#147. Imagination As the Forming Force of the World

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ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 

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Blog entries beginning with #101 are not essays but minimally-edited notes and reviews from the files I've collected over the last few decades. I no longer have the time and energy needed to sort out and put together into decent essay-form the many varied ideas in these files, but I would like to share them with all who are interested.

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

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These are notes on Robert Sardello's Foreword to Tom Cheetham's Green Man, Earth Angel (SUNY, 2005), the second of Cheetham's quartet of books on the work of the French religious thinker, Henri Corbin. 

Robert Sardello is a Transpersonal Psychologist. I learned from Wiki that there are now five commonly agreed upon types of Transpersonal Psych: "Analytical" (Jung), "Archetypal" (Hillman), "Psychosynthesis" (Assagioli), "Zen Transpersonal Psychotherapy" (Anthony), and "Spiritual" (Sardello).

I'd been very much looking forward to reading Cheetham's Green Man book, and was quite disappointed with the very few references to the Khadir and Green Man. But it turns out that when I read the Foreword, "I was floored."

I don't remember ever using that phrase in my life! And, alas, I don't have any easy way to describe such a strong reaction on my part. I'm writing this 'essay' as a kind of therapeutic exercise.

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Sardello begins by saying that there are many stories which account for the matter-spirit split and that hold to the view that we must return to the past-- or at least its values. He notes, however, that we can only do that by being apart from the world's destiny and surrounded by fear. Indeed! That's a good description of Western monasticism, of RC in general in the ideals it has held to, and of religious fundamentalism.

Sardello says we need to understand the longing for the past differently; not as a longing for a historical past but as a longing for wholeness-- by which he seems to mean healing and "salvation" in the fuller sense than it's usually meant in conventional religious terms. Already, the inadequacy of our available words is apparent!

He also says this is obvious "to those who have an inner life" and who are concerned with the meaning of out lives/existence. But we now need new ways of telling that old story of the matter-spirit split (newer, he means, than the Adam & Eve stories and the doctrine of original sin).

We need, he says, new ways of imagining-- of telling the story of our existence. While he doesn't mention the New Cosmology by name, he clearly means, it seems to me, exactly what "cosmology" means in Anthropology and in references to the New Cosmology.

OK so far, but then he says it's "soul" and "soul ways" that we need. I note that, to me, that's no more helpful that any other wording that's presently available for telling a [or the] new story. But Sardello has evaluated the problem nicely....

He says, "Only soul understands and responds to soul." And so to understand the longing for wholeness and meaning we need to use soul's own terms; we need soul-words, like "archetypal" and "imaginal." I wonder if there isn't some other way to talk about all this. Certainly we need a wholistic cosmology. But we need to look at soul-ways?? Hard to accept that as is.

But... Sardello then makes a very powerful point: "Imagination is a world force." Without imagination any metaphysics splits spirit and matter, with no linkage possible. I note that I hear "world force" here as dynamis, holy Spiritus-- "energy" in the broadest cosmo-the-andric sense, which is also the missing fourth of the mandalic understanding of time and space, matter and energy.

What comes next is a bit fuzzy-- not that his initial references to "soul" aren't. But apparently, in his transpersonal psych perspective, he uses "soul" as James Hillman does, and sees no need to say so.

The fuzzy part is that he seems to talk about science and materialism as the two sides of the split. Either he has a special 'philosophical' meaning for "materialism" or he just didn't say well what he was trying to say.

Anyway, that so far is his presentation of the problem of dualism. He never used the word "dualism" nor does he even note that he's talking in what seems to be not just a Western but also an explicitly American context. (Although his later reference to "this country" can only mean the USA.)

He then moves on to say that Cheetham helps us to see what's lost when we ignore the imaginal and archetypal aspects of "soul." His list: imagination, speech, words as angels, reading ("from, not about, reality," he says) and, "most important of all," sense of place.

What he means by "reading" seems close, I think, to the traditional lectio; and his "most important of all 'sense of place'" could easily be called "sacred geography."

In any case, these five aspects of soul clearly have to do with the "human" (in contrast to the "cosmic" or "divine"), and specifically have to do with human consciousness. It is the first list I've seen of just what it is that the imaginalis perspective involves that makes it different from other views.

Aside from the sense of place (and probably that one, too, when I think about), the items on the list are all obvious characteristics of not of the divine or of the cosmic but precisely of anthropos-in-cosmos. He is exactly right with that.

And here is the project at hand: Sardello says Cheetham helps us first to feel the loss, then to establish a "metaphysics of imagination as the forming force of the world." This, as far as I can see, presumes a scientific worldview.

Earlier Sardello used the phrase "world force," but this phrase-- "the forming force of the world"-- is an even clearer-- indeed, a much clearer-- way of talking about energy (dynamis, holy Spiritus) in exactly the sense it's understood by people like Fred Spier (Senior Lecturer in Big History at the University of Amsterdam), and the American physicist Eric Chaisson (from Harvard and Tufts) whose book is so good.

