#91. Evolution and the Passover Seder

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I have been celebrating the Passover Seder with family and friends for many years, but its relevance for our lives this year seems far more immediate than ever.

Earthquakes, tidal waves, and the nuclear disaster in Japan, with its radiation poisoning of the air and ocean and even the drinking water, make us more conscious than usual of our place in the natural world.

And the grass-roots freedom movements in North Africa and the Middle East-- as well as the bullying of workers, women, teachers, firefighters, immigrants-- just about everyone-- by political patriarchs and financial CEOs in the United States-- make us more conscious than ever of our place in the human world.

Nature and culture-- environment and government-- creation and liberation. That's what the seder is all about.

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In this post I want to share my thoughts about the seder's highlights. 

It's easy to get lost in the details because there are so many things going on... so much to experience... so many aspects to think about:

... the first full moon after the spring equinox...

... the salt tears we eat with the parsley to affirm life-- even with its numerous problems and difficulties...

... the youngest child's four questions...

... the unleavened bread that goes back to the beginnings of Neolithic agriculture ten thousand years ago...

... the roasted lamb as the sacrificed animal that dates back many more thousands of years, to the Paleolithic hunting culture...

... the bitter herbs that go with the story of slavery...

... the Exodus from Egypt more than three thousand years ago...

... the Last Supper of Jesus twenty centuries ago....

So much! So rich!

And as the seder text says, "This story holds true for us today." It is one of the great treasures of the Western world.

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Everyone involved has something to contribute: reading, singing, decorations, foods. For some the preparations take many days.

On the day itself, we gather at dusk as the first full moon of spring is rising.

The mother begins with a candle-lighting prayer. When light emerges out of the darkness of the evening twilight it's like the Big Bang. 

Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme prefer a better phrase, "the great flaring forth." But whatever we call it, the beginning of the seder puts us at the creation of the world.

An amazing thing, easy to overlook, is that the great flaring forth happens by way of the feminine. In our minds we usually link the creation story with the familiar words, "Let there be light." But in the person of the mother it is Divine wisdom, the feminine aspect of the creative power, who first brings the light from the darkness.

And as that light moves down the long table, then spreads to the sides of the room, out of the darkness a human world is created for us.

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The first thing we perceive is how beautiful world is. As the Bible says, even God's first response to the created world was, "It is good."

We find ourselves surrounded by candles and flowers, sparkling eyes and smiling faces.

Our immediate response is appreciation for the goodness of the world; we find ourselves filled with gratefulness. So the first words we say together are words of thanks for our lives in the beautiful world: "Blessed are you, Lord our God...." It's ourselves, our lives in the world, we give thanks for.

And we give thanks not just with words. As we drink the first cup of wine, reclining as in ancient times on our left elbow, we literally take the world's goodness into ourselves; we become what it is-- good and beautiful-- and know ourselves as its spokespersons.

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After the first cup, we expect next to eat the unleavened bread, but instead we eat "the green herb." We welcome spring and say "yes!" to life. Life has its tears and so we acknowledge the many problems and difficulties of our lives by first dipping the parsley into salty water before we say the blessing and eat it.

Wisdom is here, too. We know that admitting our problems-- acknowledging them as our own and not blaming someone else-- is the first step if we are to be free of them. No matter what we might be enslaved to-- no matter what addictions we may have-- we can become free. But first we have to consciously acknowledge them.

So after the world's creation, it is liberation-- freedom from whatever enslaves us-- that is the focus of the second part of the seder.

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Wisdom inaugurates this part, too-- in the person of the youngest child.

Personally, I think the most important thing that happens all evening may be when the youngest child asks, "Why is this night different from all other nights?"

Why, indeed, are we doing these strange things?

In the Grail Legends, Sir Percival, the young knight of the Round Table, failed to find the holy grail because he stood by dumbly in silence during his vision of the Grail. Parsifal wasn't sufficiently self-aware to ask, "What is this all about?"

Just as it's only by acknowledging our difficulties that we can deal with them, so it's only by questioning life's meaning that we can open up a space within ourselves to receive an answer.

In the language of alchemy "Egypt" means something like what today we call "hang-ups." The word "Egypt" means all the things that we may be enslaved to-- unconscious of, and so possessed by-- that we need to be freed from. Only then can the fullness of life be ours.

