#57. College 50th-Anniversary Report

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When my high school graduation class had their 50th anniversary in 2005, we were asked to write a report on "what we've been up to in recent years."

I wrote about my continuing interest in the convergence of science and religion. It was a bit different from the more conventional reports that said things like "had our third grandchild," "now winter in Florida" and "still enjoy playing golf."

Writing that report for my fellow high school graduates had a numinous feeling for me. When I look back, I can see that it was the start of what I like to think of as my late-in-life calling to share my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion.

Among other things, it led to the start of this blog, where I published the report as post #3.

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My college graduation class also had a 50th anniversary reunion-- four years later, of course; it was in May of this year (2009). The college, Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, was founded in 1851, so it's one of the oldest Jesuit schools in the United States. I taught in the theology department there during the 1980s.

The college reunion was a three-day event. I hadn't previously attended any high school or college reunions-- they're just not my cup of tea. But because more than a third of my fellow college graduates had died over the fifty years since graduation, I attended the opening event of the class of 1959 reunion, a memorial service, followed by lunch.

We were asked to send in a report for that reunion, too. Since friends have suggested that I try to make my posts "more personal," I'm sharing here that second report along with some reflections about both reports.

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The Alumni Relations Office provided us with some good questions for the Memory Book.

• What memory or memories of the College have been most persistent over the years?

• What aspect of your St. Joe's experience did you want your children (and grandchildren) to enjoy when they reach college age?

• What part of your SJC experience influenced your personal/professional life?

• If you could return to the 1950s for just one day, is there any one thing you would do at Saint Joe's that you now wish you had done back then? What?

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Here are the responses I sent in:

The memories of the College that have been most persistent over the years for me and which have had a major impact on my personal and professional life mostly have to do with the wonderful discoveries I made not in classrooms or the cafeteria but in the college library. My world became immensely bigger thanks to those discoveries.

They had to do with the depth of knowledge and wisdom available to us from the sciences and our religious traditions with regard to human self-understanding and of our place in the universe. I remember especially discovering the evolutionary perspectives of Teilhard de Chardin, the psychological views of C. G. Jung in connection with the Roman liturgy, and the American church's social conscience as expressed by Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day.

My interest in science and religion led me to get masters degrees in both areas, and to teach one or the other in high school or college for forty years. In retirement I continue to pursue the integration of those areas. I'm especially interested in contemporary discoveries in cultural anthropology and neuroscience and their relevance to the nature of religious experience.

I've recently completed a two-year effort to share my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion via a blog (www.sammackintosh.blogspot.com) and I'm currently working on supplementing those thoughts with background images and personal stories. I also hope eventually to have something of significance to say about the role of ritual in contemporary humanity's cultural development. A long-term plan is to produce a non-dualistic version of the traditional service of Advent Lessons and Carols in light of what's been learned in recent years about modern cosmology and Divine Sophia.

The college where I taught was Saint Joseph's University, so I'll pass on returning for a day to the college of the 1950s. Needless to say, it was an interesting experience teaching in the theology department of my own alma mater.

I think I did, back in the 50s, what I needed to do. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to have done it. My wish for my children and grandchildren-- and, indeed, for all of the children of the Earth-- is that every one of them may have the same kind of opportunity, both for self-discovery and for an understanding of our contemporary world, that I had. -Sam Mackintosh

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When I compare the two reports I see that the same basic ideas show up in both. That helps me to define better what I've called my "late-in-life vocation" to share my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion.

Because both the high school and college were Catholic institutions, I felt comfortable using essentially religious language in the reports. In post #3 (the high school report), I noted that "I think these same ideas can be expressed in the language of contemporary science, but obviously this was not the place to do it."

I've learned that it's a lot easier to talk about science in the context of religion than it is to talk about religion in the context of science.

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The high school report describes my thoughts as they were in 2005, but the college report-- although it was written four years later-- gives a better sense of how those ideas got started.

When I put the two reports together and add what I've learned since I retired in 2000, I get a pretty good over-all picture of my story--where I'm coming from and where I seem to be going.

My interest in cosmology leaps out. Wanting to understand "our place in the grand scheme of things" heads the list. It's the story of my life.

Although maybe I should say "cosmology and depth psychology," since C. G. Jung as well as Teilhard de Chardin shows up on both reports. I guess "the story of my life" really is both-- pursuing self-understanding and an understanding of our place in the universe.