That phrase is also exactly a way of talking about energy (dynamis, holy Spiritus) in the same sense that "evolution" is used in the New Cosmology, and in the way "non-stasis" is understood in a more philosophical sense. "Etc, etc, etc," as the King of Siam says. (That last sentence is an indication that I feel swamped!)

There's no indication in the Foreword that Sardello is tuned in to much (or any) of the mandalic perspective, but he's expressing the right idea in a very clear way: "The forming force of the world." Any aware 6th grader (my criterion for good communication) can readily understand what's being said there! This is a major breakthrough for me. (Although, amazingly, not the only one in this Foreword!)

Sardello goes on to describe the archetypal/imaginal/soul "metaphysics of the imagination" that Cheetham helps us establish:

• it allows for participation (our participation in the dynamic process)

• it sees creation happening always and everywhere

• it sees that all reality is alive

• it sees us (humans) as "part of soul" and not v.v. (Obviously a definition of "soul" would be of tremendous help here!)

"This metaphysics exists," says Sardello, "in a radical interpretation of Jung and in Henry Corbin." He says that Jung has some limitations which Cheetham clears up (I like that!), and it "opens us to Corbin's and Islamic (Sufi) mysticism's fully developed imaginal metaphysics."

I note that except for that list's last statement (about humans being part of "soul"-- with its, again presumed, Hillman-ian meaning for "soul"), that this is the same perspective offered in various contexts and with enormously varied terminology by many modern thinkers such as Bruno B, Karl Rahner, the Paleo perspectives of Native peoples, Thomas Berry, et al. Also, recently-- with the NYRB's review of the book by Patricia Crone on the context of Islam's emergence-- the ancient Persian-Zoroastrian perspective.

It is amazing that with those few words of his, "the forming force of the world," Sardello makes all these views and perspectives tie together so well for me. It feels good. He is saying, maybe, even more than he is aware! I'm grateful.

I especially delight in the statement about Jung's limitations. I knew Hillman went beyond Jung, but never saw what was lacking in Jung's seemingly exhaustive understanding of the psyche. That Tom Cheetham is the one who "clears up" those limitations is delightful.

He (Cheetham) is alive and well today, I've had some contact with him. We're not just trying to catch up with the thinking of a century or two in the past. We're on the growing edge. That feels very good.

Sardello's next part isn't well presented at all, alas. About Jung's limitations... He says Jung did not distinguish between soul experience and spirit experience. (Sardello has only used "spirit" once previously here, and this too will be like "soul," an undefined term-- at best, a starting point.) He says that the limitation persists not only in Analytical Psych but also in Hillman's Archetypal Psych. (Hillman pushed "soul" at the expense of "spirit," apparently.) All this needs much more explanation!

The distinction between soul and spirit is that the darkness of the Shadow (capitalized in the Foreword) is a soul experience and is to be integrated into consciousness, whereas the Divine Luminous "Black-Light" Darkness is a spirit experience and needed for experience of the world (and "wholeness"). All this is far too carelessly and quickly stated!

Soul goes with anthropos, spirit goes with cosmos. (I think that's what Sardello's saying.) Spirit and world go together in the same way that soul and consciousness do. There is a soul-consciousness and a spirit-consciousness. (Those two different uses of "consciousness" are an example of Sardello's fuzziness-- and of the difficulties we have today with language.)

Sardello then notes that Hillman sees Corbin's imaginalis as helping Depth Psych. And what Cheetham does, says Sardello, is to bring up precisely the right quotes from Corbin that establish-- if I'm getting this right-- that "un-conscious" goes with "soul" and "super-conscious" goes with "spirit." He also notes that the Islamic understanding of imaginalis mundus knows the mundus as spirit-consciousness, and then he talks about soul-darkness and Luminous Divine Spirit-darkness-- but does so fairly poorly, alas.

To me, there's a lot of very sloppy talk here! But it's not at all easy to dismiss. If it wasn't obvious (to me, at least) that he's trying to talk about the fourth function as something more than "soul" (in an un-defined sense), I might have given up at this point. The mandalic perspective is being affirmed here but, alas, very poorly!

While Sardello notes that neither Jung nor Hillman distinguishes soul and spirit, and at one point he says that soul-consciousness is related to the unconscious while spirit-consciousness is related to super-consciousness. He also distinguishes soul-darkness from spirit-darkness (which is in fact light, not darkness!), but he never says clearly and simply what that difference is.

The darkness of soul (the un-conscious, soul-shadow) is archetypal (as with Jung and Hillman); the divine-darkness (spirit-darkness, luminous darkness of super-consciousness) is imaginal (as in Sufi mysticism). Too many words! Maybe they're needed, and I'm happy to know someone's trying to sort all this out, but it's really difficult to handle well.