In response to the wisdom of the youngest child, the father provides the background details of this central story of the Great Escape from Egypt. "It all began," he says, with "our father Abraham." It was Abraham's great-grandson, Joseph, who first went down to Egypt; his jealous brothers had sold him as a slave.

The story can be told in many different ways. I've heard it read from the King James Bible as well as from many modern translations; I've also seen it illustrated with the drawings in a child's picture book and even acted out as a play by teenagers.

But however the story is told, the main point is always the same: when Pharaoh refuses to let God's people go, the results are biological plagues and environmental disasters.

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In our day, modern technology allows us to experience this story intimately and personally. The details pop up on our computer screens from moment to moment.

But it's also modern science which gives us the biggest context for understanding it all: creation and liberation. From the mother's blessing of light to the story of the Great Escape, our participation in the seder makes us present to the whole evolution of the universe.

It also makes us present to the dawning awareness in the mind of global humanity that all the peoples of the Earth are one family, and that all human persons are related to everything else in the universe.

I think Native Americans say it best: "All things are our relations!"

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But it's to the ancient Hebrews that we owe the basic evolutionary perspectives of the modern world. As Thomas Berry points out, it was this very story of the Great Escape at the heart of the seder which inaugurated humanity's awareness of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution.

In the face of the old static worldview, where for a million years there seemed to be "nothing new under the sun," it dawned on those freed slaves that "God did something new!"

And for the peoples of the Western world, it's that focus on newness-- on the emergence of new levels of complexity in cosmic matter, biological life and human culture-- which came to special clarity in the story of Jesus.

Irenaeus of Lyons says that it is precisely consciousness of this newness-- the novitatem, he called it-- that came into the world via Jesus. We know it as the New Creation and the coming of the Kingdom.

It's what our existence is all about.

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Christianity in practice often degenerated; it took on a negative, world-renouncing attitude.

But its underlying perspective is just the opposite: world-affirmation. 

The essence of the Christian perspective inaugurated by Jesus is the "God so loved the world" of St. John's Gospel and the divine "It is good" from the book of Genesis.

We can easily see this basic world-affirmation of the Christian perspective in the ways in which the story of the Exodus and the story of Jesus are linked.

In the gospels, the story of Jesus is all about life: personal freedom and "abundant life." And in the letters of St. Paul Jesus' story is merged with the Exodus story so that Jesus is identified with the sacrificial lamb and he is called "our Passover."

To this day the very name for the first Sunday after the first full moon in spring remains, in most languages, some version of Passover, Passage, Pascha.

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No matter what name we use, it is transition-- transformation, passing-over-- that's the whole point of the seder.

It's not accidental that "Pascha" is always celebrated in spring. Just as the cold and darkness of winter gives way to the warmth and light of summer, so the worst we can imagine happening to us-- the annihilation of our person and the deaths of those who are especially important to us-- isn't the end of the story.

We don't know any details and we can't make much sense of it. But deep down-- in the most profound layer of our personal self-awareness-- we have the gut-feeling that, in the big picture of the evolution of the universe, death does not have the last word.

We experience within ourselves a basic trust in reality: that our existence is not absurd, that our lives are not meaningless, that the good things of the world don't just come to an end.

That evolutionary life-force within us, in the words of one of my favorite religious thinkers, Bruno Barnhart, "promises our completion and fulfillment and the persistence of our relationships in the in-gathering of all beyond the passing away of things."

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And this is not something we have to take on the word of someone else.

As Karl Rahner, another of my favorite religious thinkers says, each of us knows by personal experience that at the very lowest points in our life we have been raised up again by the dynamic life-force operating within us.

Whatever we may call it-- the cosmic chi, the divine breath, the evolutionary spiritus-- we experience that cosmic energy acting at the deepest layer of our personal self-awareness.

It's a confidence in the mystery of the universe which we can't very well put into words.

Which is precisely what makes the celebration of the Passover seder so important for us.

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I think the seder's best expression of our fundamental trust in the goodness of reality is easy to overlook: what happens after we eat the bitter herbs.

Sometimes that horseradish seems to be more than we can take! It brings tears to our eyes and some of us make awful noises, trying to clear our heads.

But the seder doesn't end with those odd sounds. The bitter herbs don't get the last word.

There's a whole meal still to come-- good food, laughter, singing, more wine.