And the basic context for my story is cosmic evolution.

I mean "evolution" in the broadest sense: the dynamic unfolding of the physical universe. It includes not just the formation of planets and the origins of life on Earth, but also the emergence and development of humans-- of ourselves both as individuals and as a species on our planet. 

And it especially includes humanity's cultural development.

So, asking “What is our place in the vast scheme of things?”-- in the context of the immense transition from a static to a dynamic world view happening in our time-- really is what I've been all about. And sharing my thoughts about it is what the blog is all about.

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Most of the things I've mentioned in the posts over the last two-and-half years are really just details about the understanding of ourselves as a continuation of the cosmic process.

Just listing some of those "details" is fun: ritual, liturgy, social justice, ecology, cultural anthropology, neuroscience, the four-fold nature of the mind, the nature of religious experience, the importance of images and stories, the Native American medicine wheel teachings, the Sophia-Wisdom perspectives at the heart of western religion and-- most especially-- the Immense Transition currently happening as we move away from religious dualism and the patriarchal exploitation of the Earth toward a more balanced world view.

I thought I might also list the names of some of the persons especially important in helping us understand ourselves and human culture in terms of cosmic evolution, but I decided the list would be far too long. Maybe I can do that in a future post.

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Many of these details about ourselves which the dynamic-evolutionary perspective gives us are new to all of us. I think the most unfamiliar is the central place of personal consciousness in the evolution of the universe. The static world view just doesn't have a place for human beings as co-creative participants in the cosmic process.

Besides major changes in our thinking about the cosmos and our place in it, the evolutionary world view also offers a significant new perspective about our relationship with the world's creative source.

I have offered a brief summary of my thoughts along those lines in several posts. "The Mystery gives itself to us as the world and ourselves, guides and directs us, gathers us as individuals from all time and the four corners of space into a wondrous celtic knot and into a global community of diverse peoples (which early Christians called the ekklesia), and most significantly, promises our completion and fulfillment and the persistence of our relationships in the in-gathering of all beyond the passing away of things."

That last statement seems to be the most difficult for western culture's analytical mode of consciousness to deal with-- even for many who are otherwise comfortable with the new cosmology. Religious fundamentalists have a problem with an evolutionary origins of things, new cosmologists seem to have a problem with an evolutionary fulfillment of things.

We need a bigger picture. We need both an alpha and an omega. The noted author and lecturer Benedictine sister Joan Chittister recently published online a fine column called "the God who beckons." It deals specifically with how the evolutionary perspective provides us with a more adequate understanding of a God who is, as she says, "big enough to believe in."

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There's one important aspect of my "late-in-life vocation" which doesn't show up in the high school and college reports. It's that I find in myself an inborn drive to share my understanding of the connections between evolutionary cosmology and the world religions with anyone interested.

I call it my "teacher instinct."

It, too, as I see it, is an aspect of the cosmic process. It's nothing less than an expression, via the genes I inherited from my ancestors, of the same divine energy (spiritus) which the Wisdom core of the Judeo-
Christian tradition sees "present and active at the heart of all creation."

And that is, of course, what my blog is all about: the convergence of science and religion.

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While modern science is approximately 500 years old, and provides us with a clear understanding of our physical place in the universe, religion been around about 400 times as long. When we put those two facts together, it's obvious that religious consciousness itself is part of the evolutionary process.

And we-- humanity as a whole-- are just coming to realize that fact.

When we see everything "under the arc of evolution," as Teilhard words it, we can see that just as our planet emerged from the dust of stars, and just as life emerged on the Earth from its chemical elements and compounds, and just as human self-awareness emerged from the complexity of the brains of earlier primates, so, in the same way, the world's great religions emerged out of the complexity of human self-awareness.

If fundamentalists, who remain stuck in an unchanging static world view, have a tough time with the idea that human consciousness emerged "from the complexity of the brains of earlier primates," they have an even tougher time with the idea that our western religious tradition itself "emerged out of the complexity of human self-awareness."

But without the dynamic evolutionary perspective which understands the divine creative spiritus to be operating at every level of the cosmic process, those in the static worldview have only what a friend recently described as "an interventionist illumination from above."

