#82. Moving Up the Ladder

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 

http://www.sammackintosh.blogspot.com/

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I was delighted, as I said in the previous post, to be able to express well there my understanding of religious ritual in the context of cosmic evolution. It was the first time I was able to share with readers what I felt was a satisfactory expression of my understanding.

If you didn't read that post, its main idea is that religious ritual only makes sense in the unitive (contemplative, mystical) perspective. It was thanks to Mary Coelho's comments on post #79 that this idea finally dawned on me.

I've been struggling for years to be able to say well how ritual and cosmic evolution are connected, and although I felt immensely satisfied to be able to express it adequately for the first time, I'm sure some readers didn't feel as delighted as I did. The unitive (contemplative, mystical) perspective is, alas, hardly a familiar one in contemporary Western culture.

So in this post I'm going to try to put that still-unfamiliar unitive perspective itself into a more understandable context: Western society's cultural evolution.

===

If it sounds complicated, it is! As a whole, Western culture is still stuck at the bottom rung of the Great Ladder. We're still in a wasteland-- a "Flatland," as Ken Wilber calls it-- where only physical matter is considered real. For some of us, it's hard to imagine that anyone could actually hold to "Positivism," as it's called, but in fact that is still the common view.

In Deciphering the Cosmic Number, Arthur I. Miller says that when C. G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli were collaborating in their efforts back in the first half of the 20th century to establish a link between matter and mind, Pauli couldn't even talk about it with his fellow scientists. Miller says that to the quantum physicists of that time, "the very notion of consciousness was considered nonsense."

Jung, too, was well aware of the difficulties involved. He called the link between mind and matter a "no-man's land" and-- in an excellent example of his courageous and adventurous nature-- he described it as "the most fascinating-- yet the darkest-- hunting ground of our times."

So the collaborative relationship of those "Two Mavericks," the depth psychologist and the quantum physicist, was a tremendous breakthrough for Western society-- a first step away from the bottom rung of the Great Ladder.

It's probably true for most readers of this blog that the notion held by Pauli's fellow physicists that "the notion of consciousness is nonsense" itself seems to be nonsense. But it's important not to dismiss their views too quickly.

===

For an adequate understanding of the convergence of science and religion-- which is what my whole blog effort is about-- we need to appreciate the momentousness of the breakthrough brought about by the collaboration of Jung and Pauli.

To emphasize that point, I originally intended to call this post "Getting Unstuck." I also considered calling it "Beyond Jung and Pauli," to stress my understanding that cultural development didn't stop with just one step up from the bottom rung of the Great Ladder.

There's a big gap between moving away from that bottom rung and being conscious of the unitive perspective. The insight that we humans and all reality are non-dual with the Mystery behind the universe is as incomprehensible for many today as was the view in Pauli's time that the very notion of consciousness is nonsense.

So "Moving Up the Ladder" seems to be the best title for this post. I see it as an image of Western culture's evolutionary development. I'd like to think it's a good expression of the task we have at this point in our cultural history.

===

A quote from Pauli about his growing recognition that science did not provide the last word on everything is valuable for helping us appreciate just how profoundly difficult it to move up the Ladder-- how difficult it was for the scientists of his day to get unstuck from that bottom rung.

Pauli said, "We now have natural science, but we no longer have a total scientific picture of the world.... Since the discovery of the quantum of action, physics has gradually been forced to relinquish its proud claim to be able to understand, in principle, the whole world."

Isn't it amazing that science ever thought it could understand the whole world! The fact that it thought it could is an indication of the tremendous success science and technology have had, not just in understanding the world, but also in improving people's health and making our lives better. 

What a contrast to dualistic religion's rejection of the world!

So the collaboration of Jung and Pauli "in search of a fusion of physics and psychology," as Miller describes it, was also a movement away from the arrogance of scientific rationality. And while we recognize that arrogance today, recognition is not enough.

We need some practical tools to help us move up the Great Ladder.

===

Long time readers will not be surprised at the tools I'm suggesting. I've shared my thoughts about them, and made good use of them, in many previous posts. I'm referring, of course, to the four-fold (quaternary, mandalic) understanding of the human mind.

Despite the importance of these perspectives, our culture unfortunately doesn't yet have a commonly accepted way of talking about the fact that our mind works in four distinct ways.