Tears and bitterness are not the end of our life-story.

sam@macspeno.com

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#76. Modernity's Gains

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This post is part of the series I began with #73 on two important books dealing with the integration of science and religion: Ken Wilber's The Marriage of Sense and Soul and Michael Dowd's Thank God for Evolution. They go together as theory and practice.

In post #74 I focused on Wilber's description of the main stages of Western society's cultural development: Modern, Pre-modern, Post-modern. The key idea here is that the perspective known as the Great Chain of Being, common to all the world's Pre-modern religions, was lost with the coming of Modernity.

In the most recent post (#75) I focused on the three Post-modern cultural movements: Romanticism, Idealism and Deconstructionism. Each of them attempted-- and failed-- to deal with the loss of the religious perspectives of the Pre-modern Great Chain of Being.

Words like "loss" and "failure" make it sound as if Modernity is something totally negative, but it's not. As I mentioned in post #74, Wilber is especially good at presenting a balanced view of the gains as well as the losses resulting from Modernity. This post, "Modernity's Gains," is about his understanding of the positive side of the picture.

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Wilber says that the very essence of Modernity is a cultural process-- first named by the 19th- and early 20th-century scholar of sociology and economics, Max Weber-- called the "differentiation of the cultural spheres." Max Weber himself described it as "one of the most significant developments in all human history."

It was a totally new idea to me. I have been interested in science and religion all my life, but here I am, 72 years old, just hearing about "one of the most significant developments in all human history." Amazing!

It may be a new idea for you, too. Both terms of the process-- "differentiation" and "cultural spheres"-- require some explanation. And Wilber's presentation tends to be a bit confusing because he needs several sets of terms to describe the three "cultural spheres" that got differentiated. But it's well-worth our efforts to follow his thoughts. An understanding of the gains of Modernity makes clear, as nothing else I've seen previously, what's needed for the integration of science and religion.

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Differentiation. "Differentiation" is a familiar idea. It just means growth and development. It's a basic characteristic of every living thing and a daily experience for all of us.

We know, for example, that each human being starts as a group of cells made from union of the father's sperm and the mother's egg, and that as a zygote it has no parts. But over days and months the cells differentiate: arms and legs, bones and nerves, genitals and internal organs begin to appear.

The process of differentiation continues after the infant is born. Babies smile and cry as they learn to indicate their needs. Soon children walk and talk as they begin to be aware of the world around them and use words to communicate to others.

When children are growing up their minds and hearts are formed originally by their parents and extended family. But little by little they become separate persons: they differentiate themselves from their more or less previously unconscious mental and cultural backgrounds.

In adolescence there's further differentiation, as they venture out on their own beyond their extended families to join the wider communities of society available to them.

Even those various social groups in a society differentiate from one another. Whole segments of culture begin to see things differently from other segments. The various cultural perspectives arise naturally from the different ethnic, geographic and environmental circumstances in which the various communities live. Even the great global cultures of Asia, India and Europe originally differentiated from one another in this way.

And within each of those large cultural centers various smaller segments of society continue to differentiate. Artisans, for example, have quite different concerns than bankers, and both have different concerns from those of politicians and religious leaders.

This differentiation of fields of interest and concern-- of conscious activities in human society-- is what's meant by "the differentiation of the cultural spheres."

After many centuries of its history, sometime after the year 1000 CE-- and definitely by the 1600s-- in Western society three major areas of human consciousness began to differentiate--- just the way arms, legs and internal organs differentiate in an embryo.

These differentiations mark Western culture's shift to Modernity.

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The Cultural Spheres. The three areas of culture which were differentiated can be named in many different ways. Wilber most generally refers to them as "art, morality and science."

This doesn't mean, of course that art and morality or science didn't exist in earlier times. It only means that, as conscious human activities, these three realms of human concern became separate from, and independent of, one another-- just as adolescents gradually separate from, and become independent of, their parents and extended families.

It's this differentiation-- the independence of the three cultural spheres of art, morality and science-- that is the very essence of Modernity. It's what Max Weber was referring to when he said it was "one of the most significant developments in all human history."

The separation from one another of the cultural spheres of art, science and morality has been so successful that it's difficult for us today to understand just how un-differentiated they were prior to the coming of Modernity. They were fused, Wilber says, like the parts of a potential oak tree while they are still in an unsprouted acorn.