In the previous post I mentioned how the 10th-century Greek saint, Symeon the New Theologian, says that we are divinized even in our genitals, and that to think otherwise is blasphemous. I think it will eventually be seen as equally blasphemous to deny that the creative spiritus is active at the heart of the world even in the emergence of humanity's religious traditions-- including our own western Judeo-Christian tradition.

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As the friend I just mentioned said, the fact that "the universe has processes that can raise religious consciousness rather than reliance on interventionist illumination from above is obvious-- but challenging to communicate."

It's that challenge I struggle with in this blog's many posts. We need to be clear about the details-- the kinds of things I've listed above-- before the obvious dawns on us. So I'm always on the lookout for better ways to express whatever can promote an understanding of the changes the evolutionary worldview offers. In some ways, that's the "story of my life."

I've often said, "I wish I were a poet." I wish I had the skills with words which poets and story-tellers have, so I would be able to express well those many details about the convergence of science and religion we need for "the dawning of the obvious" to take place in our minds and hearts.

But I'm not a poet. Just making the effort at communicating well seems to be what I'm to be about. That's the main thing I want to share in this post about the report for my college's 50th-anniversary reunion.

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As I was working on this post, a friend sent me a brief poem by American poet Mary Oliver: 

Instructions for living a life.

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

That's what I've been doing. I've done it in two reunion reports and in an brief autobiography in post #7. But now my introverted self is saying to me, "This can be pretty boring stuff."

And it would be, except for one thing-- these kinds of thoughts and feelings need to be shared.

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Without a dynamic understanding of "our place in the scheme of things" we are cut off from the world of nature, we're alienated from ourselves, and in that context we can't even hear the "God who beckons."

Without an evolutionary cosmology we don't have a goal-- an omega-- and we don't even have a decent alpha, either.

All we have is fear.

It's fear that got George W. Bush re-elected, fear that allows the torture of humans and fear that promotes the destruction of our environment. It's fear that caused many schools, at the start of the new school year, to keep their students from watching a new Black President encourage kids to do their homework. And it's fear that opposes his efforts to provide for universal health care.

Who needs that?

sam@macspeno.com

PS. Three recent New York Times columnists have described this situation of fear, hatred, hostility and ignorance well: Charles M. Blow ("Ephemeral Comfort of Conservatism"), Roger Cohen ("The Public Imperative") and Paul Krugman ("The Politics of Spite"). Worth reading, if you didn't see them.

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ARCHIVE TECHNICAL PROBLEM: Since I started this new series of posts, each time I publish one, an earlier one vanishes from my Archives list; they're still there, just not visible. Until tech support can deal with this, I'm putting links to those "missing" posts here.

#7. Brief Autobiography

#6. Tai Chi

#5. Alternative to "Human Nature Redux"

#4. The "Biogenetic" Perspective

#3. High School 50th-Anniversary Report

#2. Spirituality Research Symposium

#1. On Recent Developments in Science and Religion

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#38. Exodus

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Where did the idea of evolution come from in the first place?

I said in post #37 (What's Next) that the concept of evolution didn't originate with Darwin but with the Bible and I acknowledged that "it's a big claim-- not one that people still living in the context of a static worldview can hear easily or take seriously." Biblical fundamentalists, with their strong sense of conflict between the Bible and scientific evolution, simply can't imagine it.

But for those who aren't closed to the evolutionary worldview, the understanding that it has its origins in the history of the Jews can help us to make much better sense of the Second Axial Period which western culture and all humanity is currently experiencing.

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To start with, it's important to be aware that Charles Darwin did not invent the idea of biological evolution. What he did was discover the mechanism by which it works. He called that mechanism "natural selection."

Almost everyone knows of Darwin's famous five-year voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle and about his observations in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of South America. It was there that he gathered much of the evidence for his understanding of natural selection. Less well known is the fact that a contemporary of Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, came up with the same mechanism for biological evolution from his work in Southeast Asia and the island of New Guinea.

But the idea of evolution is much older than Wallace and Darwin. Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, for example, was aware of it, and many earlier scientists, long before Erasmus Darwin's time, saw glimpses of it. An excellent brief summary of the history of the dawning of the idea of evolution in the world of science is available in the June 2008 issue of Smithsonian magazine, "On the Origin of a Theory."

I've quoted Teilhard de Chardin many times in this blog about the fact that the transition from a static to a dynamic worldview is the greatest change in human consciousness since consciousness first appeared on Earth several million years ago. And I've shared some thoughts about this truly immense transition in human consciousness in several recent posts: aspects 1 & 2 in post #35; aspects 3 & 4 in #36.