According to Sardello, Cheetham says that the un-conscious soul is perceived by soul, but the super-conscious realm is perceived by the "supersensory senses."

And this fits well with the mandalic view-- that the fourth function is a perception function just as the Sensing function is. So maybe "super-sensory senses" is a good term there! Maybe! And maybe, someday, thinkers might be talking about the physical senses as the "sub-imaginal senses."

In any case, Sardello goes on to note that he and Corbin use, as a term for "supersensory sense," nothing other than "heart."

So here at least we're with the Hesychasts and Cynthia B, in trying to distinguish perception in the imaginal realm-- by the "heart"-- from perception by "soul'"--although there doesn't seem to be some other "soul realm" wording to go with imaginal realm). Again, this is not as satisfying as it might be, considering how profoundly significant it is. Surely we can do a better job with all this! There is sensory realm, soul realm and super-sensory/imaginal realm. As I see it, using "heart" confuses the soul realm and the imaginal realm! It sure as hell confuses me.

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Next: Some explanation of Imaginal Metaphysics.... In imaginal metaphysics "all persons, places and things are mirrors of the spirit world." Note that "spirit world" is same as "imaginal realm." I presume this is Sardello's way of saying 'all is theophany' (even though "expression of" and "reflection of" surely do not mean the same thing, although I think they are meant to, here). Seeing by the "heart" is perception of all things as theophany.

But this has nothing at all to do with soul-"perception"! (I think, even, that we can say there is no such thing as perception via "soul." It is an evaluation of all things as good, something very different from perception of all things as theophany.)

Sardello adds: We see by the light that makes all things visible, but then he also says "we are, in effect, composed of the artistic play of spiritual beings." Maybe that's supposed to be "poetic"? But both it and his use of "mirrors" seem to me to negate any real reality to "persons, places and things"-- even though he obviously doesn't mean to do that. So I find his language totally unacceptable here.

But he concludes this section by saying that the imaginal metaphysics of Ibn Arabi is fruitful (his word) "for gnosis of divine worlds and earthly worlds," and this is precisely because it "does not confuse or separate them as Jung does." "Gnosis" here is used in the right sense as perception.

So there's no question that all of this is on the right track. It's amazing, though, that Sardello does not attempt a more clear distinction between the various expressions of that all-important distinction he's saying Corbin, Cheetham and Islamic mysticism are presenting to us. I'm sure he thinks he is, however.

Even with all of (what I call) his "sloppiness," it's still very, very impressive. It is all about wholeness and meaning-- nothing less than our understanding of and participation in our life and existence-- to which gnosis we have access via "heart" (i.e., imaginality, our fourth function).

The language here is very different but it reminds me a lot of the Carmelite Constance Fitzgerald's understanding of John of the Cross and the dark night of the soul, where his (John's) directive is "move on." I.e., "Get out of your isolated Feeling function." It also reminds me of Bruno B saying simply, that "There is no dark night."

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I'm about half way through my 10 pp of notes on this 6 ½ page Foreword. This is the end of Sardello's introduction to Cheetham's book. The rest of the Foreword talks about the implications for the culture of seeing imaginally. Some of it is good, some of it is awful. He mentions seven topics....

1) Incarnation. The first topic is about what I think is an extremely poor understanding of incarnation and Xnity. Sardello says "Gnosis from imaginality is in opposition to any kind of incarnational Xnity." Sloppy, to be sure. He actually means something like "is in strong opposition to the conventional/popular Christian understanding of incarnation." His sense of "incarnational" is almost fundamentalist.

He talks about "Christ" when he means Jesus, and says that the Christian understanding of incarnation is both "archetypal secularization" and "the death of God." He says that Cheetham's chapter about all this-- which he calls "the theological chapter"-- is pivotal in the book.

One more thing the conventional understanding of incarnation does is that it "collapses any sensitivity of the angelic hierarchies." (How's that for clarity!)

Sardello adds: "An imaginal theology accompanies-- even precedes-- imaginal metaphysics" and is "founded on Beauty, not salvation."

What a testimony all this is, to the failure of the church! That a leader of Spiritual Transpersonal Psychology sees Christianity only as a fundamentalist does, with no sense at all that "salvation" can mean healing/wholeness/fulfillment, rather than a rescue from reality.

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2) Beauty. About Beauty, Sardello says, "That's what the longing is for." But it has to be strived for, via soul-purification.

He then adds that "Beauty is the theophany of Sophia." This is the first use of Corbin's "theophany" term, and offers no hint of what "Sophia" might mean in this context. He does, however, describe Sophia as "a destination," but then uses what I thought of as a singularly dumb image about "arriving but not arriving" when he's trying to say that it's a goal into which we can enter ever more deeply.

He then backs off from trying to talk about imaginal knowing by saying that non-dual gnosis is "epistemological complex." I realize that this is a Foreword, not an explanatory essay, but surely this phrase is nothing but what used to be known-- when people still looked for explanations of things-- as a "cop out."