He also points out an added problem for our understanding: that most of the history we learn is surface history. There's still little awareness in Western culture's educational perspectives that we also need to understand the inner story of our culture. We lack a sense of the importance of anything having to do with interiority-- precisely because that's what was lost with the collapse of the Great Chain of Being.

But the take-over by rationalism and scientific materialism came after the collapse of the Great Chain. So it's important to see that the conflict between science and religion didn't precede but resulted from the differentiation of the spheres of art, morality and science.

It's difficult to describe the differentiation of the cultural spheres simply because we so take them for granted today. The shift from the Pre-modern to Modern has been very successful!

So we need to take a close look at these areas of culture which were differentiated if we are to recognize the positive gains resulting from the shift from Pre-modern to Modernity.

Wilber calls the loss of the Great Chain "the disaster of Modernity." He uses the term dignities to describe Modernity's gains.

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I've said Wilber uses various sets of names in describing the three areas of culture that were differentiated. All are helpful, but too many tends to be confusing. At lunch recently, a friend and I tried to list the various sets of names Wilber uses. We easily came up with a dozen.

In addition to "art, morals and science," for example, Wilber uses the familiar terms from Greek culture, "Beauty, Goodness and Truth." Sometimes he says "aesthetics" for art, "empiricalism" for science and "religion" for morality.

He also names them as the areas of the "personal, communal and non-personal" and the domains of the "subjective, the inter-subjective and the objective." For shorthand he refers to them as the realms of "I, WE and IT." And sometimes he just says "the Big Three."

I'm going to try to describe each of these spheres (areas, realms, domains) of culture which were differentiated. If these ideas are new to you, as they were until recently to me, please hang in there. They make good sense and help greatly in our understanding the conflict between religion and science and what can be done to bring about their integration.

In talking about these three differentiated cultural spheres, Wilber is especially helpful in telling us which kind of language we need to describe them.

Science. The objective area of science, the sphere of Truth and the realm of IT, uses what Wilber calls "mono-logical" language. By that he means that this cultural sphere is concerned with things, and we can describe them without getting any feedback from them. To give an easy example from chemistry, we don't need the opinion of the element potassium to describe it as "shiny, easily cut with a knife, and explosive with water." We can describe the world of things objectively, using "mono-logical" language.

Morality. In contrast, we need "dia-logical" language to talk about the communal WE realm of Morals and Good. We obviously need feedback from others if we are to know what they consider to be of value and significance. Because we have to talk with people to know what's important to them, the inter-subjective moral realm of WE requires "dia-logical" language.

Art. The subjective realm of I, Art and Beauty, uses "trans-logical" language. By that Wilber means that the realm of personal subjectivity is mostly beyond words. We really can't say much about our inner experience in rational terms. Logical language isn't adequate to express our relationships with one another or to express the experience of communion with all that exists, and it is even more inadequate if we try to express in words our relationship with that "ultimate mystery out of which all things emerge." We turn to Beauty and Art, aesthetics and creativity, to express these most intimate aspects of our interiority.

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The great shift in Western culture from Pre-modern to Modern is that these three realms-- each understood in the broadest sense-- become free to pursue their own concerns and interests, free to use their own methods, and free to proceed at their own pace. With the coming of Modernity, art, morality and science became independent spheres of human activity.

Wilber gives some good examples of this independence. Artists can now paint landscapes or a still life, for example; they don't have to limit themselves to depictions of the lives of the saints or stories from the bible, as they did when the cultural areas were fused "like an acorn."

Scientists, similarly, can use an instrument like a telescope to observe the motion of the moons around a planet; they didn't have to accept the word of church authority that said such motion isn't possible.

And both individuals and communities can determine what's right for them, without external authorities defining for them what constitutes proper ethical behavior.

In addition to his descriptions and examples of the three differentiated spheres, Wilber's comparisons of the cultural spheres-- each with the two others-- is especially helpful:

WE & IT. The differentiation of the communal realm of WE from the objective realm of IT results in the fact that the tyranny of the group-- either religious or political-- could no longer determine what is objectively true. WE and IT are separate realms of knowledge.

I & IT. In the same way, differentiation of the subjective realm of I from the objective realm of IT means that no individual can claim to establish objective truth. When art and science are differentiated, truth isn't determined by the wishes or whims of any individual.