I've used Jungian language, Native American images and Medieval terms, for example, as well as Karl Rahner's descriptions of existential experience, Ken Wilber's IT, WE and I categories, and Michael Dowd's cute animal names such as Lizard Legacy and Higher Porpoise.

I think the classical elements (earth, air, fire, water) also make good tags for talking about how our minds work. So do the four directions (north, east, south, west), the four seasons (winter, spring, summer, fall), and even the four times of day (midnight, dawn, noon, dusk). But by far the simplest terms to work with are matter, mind, soul, spirit.

And yet even the last two of those four terms (soul and spirit) have ambiguous connotations. (Is our soul something different from our spirit?) Maybe the best names to use for talking about moving up the Ladder are those Jung himself provides.

While Sensing, Thinking, Feeling and Intuition aren't any clearer than matter, mind, soul and spirit, at least they don't have the confusing semi-religious connotations that spirit and soul have.

But there's a similar confusion still current in Western culture about the words Intuition and Feeling. Just like spirit and soul, they, too, are often used interchangeably. We may no longer be stuck at the bottom rung of the Great Ladder, but it's obvious that we're still pretty fuzzy about what's involved when we move up the Ladder beyond matter and mind.

===

I think the most basic way the talk about moving up the Ladder is to describe the functions of our minds with a combination of the classical and the Jungian terms, and to connect them, as a poet would, with the corresponding compass directions, seasons and times of day. Something like this:

Matter (Sensing) is that aspect of reality we are aware of by means of our senses of touch, smell, taste, hearing and seeing, and is associated with the solidity of earth, the cold of winter, the darkness of night-- all images a poet would connect with north.

Mind (Thinking) is our awareness of cause and effect, that fact that reality is sequential or developmental, not static, and is associated with the clarity of fresh air, the new life of spring, the dawn of morning-- all images a poet would connect with east.

Soul (Feeling) is our consciousness of our relationships and of the inter-connectedness of all aspects of reality, and is associated with the energy of fire, the warmth of summer, the heat of noonday-- all images a poet would connect with south.

Spirit (Intuition) is something like sense perception, but it's an awareness not of details (as Sensing is) so much as consciousness of the Big Picture, and is associated with the flow of water, the fullness of autumn, the shadows of evening at dusk-- all images a poet would connect with west.

While most of us don't have trouble with the thought that we "sense materially" or "think mentally," saying that we "feel soul-ishly" or "intuit spirit-ually" is a problem. And few scholars or scientists are yet willing to admit that "thinking like a poet" could be helpful.

Both our everyday language and our academic discourse show how difficult it is to move up the Great Ladder! Once again we can appreciate the tremendous accomplishment Jung and Pauli made with their initial breakthrough.

We can also see why neurological science (brain and nervous system studies) has blossomed in our day. Sensations enter our mind and knowing emerges. What happens in between? Just how does matter become mind? (This is the kind of question Charlie Laughlin and the Biogenetic Structuralists worked on. I mention it here again only to make sense of my interest in their efforts.)

===

But there's also another aspect of that initial step in moving up the ladder that's important to remember: the movement from matter to mind-- from Sensing to Thinking-- is a movement from the static to an explicitly dynamic worldview. Images such as springtime and morning sunrise help us to see that the conscious thinking process always functions in terms of sequential development-- of cause-and-effect, of emerging newness.

So it's the mind's Thinking ability that allows us to understand the evolution of the universe, and it's also that same developmentally-orientated form of awareness that allows us to recognize that the emergence of awareness itself is a central aspect of the cosmic process.

This seems to be where Western culture is, just now, in its movement up the Ladder. More people than ever are comfortable with the fact of evolution today, but we're not yet comfortable with the idea that each of us is a part of it.

Each of us, individually, needs to make a breakthrough as great as that of Jung and Pauli in recognizing that our personal growth and development is nothing less than our creative participation in the 
evolution of the entire universe.

===

We're also coming to see in our day what the soul level of the Great Ladder is all about-- that Jung's Feeling function, Ken Wilber's realm of WE, and Michael Dowd's Furry Li'l Mammal are expressions of the fact that we are personally related to everything else.

It's finally beginning to dawn on Western people that all things are, indeed, "our relatives," as Native Americans pray. Our concern for human rights, equality and social justice is an expression of it. So are our environmental concerns and growing ecological awareness.