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3) Freedom. Next comes a paragraph about Freedom.... Sardello identifies freedom in the conventional understanding with nihilism, blames it on the Christian understanding of salvation, and notes that "this country's battle cry is freedom"-- which, as nihilism/terrorism, "speaks of wars of self-destruction." Hard to know what to make of all that! He's trying to say something of the greatest importance, but stutters woefully.

He adds that for freedom not to be nihilistic, it has to be filled with love, and he seems to be critical of Cheetham about this.

Somehow, Christian freedom leads to Christian technology (which seems to be yet another name for nihilism), and stands in great contrast to Islamic mysticism. The difference "hangs on transformation"-- he uses the term metamorphosis-- "and on initiation into the Source of Love, 'the Beloved'."

He says conventional Christianity "lacks the angelology to proceed to this Source;" it can only lead to nihilistic freedom. And adds that "Cheetham's work on all this is wondrous." (Earlier, he called Corbin's work on Beauty "stunning." Hmmm.)

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4) Geigerich. A paragraph about someone new to me, Wolfgang Geigerich, follows. It's about Jung's spirit-matter dualism, which comes, says Sardello, from Jung's work on alchemy. The main idea seems to be that without spirit, matter can only lead to nihilism and thus to technology understood "as the god and the means of salvation."

Sardello says of these ideas in Cheetham's book that "Just this section is worth the price of admission to the book." That statement is followed by one more comment about Geigerich and incarnation, which, alas, makes no sense at all. (All my condemnations of Sardello are really laments-- that he doesn't talk better about these tremendously important perspectives!)

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5) The way out. Cheetham's concern is for valuing the world, Sardello says, "but not in an abstract or nostalgic sense." He describes Cheetham as "one of the most courageous thinkers I have ever read." What Cheetham does is "shows us the way out of the nihilistic worldview through-- not above-- the labyrinth."

And that way-- based on the imaginal, and not on a dichotomy between spirit and matter-- is two-fold:

 • love, as an initiatory process via purifications

• re-sanctification of the world.

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6) Word. This is followed by a fascinating section on Word "as way out and as way to rightly respond to the longing for wholeness." He refers to Ibn Arabi's understanding that our language is a unique articulation of divine Breath, saying that "our breath belongs to us and to the world" (i.e., that it expresses both a human and cosmic reality).

Our breath is "poetic and creative speech," he says. As spirit is linked to world via soul, so speech embodies spirit without collapsing it into matter. He notes that "This is a new idea of soul, as that by which spirit is embodied and thus matter is spiritualized." I hear him saying something like: we are the world speaking and our symbol-speech is Divine Breath. Surely Rabbi Arthur would agree!

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7) Lectio. We need to read the world-- which is a discipline of imaginal asceticism-- keeping us from giving in to technological worldview desire, and giving us the courage "to be fully present to what is present." That's it. End of Foreword. So many significant things!

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Summary. I think what "floored me" most about all this is that it so directly addresses the dualism of Western culture in terms of psychology (which I wasn't expecting), including the different dualisms of Jung and Hillman, while at the same time incorporating them into much bigger perspective. And of course I am delighted by the fact that that it does so precisely by affirming the reality of the fourth function.

Most of what has been important to me all my life, and utterly absent from the culture as a whole, is here recognized as central to our existence. Can't ask for more than that! As I've said, I'm grateful! (1 July 2013)

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#85. Primal Religion

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In this post I want to share some thoughts about what Thomas Berry calls the "new mode of religious understanding" given to us by contemporary science.

My previous post was about how both Western religion and science had alienated us from the world we live in and out of which we have emerged, and that today we have a different picture. We're no longer "Doubly Estranged," as I called post #84. Today, we know that "evolution is our sacred story."

And this scientific understanding-- of ourselves and of the world together-- provides us in with a better than ever perspective on the spiritual aspects of human nature. Especially important is the idea that this "new mode of religious understanding" doesn't negate our previous understanding. It deepens and enhances it.

Today we know that religion is in our genes. That's what the title of this post refers to: "Primal Religion." If it didn't sound so strange, I'd call it "Genetic Religion."

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In any case, to be clear about it, we need to take into account two important facts. One is that, in Berry's words, "the cosmic process has a human dimension from the start." The other is that human consciousness first appeared on Earth during the Cenozoic era. That's the last 65 million years of the Earth's history-- which Berry calls "the great lyric period in the Earth's development" because it's when flowers, birds and butterflies, among many other living things, first appeared.

These two ideas are the context for our "new mode of religious understanding."

It's the fact that the evolutionary universe has a human dimension from the start that accounts for "our unique spiritual aspects." Note that Berry emphasizes that it's science, not religion, which has established that we are the result of the cosmic process and that we humans are its conscious expression.

It is this point about which Berry himself says, "we can hardly believe it." It seems so unbelievable precisely because we have been "doubly estranged" from the physical cosmos by many centuries of religious dualism and scientific materialism.

