundly positive aspect of our personal existence. And, as these evolutionary and neurological perspectives become better known, we can expect that they will have a strong impact on our religious understanding.
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For example, with his early awareness of the significance of cosmic and biological evolution, Teilhard had an extremely positive appreciation of the fact that we each have our own inner world.
The Teilhard scholar, Georgetown University theology professor Thomas M. King, S.J., mentions it several times in his book Teilhard's Mass: Approaches to "The Mass on the World" (Paulist Press, 2005).
Fr. King calls it Teilhard's "individualism," and notes that it is an element of Teilhard's thought which often goes unrecognized even by those familiar with Teilhard's writings.
In Making of a Mind: Letters from a Soldier-Priest, 1914-1919 (Harper and Row, 1961), Teilhard says, "Every man forms a little world on his own."
Teilhard wrote two essays with the title "My Universe." In one he observes, "I've become so accustomed to living in 'my own universe'." And in his Letters to Two Friends, 1926-1952 (New American Library, 1968) he says, "Another man is, for each of us, another world."
Fr. King notes that sometimes Teilhard refers to persons by the philosophical term "monads" and quotes Teilhard's Writings in Time of War (Harper and Row, 1967) where he says, "Each monad, in turn, is to some degree the centre of the entire Cosmos."
In that same collection of Writings, Teilhard sums up his view in one sentence: "Each one of us has, in reality, his own universe; he is its centre and he is called upon to introduce harmony into it."
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Science and religion converge powerfully in that last statement.
The scientific fact that each of us is at the center of our own world doesn't isolate us from the rest of the universe. Rather, it allows us to see that we have a profound relationship with the entire physical cosmos and thus that our personal existence has meaning and purpose within the cosmic evolutionary process.
We usually associate terms like meaning and purpose with religious or spiritual views more than with objective science, but that last statement of Teilhard's brings the two together in a way that simply wasn't possible before humanity awakened to contemporary evolutionary perspectives.
The "biogenetic" (evolutionary) perspective of modern science allows us to see the validity of the old religious idea of vocation.
Because we are at the center of our own inner world, we are thereby "called upon"-- by our very existence as part of the cosmic process-- to do something. We have a task. We have a purpose. Life isn't meaningless.
And when we see that our very existence is the result of fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution, and that the details of our everyday life have significance within that cosmic process, it slowly becomes clear that what we are "called upon" to contribute to the evolution of the universe is nothing less than ourselves.
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"This stuff is a bit heavy for me," one of my cousins told me recently.
"Yes," I said. "Isn't it awesome!"
sam@macspeno.com