The question here is where did that breakthrough first occur? What occasioned the beginning of the immense change from a static to a dynamic understanding of the world?

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The answer is the event known in the Bible as the Exodus. As strange as it may seem to many, the dynamic-evolutionary worldview of contemporary science first entered into the consciousness of western culture as a result of the Great Escape from Egypt.

The Exodus happened around 1400 BCE. (Bible scholars and historians debate the exact date. The importance of the Exodus event is demonstrated by the enormous amount of effort that has gone into trying to determine its exact date. You can check out some of the numerous web sites for more than you ever wanted to know about how scholars go about dating an event of the distant past!)

The Great Escape from Egypt was essentially a revolt against slavery. A group of Egyptian slaves, focused around a leader we know as Moses, revolted against their degrading political and social conditions. They escaped, crossing the Red Sea (Sea of Reeds) "with dry feet" and wandered in the Sinai desert for many years; it was there that they forged their unique spirituality and eventually came to recognize themselves as a nation, the "people" known today as the Jews.

The Exodus event was not only the beginning of the Hebrew nation but also the start of the western religious tradition. It was the context out of which Jesus and the early Christian tradition appeared, and along with Greek metaphysics it is one of the two major sources of western culture.

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The Great Escape is still celebrated each year at the full moon in spring. Telling its story is the central part of the Passover Seder. It's told in response to the well-known question asked by the youngest child, "Why is this night different from all other nights?"

The end of the story always includes what scholars say is the oldest recorded song in the Bible, the song of "Meriam the prophetess, Aaron's sister, and all the women who followed her, singing and dancing with tambourines."

Sing to the Lord,
for he is highly exalted,
horse and its rider
he has hurled into the sea. (Exodus 15, 19-21.)

A longer version, called the Song of Moses, is given in Exodus 15, 1-18.

We sing of the Lord!
God, covered with glory!
Horse and rider thrown into the sea...
“The Lord” is God’s name.

What comes next is especially important:

God’s right hand is majestic in power,
God’s right hand shatters the enemy,
Great is God’s splendor...
"The Lord" will be king for ever more!

It's difficult today to understand how important those words are. They express the realization that something new happened: the Hebrews' God did something new. And it's with that insight that humanity began to move out of the static worldview of the Neolithic cultural period that had previously prevailed for many thousands of years.

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The Neolithic Age is a period of human cultural history that's both familiar and unfamiliar to most of us. It was the age of the Great Mother, when humans first become farmers rather than hunter-gatherers and human life was centered on the life-giving world of plants.

The discovery of agriculture began about ten thousand years ago with the (probably accidental) discovery that food-bearing plants will sprout from intentionally planted seeds. Those plants grow to bear edible fruit and vegetables. And more seeds.

While those plants die off at the end of the growing season, their seeds can be planted at the beginning of the next growing season and will sprout again to produce new food-bearing plants.

This experience of the life-death-life-death of the Earth's vegetation, repeated over and over, exerted a tremendous influence on human consciousness. It prevailed in people's mind for countless generations. A familiar biblical expression of it is recorded in the Book of Ecclesiastes: "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."

This same attitude is expressed by people today when they respond, "Same old, same old," to "What's new?"

The phases of the moon, dying and returning to life every 28 days, also fit this "same old, same old" pattern.

When the new moon first appears, it grows larger each night until it reaches its fullness. That glorious full moon fades quickly, however, and the moon eventually disappears completely. But it returns again three days later, so that every month ("moonth") is a death-resurrection-death-resurrection story-- just like the plant cycle.

Life-death, life-death, life-death: it goes round and round and round. Nothing really new ever happens. In the static agricultural world of the Neolithic period, there is, indeed, "nothing new under the sun."

It was the reflections of the Jewish people on the Great Escape from Egypt which opened the mind of humanity to the dynamic view of the world. But it hasn't been an easy transition; it's taken humanity more than three thousand years to catch on to it. As Teilhard says, "We're just coming out of the Neolithic Age."

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So this is what I meant when I said (back in post #37, in response to the comment of a reader who referred to "the bible stories about God, Christ and the Holy Spirit") that those stories are about the same thing that science is about. The idea of evolution comes "not from Darwin but from the Bible."