The second big idea for our "new mode of religious understanding" is that humanity first emerged during the Cenozoic era. The "Earth's great lyric period" is the sacred world of our origins. We are "genetically coded" to it-- attuned to it in terms of our outer and inner realities. And as Berry says, because "our genes are integral with the Cenozoic, so is our soul life."

Traditional religion knew almost nothing about genetics; it's from science that we know that our primal religious instincts are "in our genes."

These two ideas-- that the cosmic process has a human dimension from the start and that human consciousness first appeared on Earth during the Cenozoic era-- are the context for our new mode of religious understanding. Together, they provide a new way to understand the basic religious-spiritual orientation we find in our minds and hearts.

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I noted in post #84 that Berry stresses that this new cosmology-- the story of our place in the universe-- is being told to us by the universe itself. "Modern science," he says, "gives us the story of who we are, how we came to be, and what our lives are all about."

And so in our day, "we are recovering reverence," says Berry. We are learning again to appreciate and trust the Earth; we're learning that we need to listen to the voices of the Earth. Without those voices of the Earth-- "the stars at night, songs of birds at dawn, the smell of honeysuckle on a summer evening"-- our souls shrivel.

Berry describes it quite explicitly: "Our inner world cannot be activated without these outer experiences of wonder for the mind, beauty for the imagination, and intimacy for the emotions." These, he says, are experiences of "that numinous reality whence the universe came into being and by which it is sustained in its immense journey."

Wonder, beauty and intimacy allow us see "that the universe is a vast celebration"-- which, as Berry emphasizes, it is our role to enter into in our specifically human way -- and that "this is the purpose of all existence."

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This profound perspective makes the New Science Story an authentic cosmology in the anthropological as well as in the physical-astronomical sense. I know from my many years as a teacher, however, that the term Berry uses with regard to wonder, beauty and intimacy-- "numinous"-- is neither familiar to many nor easily explainable.

It's not that numinous experiences are rare; studies indicate that they are common. But to the extent that our culture remains stuck at the bottom rung of the Great Ladder, many people-- mistakenly thinking that science still claims "there's only matter"-- are embarrassed or bewildered by such experiences and do their best to suppress them.

"The numinous" is not easy to talk about, but because it's the basis for our "new mode of religious understanding," my strong teacher-instincts make me want to give it a try.

There are two basic concepts involved here. One is easy enough to understand: that just about anything-- any person, place, thing, happening-- can be the occasion for a numinous experience.

The second, much less easy to understand, is that the experience is a combination of two opposite feelings. That's what makes it so difficult to express in words; our logical Thinking function is simply of no help when it comes to numinous experience.

The two opposite feelings which constitute a numinous experience were originally described by the early 20th-century German scholar Rudolf Otto. If his name is unfamiliar, you might like to read the Wikipedia article about him. The English title of his famous book is The Idea of the Holy. Today, he would more likely have called it "The Idea of the Numinous" or "The Idea of the Sacred."

That Wikipedia entry notes that, since Rudolph Otto's time, references to numinous experience have appeared in the work of numerous intellectuals in many fields-- from the fiction of C. S. Lewis and the psychology of Carl Jung to the religious studies of Mircea Eliade.

Even the writings of the cosmologist Carl Sagan and a number of contemporary spokesmen for atheism such as Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris contain positive references to numinous experience.

While we may not have been explicitly conscious of it in a conceptual sense before the 20th century, the numinous is obviously an important part of human experience.

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Rudolph Otto uses Latin words to describe it: the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

Tremendum means fearful or awesome: something that evokes fear and trembling-- something from which we want to keep our distance.

Fascinans means just the opposite; it refers to what we find attractive, compelling, wonder-full-- something that keeps grabbing our attention and calling us back to itself.

Beside being tremendum and fascinans, the numinous is also experienced as mysterium. It is especially important to note that the numinous has a personal quality to it. When we are experiencing it, we feel that we are somehow related to it-- that we are in communion with it.

You can see why this is so difficult to put into words. But doesn't it sound familiar?

Feeling both attracted and repelled by something we're part of is not an uncommon experience-- even if we don't, or can't, talk much about it.

Rudolph Otto's point is that it's the basis for all religious experience. 

And Berry's point is that "our souls shrivel" without it. Our inner world, our "soul-life" as he calls it, simply cannot be activated without these experiences of "wonder for the mind, beauty for the imagination, and intimacy for the emotions." This is why we need to listen to the voices of the Earth.

I quoted Berry's words about listening to the voices of the Earth in the previous post. I think they are worth presenting again here in this context:

"We need to listen to the stars, the sun and moon, the mountains and plains, the forests and rivers and seas, the meadows and the flowering grasses, the songbirds and insects that sing in the evenings. We need to experience, to feel, to see this celebration of life. They are dimensions of the human soul, revelations of the divine being communicated to us, and inspiration for our spiritual life."