===

But beyond that relatedness level there's still yet another rung of the Great Ladder. And it's there that we need the mind's Intuition function so that we can see the biggest big picture. It's only at this spirit level of consciousness that the unitive (contemplative, mystical) perspective is clear.

The best name I know for this biggest big picture is "cosmo-the-andric unity"-- i.e., the unity of cosmos, theos and andros. Sometimes it's expressed as the "the-anthropo-cosmic unity." Both versions are awkward but helpful attempts to name that total unity-- which we can only perceive via the mind's Intuitive function-- of divinity (theos), humanity (anthropos) and the physical-material universe (cosmos) all together.

The term comes from Raimundo Panikkar, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. Panikkar said that he thought of himself as a Buddhist when in China, a Hindu when in India, and a Christian when in Rome. It was his way of describing the unitive perspective-- the contemplative, mystical, spiritual awareness-- that's at the basis of all humanity's religious traditions. He died only recently; you might like to read his obituary.

===

While the unitive worldview is probably familiar to readers of this blog, particularly in its Asian expressions, for many persons in Western culture it remains totally unfamiliar.

The reason? The overwhelming predominance of the opposite perspective-- religious dualism-- that has pervaded the Western Judeo-Christian worldview for many centuries.

Our very word "non-duality" comes from the spiritual traditions of the East. Literally, it means "not-two." It's an ancient way of expressing the intuitive insight that we and the world from which we have emerged are manifestations of the Tao, incarnations of the Ultimate, epiphanies of the divine, children of the Great Mother. That, as Jesus says, we and the Father are one.

===

So where does ritual come in? In terms of the way our minds work, ritual obviously belongs with both Intuition and the unitive perspective. 

Intuition is what allows us to see the Big Picture of cosmo-the-andric unity; sacred ritual is what allows us to enter into it.

Modern Western culture has been slow to catch on to the nature and value of ritual because we are still not clear about the nature and value of the Intuitive function.

We're still working our way up the Great Ladder. And whether we call the main steps Sensing, Feeling, Thinking and Intuition or matter, mind, soul and spirit, it's a slow process. Just as "consciousness" sounded like nonsense to Pauli's scientific contemporaries, "contemplative vision" or "mystical experience" still sound like nonsense to our modern contemporaries.

It is indeed a slow process. But it's important to keep in mind that the process is still going on. And in terms of the West's cultural development, you and I are just as much a part of it as were Jung and Pauli. We're still struggling to understand what's meant by "spirit"-- by non-duality, ritual, intuition-- the whole vision of cosmo-the-andric unity.

===

An article in the current (November, 2010) issue of Smithsonian magazine offers us some encouragement. It's about the neutrino, the sub-atomic particle Pauli predicted in 1930 but which wasn't discovered until a quarter century later, in 1956. The article, called "Looking for Ghosts," begins:

We are awash in neutrinos.... They come from all directions: from the Big Bang, from exploding stars, from the sun. They come straight through the earth at nearly the speed of light, all the time, day and night, in enormous numbers. About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through our bodies every second. Physicists call them "ghost particles."

"Ghost," of course, is just the ancient English name for "spirit."

Arthur I. Miller says that in 1930 it was "audacious" for Pauli to suggest a new particle, that "No one before had ever dared to do so." Now we know that 100 trillion of those "spirit-particles" are passing through our body every second.

We, too, can be audacious in moving up the Ladder!

sam@macspeno.com

=== +++ ===

Your feedback is welcome.

To send a comment: use either "Click here to send a comment" (below) or click on "Post a Comment" (at the bottom).

If you prefer, send your thoughts, suggestions and questions to my email address (above).

To email a link to this post to a friend, with your own message, click on the little envelope with an arrow (below).

If you would like to be notified when I publish a new post, let me know; I'll put you on the list.

+++

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

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ARCHIVE. For a list of all my published posts: 

http://www.sammackintosh.blogspot.com/

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 

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.

===

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.

===

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.

===

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.

===

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.

===

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.

===

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.

===

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.

===

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.

===

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

=== +++ ===

Your feedback is welcome.

To send a comment: use either "Click here to send a comment" (below) or click on "Post a Comment" (at the bottom).

If you prefer, send your thoughts, suggestions and questions to my email address (above).

To email a link to this post to a friend, with your own message, click on the little envelope with an arrow (below).

If you would like to be notified when I publish a new post, let me know; I'll put you on the list.

+++