That dynamic worldview was developed by later biblical writers, especially the authors of the Hebrew Bible's Wisdom Literature. And it was continued into early Christian times by New Testament authors such as John the evangelist and the apostle Paul and by those writers of the first few centuries of the Christian era known as the Fathers of the Church.

Irenaeus of Lyons and Maximus the Confessor are good examples. They understood Jesus and the early Christian communities in that same dynamic context expressed in the Wisdom Literature. I hope to talk about the developmental mind of both the Hebrew and the early Christian writers in a future post.

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As I mentioned back in post #21 (Struggling with Words), the dynamic-developmental worldview was lost to western culture during the Dark Ages and eventually replaced by the static perspectives of the ancient Greeks. But it began to be recovered once again by the work of scholars and scientists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Scholars in areas such as biblical, liturgical and patristic studies began to recover it on the religious side, while researchers in astronomy, physics, evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology-- and most recently in the area of neuroscience-- did the same on the science side.

With my life-long interest in science and religion I find it delightful that enshrined in the sacred writings of the Jews and early Christians is nothing less than the evolutionary worldview which modern science has been uncovering since the time of Darwin.

As I said in post #21, "Theologians have not only recovered the inner core of the Judeo-Christian tradition which had been lost to western civilization after the Dark Ages but also have moved forward to include the best values of the modern world; those values especially include an appreciation of the universe as developmental and of persons as central to the cosmic process."

In our day, science and religion converge in humanity's efforts at self-understanding. We can see far better than previous generations that human history and humanity's cultural development are the continuation on our planet of biological and cosmic evolution. The essence of the Immense Transition is our awareness both that it is one single process and that we "Earthlings" are at the center of it.

But it's to the biblical mind that we owe the initial change from the static worldview of the Neolithic-agricultural period to the dynamic-evolutionary perspectives of the modern world.

And that began with the Great Escape from Egypt.

sam@macspeno.com

#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

#13. Cognized Environment

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This is the second of three blog postings dealing with the Mystery of Person in light of the neurological perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism.

In my previous post (#12) I noted that we have many different names to talk about the mystery of conscious awareness: words like mind, soul, spirit, person, psyche, self, inner self, consciousness, cognition, awareness, knowledge, understanding, gnosis and episteme.

This entry deals with a Biogenetic Structuralist term for the mystery of conscious awareness: "cognized environment."

I know that doesn't sound too promising. But-- like the phrase in post #12, "cognitive extension of prehension"-- it's quite helpful for our understanding of what it means to be a person.

As I described in that entry, the phrase "cognitive extension of prehension" offers significant insight into the fact that due to the cosmic evolutionary process, the matter of the Earth has become not only alive but self-aware. The main idea there was that, thanks to the structures and functions of the human brain, we are free to some extent of the affective or emotional ties our primate relatives have, via the brain's limbic system, to their immediate environment. And that this freedom--liberty, autonomy, independence-- as limited as it is, is precisely what was meant in earlier times by our spiritual nature.

The great value of seeing our human spirit from this neurological perspective is that it doesn't separate us from the rest of the living world, as religious dualism does; rather, it situates us within it. It marks "the End of Dualism," as I entitled entry #11, because it helps us to see that the human spirit is rooted in the Earth and the cosmic process.

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The topic of this posting, the term "cognized environment," is similar, but it looks at personal consciousness from a different slant. While the "cognition extension of prehension" deals with the fact that, as a result of the cosmic evolutionary process, "the matter of the Earth has become alive and self-aware," this second term, "cognized environment," helps us to understand what it means to say "That's us! That is what we are."

It really is a very good way to describe the mystery of ourselves. It helps us see not only that we are the matter of the world become conscious, but also that, as the matter of the world become conscious, we are active participants in the dynamic cosmic process. In terms of the convergence of science and religion, this neurological viewpoint opens the door to a contemporary spirituality of everyday life as participation in the evolution of the universe.

That spirituality will be the topic of a future posting. In this present entry I hope to spell out some details of just what neuro-scientists mean by "cognized environment."

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We're hardly comfortable thinking of plants and animals as the matter of the cosmos become self-transforming life-forms. So thinking of ourselves, not only as "the matter of the cosmos become alive" but also as self-aware, is even more challenging.

We know, however, from personal experience what we're talking about. And even though it's difficult to wrap our minds around this objective way of looking at ourselves, it is, as I've said repeatedly now, well-worth whatever time and energy we can give to it.