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To put the main idea of this post as simply as possible: whether we call it the experience of the holy or the sacred or the divine or the numinous, this kind of experience is what religion has been all about since human awareness first emerged on Earth. It was the religion of our earliest human ancestors.

More poetically, this kind of experience-- of "the stars at night, the songs of birds at dawn, the smell of honeysuckle on a summer evening"-- is the primal religion that's "in our genes."

Berry says early humans, and to a great extent indigenous peoples still today, are attuned to the natural world and the numinous nature of the cosmos spontaneously. "Mountains were spiritual modes of being. Sunrise and sunset were sacred moments. Animals were spirit presences."

And it's from this experience, he adds, "that religious ritual, prayer, poetry and music were born."

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I think we need one more idea to have a good overall view of primal religion. Even when we can see clearly that this kind of religious experience is in our genes, there's another question that some of us can't resist asking: How did it get there in the first place?

Why did the biological process of natural selection select for numinous experience? What was it about these primal experiences of the sacred that promoted the survival and thrival of our earliest human ancestors?

Berry offers some deep and especially helpful thoughts along these lines in a 1987 essay entitled "Spiritual Traditions and the Human Community."

In antiquity, he says, all human activity was done in alliance with "the human, spiritual and natural" together. He's says that humans have been shaped by natural selection to deal with our existence in the natural world in union with the divine.

Using the Greek terms-- anthropos, theos and cosmos-- which I have used in many previous posts for trying to express these ideas without the emotional connotations words like "world" and "God" have, I would say it this way: that anthropos is shaped by natural selection to deal with our existence in the cosmos in union with theos.

And then, using Raimundo Panikkar's phase which I've used in several recent posts, I would say that it's clear, then, that we are genetically oriented to living in the cosmo-the-andric unity. Our very existence is defined by the union of cosmos, anthropos and theos.

Berry says we evolved this way because we are "too fragile" to handle the terror of our existence by ourselves. He says that without a sense of our union with theos, we are annihilated by cosmos-- it's just too harsh in itself, too overwhelming.

And it is our sense of the cosmo-the-andric unity that lets us see that while reality is indeed terrifying, it also has a positive, good side. It is "beneficent," Berry says, and notes that we experience this benign providence "as ready to align with humanity." It "assures us of an inner tranquility in the larger pattern" of the cosmic process.

We can trust it in the long run.

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Such profound thoughts! We need to remind ourselves again where our primal religious experience comes from: "Seeing the stars at night, hearing the birds at dawn, smelling honeysuckle on a summer evening."

Fifty years ago, an Eastern Orthodox Christian writer, Jon Gregerson, put his description of numinous experience in a wonderfully simple and explicit way. He said, "We can see and hear and taste and smell God."

It is that experience-- of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans-- which empowers us, via the coming together of cosmos, anthropos and theos, not just to survive but to thrive in this world.

And it's that experience-- the recovery of our primal (genetic, Cenozoic) spirituality-- which is the essence of the "new mode of religious understanding" that's ours now, thanks to contemporary science.

These are, indeed, profound thoughts!

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As in the previous post, most of my quotes from Thomas Berry in this post are taken from a small collection of essays he wrote in the last quarter of the 20th century which have been recently published under the title The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth.

Jon Gregerson's book, in contrast, is a half century older. But, in yet another example of the contemporary convergence of science and religion, a new paperback edition was published just three years ago. Its title is The Transfigured Cosmos.

To me, that title is a wonderful summary of Berry's "new mode of religious understanding." It's saying that when we recover reverence, our world is transfigured.

sam@macspeno.com

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#74. Modern, Pre-modern, Post-modern

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This is the first of several posts dealing with ideas about the integration of science and religion that I've found in the two important books-- Ken Wilber's The Marriage of Sense and Soul and Michael Dowd's Thank God for Evolution.

I introduced them in the previous post; if you missed that one (#73), you might want to look at it before reading this post. I'll be sharing some thoughts about Michael Dowd's book in the near future. My focus here is some ideas from Wilber's book that I found especially helpful in understanding what's needed for "Integrating Science and Religion"-- the subtitle of Wilber's Marriage of Sense and Soul.

As I mentioned in that previous post, I'd been irrationally prejudiced against Wilber and was happily surprised to learn how much good sense he made once I finally got around to reading his work. He's saying some important things.

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One of the most valuable things about Wilber's book concerning the integration of science and religion is his explanation of the differences between the various stages of cultural development in the history of Western society.

The stages are usually named "modern," "pre-modern" and "post-modern." But these terms aren't especially helpful, at least initially, because the central word, "modern," has two very different meanings.

In everyday life "modern" means "contemporary." But in the context of Western culture's historical development, the word "modern" refers to an attitude or cultural perspective about the nature of reality and humanity's place in it that is already about 400 years old.

"Modern" in this context refers to a specific worldview-- a cosmology, as we've come to call a culture's worldview. And to distinguish it from "contemporary," this worldview is usually referred to by the much less familiar name: "modernity."

So our modern world is already post-modern, in the sense that there have been several centuries of reactions to the worldview called "modernity." It's confusing.

But it's well worth the effort to get these terms clear, because only with this developmental view of Western culture-- only with an understanding of what's meant by the three cultural worldviews of pre-modernity, modernity and post-modernity-- can we make good sense of what's needed for the integration of science and religion in our day.

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The worldview called "modernity" dates from the beginnings of science, roughly 1600 CE. In contrast, almost all of the world's religions date from much earlier. For this reason, those religious traditions belong to that cultural stage called "pre-modernity."

In his Marriage of Sense and Soul Ken Wilber spells out well the specific characteristic of the pre-modernity stage of Western culture. It's the understanding that reality is made up of levels.

That sounds strange at first, but Wilber notes that a hierarchical or multi-leveled view of the world has been held in one form or another since humanity's earliest times. Its classical name is the "Great Chain of Being." It's also referred to by the somewhat more helpful name, "Great Ladder of Beings" or the "Ladder of Nature." By whatever name, it's the key to understanding what's meant by pre-modern, modern and post-modern.

The main point is simple enough: when we look at all the different things that exist, we readily recognize that they fall into various categories. 

There are levels or gradations to the kinds of things we see in our world. Some cultures have dozens of levels to their Ladder of Beings; the minimum our minds seem to be able to handle is three.

In the previous post I mentioned the old game Twenty Questions. With its familiar "animal, vegetable or mineral" categorization of things, it's a good example of a simplified "Ladder of Beings."

Another example is the phrase "matter, life and mind" which I've used frequently in these posts. Wilber usually refers to the three basic levels of the Great Ladder as "matter, mind and spirit." Still another common variation is "body, soul and spirit."

Wilber points out that every human society-- from the earliest shamanic culture of Paleolithic times up until the beginning of modern science in the 16th century-- had some version of the Great Chain to express their understanding of "our place in the grand scheme of things."

Wilber says the best expression of the Great Chain of Being in pre-modern Western culture is that of the Franciscan Saint Bonaventure and the 12th-century monastic writer, Hugh of St. Victor. Here are some Great Chain illustrations: the shamanic three-layered cosmos, a Medieval version, and Great Chains from 1579 and 1617.

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What marks the change from the worldview of pre-modernity to that of the modern ("modernity") worldview is the loss of this multi-layered Great Chain perspective.

The religious attitudes of pre-modernity cultures tended not only to emphasize the distinction between the lower and upper levels, but to give all their attention to the higher levels. But the great successes of science-- beginning in the 16th century with the astronomy-related measurements made by Galileo and Kepler-- turned the Western world's attention away from those highest levels.

The coming of science resulted, for Western people, in the collapse of the Great Chain of Being. So "modernity" means a worldview where only matter, the bottom rung of the Great Chain, is considered real.

The 400-year-old "modern" worldview simply doesn't take into account what was meant in the pre-modern perspectives by words like "mind," "soul" and "spirit."

This explains why we have such difficulty in understanding these major stages of Western culture's development; we're trying to understand something that modernity says doesn't exist.

It also explains why, from its start, modern science has been in conflict with the traditional pre-modernity perspectives of the world's great religious traditions.

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These are over-simplifications, of course, but the primary point, I hope, is clear enough. The worldviews of pre-modernity focused on the spiritual realm, the upper levels of the Great Chain or Ladder, while modernity's worldview considers only the bottom rung to be real.

For many of us, it's difficult to understand just why so many people in the Western world would accept such a claim about the nature of reality.

It's also difficult to understand how early science, in denying reality to all but the lowest rung of the classical Great Chain, tended to overlook the fact that science itself operates by way of those mental activities (such as reasoning and math) which are part of the higher levels of the classic Great Chain of Being.

But in another sense, it's easy to see why science made such a claim. 

Science has been so successful! In its ability to bring about great gains-- in industry, agriculture and medicine, for example-- science, and the technology based on it, went far beyond anything the pre-modern religious worldviews ever came up with.

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I'll share some thoughts about the positive aspects of modernity in a future post; they are no less significant than its negative aspects. Wilber is especially good at presenting a balanced view of the gains as well as the losses resulting from the perspectives of modernity.

But it's the collapse of the Great Chain-- the loss of all but the bottom rung of the Ladder-- that I want to give my attention to in this post. Wilber calls the negative aspects of the worldview resulting from scientific materialism "flatland."

It's a boring world, that "flatland." Without mind and soul and spirit, persons are reduced to things, and there's no wonder and awe, no surprise, no meaning to our lives.

To a great extent, Western people accepted that flatland worldview. The idea that only the old Great Chain's bottom rung is real became, as Wilber says, the "official philosophy" of Western culture.