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One part of that effort is to note that if we begin by asking "How can matter become conscious?" we have already slipped back into the pre-20th century perspective about matter. What we're really asking-- in that older context-- is: "How can something inert and passive and dead become alive and aware?"

Thanks to the modern evolutionary perspective, we know that that's not a good way to think about matter, life and mind. It's called "thinking from the bottom up," and we need to look at cosmic evolution from the opposite direction, "from the top down." When we do, it's obvious that life, not death, is what the world is all about.

And not just "life" in an abstract sense. It's human life that's at the center of the entire cosmic process. In Teilhard's words, quoted back in entry #11, "We are the Terrestrial head of [the] Universe... the fruit of millions of years of psycho-genesis."

We need only think for a moment of human society, of culture and civilization and of our personal relationships, to see the validity of what Teilhard calls this "neo-anthropocentric" view. When seen from the top down, the story of the universe as it shows itself on Earth is centered on human consciousness. Personal self-awareness is the very apex of cosmic evolution.

That's what the neurological jargon term "cognized environment" helps us to understand.

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We need to keep in mind two things from the modern scientific worldview. One, from the evolutionary perspective, is that that universe isn't static but dynamic. The other, from neuro-physiology, is that the human brain and nervous system is the most complex thing we know of in the entire dynamic universe.

It's easy to see why Teilhard said our understanding of the world as dynamic rather than static is the most significant change in human consciousness since consciousness first appeared on Earth. In terms of neurological concepts, it means not only that our brain is the universe at its most complex stage of development but also that brain activity is nothing less than that "dynamic universe at its most complex stage of development" in action.

The obvious question then: "What's going on in the brain?"

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You might like to look back at blog entry #10 (Overview of Biogenetic Structuralism) to check out the section on Chapter V which deals with their distinction between the "operational environment" and "cognized environment."

The term "operational environment" is neurologists' jargon for the external world outside ourselves; it's their way of talking about 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 activity of the brain's structures.

As the most complex thing in the dynamic universe, the brain's neural cells and networks are themselves not something static but, rather, a dynamic field of electro-chemical reactions. And neuro-gnosis (the research scientists' name for personal consciousness) is the result of that dynamic activity of the neuro-gnostic structures.

It helps to keep aware that we're talking about the third level of the cosmic process. Not just the realm of matter studied by physics, nor the realm of living things studied by biology, but the realm of that inner mystery for which we have so many names-- mind, soul, spirit, person, psyche, self, inner self, consciousness, cognition, awareness, knowledge, understanding, gnosis and episteme-- the realm of the human sciences.

The main idea in the neurological perspective is that, at this third level of cosmic evolution, each individual is born with a rudimentary gnosis-structure: a genetically-based (in-born) potential for awareness resulting from natural selection and the cosmic evolutionary process, and out of which our personal consciousness grows by corrections and modifications based on data coming in from the operational (i.e., external) environment.

In terms of evolution and natural selection, 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 is an evolutionary survival mechanism; it allows us to recognize what's potentially hurtful or helpful in the operational environment. If incoming data produces a negative affect (i.e., if something in the external environment appears threatening or in some other way unattractive), the object can be avoided; and if the affective response is positive (the object appears to be potential food, protection or a mate, for example), the object may be approached.

The basic idea here is that any sense data that enters the brain is immediately compared with already-there previously-stored sense data. This 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 (consciousness) 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.

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."

And what a perspective it is!

Conscious awareness is the dynamic universe, at its most complex level of development, doubled back on itself and raised to a new, third, level of complexity. That's us. We're not just part of the world, we are the world, internalized. As a result of thousand of millions of years of evolution, we are the universe become conscious of itself.

The religious implications of this scientific view of ourselves are immense.

Ours is the first age in humanity's cultural development when we can understand ourselves this way. I'm not saying that it's likely that we'll soon add "cognized environment" to the names we have to express "the mystery we are." But there's no question that everything looks different from this neo-anthropocentric perspective, including the meaning of words like mind, soul, spirit, psyche, self.

One of the most interesting things is the realization that human activities-- our personal relationships and the products of our creative imagination and technical know-how-- are not just private activities; they are nothing less than the creative universe in action. They are the cosmic process doing its thing through us.

So much to explore!

sam@macspeno.com