Wilber calls this shift in cultural perspective the disaster of modernity and some scholars refer to it as the "disenchantment of the world."

But it's important to keep in mind that the "flatland" disaster was not the last word in Western culture's historical development.

The third phase of the Western world's cultural history, "post-modernity," resulted from the collapse of the Great Chain. Many Western people reacted against the shift from spirit to matter and to the boredom and meaninglessness of modernity's "flatland" worldview.

But they weren't sure just how to respond or what to put in its place. Over the last several centuries, there have been three major, and quite different, social and cultural responses to the collapse of the Great Chain.

If you're like me, some of the names of these major social-cultural movements are probably familiar: Romanticism, Idealism, and 

Deconstructionism. But you may also be like me in being more than a little hazy about what those words mean.

Personally, I was more than "just a little bit hazy." I simply didn't know what they had to do with the integration of science and religion.

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I'm grateful to Wilber for my newly-acquired understanding of these three major post-modern cultural developments and of how important they are for the integration of science and religion. I'm planning to share my understanding of these three post-modern movements in the next post.

In this post I want to include some thoughts about just what's meant by the higher rungs of the Great Chain.

It's precisely because the worldview of modernity doesn't take into account what was meant by words like "mind," "soul" and "spirit" that we have great difficulty in understanding the three main stages of Western cultural development.

And it is, of course, why modern science has been in conflict with traditional Great Chain of Being perspectives of the world religions from the start.

Wilber says that the integration of science and religion ultimately comes down to two things: whether science can accept the higher rungs of the Great Chain and religion can accept the lower rungs.

And, as he puts it, "the discussion has to be in terms acceptable to both."

So it's important to be clear about just what the higher levels of the Great Chain mean in order to understand well the various post-modern responses to their loss.

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It's an indication of how thoroughly Western society believed in the modernity worldview that in our day words like "mind," "soul" and "spirit" are probably the most ambiguous words in the English language. 

The very existence of what they are referring to has been denied, so we need to work hard to understand them.

For a start, we can say that among other things words like "soul" and "spirit" refer to our powerful desire to know and understand ourselves and the world we live in. They also include the drives we experience within ourselves to improve our situation: to make our world better. So words like "quest" and "invention" and "creativity" are part of the upper end of the Great Chain perspectives.

In more personal language, we can say that the Great Chain perspective of "matter, mind and spirit" refers to the fact that we are (or have) a physical body, that we are (or have) self-awareness, and that we are (or have) a concern for an ultimate (big picture) understanding of the facts of our existence.

In terms of our inner psychological experience, we might describe the three basic levels of the Great Chain by saying that "matter" refers to physical things outside us, "mind" refers to what we experience within ourselves, and "spirit" refers to the perspectives we have about how those inner and outer experiences go together.

If it didn't refer to sex, a phrase like the "facts of life" would be a great way to describe what the traditional religions meant by "spirit" or the "realm of spirit." Nowadays, "spiritual" has such negative connotations that, in the healing professions of psychiatry and psychology, a phrase like the "realm of the transpersonal" is often used instead.

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Religiously-oriented people tend to jump in here with a comment like, "You're talking about God." I'd say, "OK. But we're trying to get some clear ideas about just what we mean when we say that."

In the flatland worldview of modernity, the word "God" refers to an object or thing, just as "human person" does.

In contrast, in the quotation which Michael Dowd uses in the chapter on revelation in his Thank God for Evolution, and which I used at the beginning of the previous post, Thomas Berry refers to the creative source of the world as "that ultimate mystery whence all things emerge into being."

"Mystery," for me, seems an especially good way to say what "spirit" or the "realm of spirit" mean in the pre-modern religious traditions of the world. Our pre-modern ancestors definitely were not talking about an object or thing when they used terms like "God" and "holy spirit of God."

A good example of that pre-modern understanding is how frequently the word "mystery" shows up in the 3,000-year-old Tao Te Ching, which I shared my version of in several recent posts (#68-72). An anonymous reader, commenting on #72 says, "This post 'explains' God." That's right on target. The ancient Tao Te texts do indeed help us to understand what we're struggling to talk about when we use words like "God" and "spirit."

We struggle to be clear about what we mean by the higher rungs of the Great Chain precisely because their very existence is what the worldview of "modernity" stopped paying attention to.

And that loss is what the various "post-modernity" perspectives are responses to.

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It's not only because the modern world is already post-modern that all of this seems so confusing. Many of the Earth's peoples, especially those in what used to be called "second or third world countries," still live to a great extent in pre-modern cultures. So globally, our contemporary world is not only modern and post-modern but also pre-modern as well. No wonder it seems so utterly confused!

We need a new evolutionary Great Chain, a new Ladder of Beings, that both traditional religions as they mature and modern science as it grows up can live with.

We're ready for a New Cosmology! People like Michael Dowd and Ken Wilber, and many others I've mentioned in this blog over the last few years, can help us as we grow up.

sam@macspeno.com

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