WE & I. Similarly, the differentiation of the communal realm of WE from the subjective realm of I resulted in the fact that groups could no longer dominate the lives of individuals. Persons have rights that cannot be violated-- by church, state, family or communities. When morality and art are differentiated, individuals are no longer controlled by the group WE.

When we look at Wilber's descriptions of the three cultural spheres and his comparisons between them, it's clear that the "gains of Modernity" can be described in one word: freedom.

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Historically, Modernity is most often said to have started around the time of the Italian Renaissance (14th century) and to have blossomed at the time of the Enlightenment (18th century). An important author I've referred to a number of times in these posts, Bruno Barnhart, sees it starting a century or two earlier (around the time of Francis of Assisi and Dante) and I've even heard it traced back to the desert hermits of the early centuries of Christianity.

However far back we can trace its roots, the very essence of Modernity is human autonomy. If the disaster of Modernity is the collapse of the Great Chain, human freedom is its dignity.

In a section on Modernity in his book, The Future of Wisdom, Bruno Barnhart says that as individuals differentiated themselves from religious and cultural traditions and institutions, they began to realize themselves with a new autonomy which also included a new intellectual autonomy. 

The individual person "began to think for himself or herself, and to arrive at independent conclusions."

This opened up space "for critical thought and free discussion," leading to scientific inquiry, creative innovation, and a sense of progressive dynamism-- "all expressions of a single massive historical process," the "emergence of the individual person from the collective matrix of religion, society and culture."

Wilber mentions other aspects of human freedom-- that our personal identity "is not determined by our role in a social hierarchy," for example. And among the "dignities" of Modernity he lists "political and civil rights such as the outlawing of slavery, women's rights, child labor laws, and freedom of speech, religion, assembly, fair trial, and equality under the law."

This independence from social class, economic status and religious background is one of the great treasures of American society.

The main idea in all this is quite clear. As Wilber puts it: "the values and rights brought about by Modernity such as equality, freedom and justice existed nowhere in the pre-modern world on a large scale." (Wilber's italics.) "Slavery existed in every pre-modern society," he notes, "and none of the world's pre-modern religions offered these rights and dignities on any large scale."

In the face of this failure of the Pre-modern religious perspective, human freedom stands out. We can easily see why the early sociologist Max 
Weber called the differentiation of the cultural spheres "one of the most significant developments in all human history."

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I'm grateful to Ken Wilber for his sense of fairness in presenting such a balanced view of the gains as well as the losses which resulted from the shift from the pre-Modern to the Modern world view. Thanks to Wilber, I understand much better why the successes of science and the failure of the earlier religious perspectives put science and religion in such conflict.

In a way which I previously did not, I can see that the gains of Modernity provide us with the tools we need for the integration of science and religion in our day.

With the insights of the Post-modern perspectives-- about our need to recover our union with the natural world, our task to be creators of our human world, and our recognition of the value of cultural diversity, where "no single perspective is privileged"-- Modernity's gains open the way for an everyday, down-to-earth practice of the New Cosmology.

sam@macspeno. com

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#36. Aspects of the Immense Transition, Parts 3 & 4

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This is the second half of the previous post. Together, the two posts offer thoughts about the Second Axial Period-- the time of Great Turning or Immense Transition we're in-- using the quaternary perspectives of both Jungian concepts and Native American imagery while focusing on Karl Rahner's existential analysis of human experience.

I spelled out the Jungian functions of consciousness along with their Medicine Wheel images in three recent posts: #29 (The Four-fold Mind), #30 (Ways Of Being Religious) and #31 (Integrating the Four Functions); and I described Rahner's "existentials" of self-awareness, self-transcendence, freedom and grace in post #34 (Talking about Us). The briefest way I know to express Rahner's four existentials is to say that we experience ourselves as aware, open, free and given.

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3. The Immense Transition and Our Experience of Freedom.
The experience of freedom means that, although we know ourselves to be limited in so many ways, we also experience ourselves as being able to make choices. Probably the best word we have to describe this existential aspect of our personal experience is self-determination.

For a fairly coherent description of just what freedom means from a scientific point of view-- in terms of neurological functioning-- you might want to check out post #12 on the cognitive extension of prehension, where I've spelled it out in Biogenetic Structuralism jargon.

The main idea there is that because of the structure and function of the human brain, our actions are not controlled totally by our instincts; in ways our animal relatives can not, we can choose. And it's in making these free choices that we "actualize"-- make actual or real-- our individuality and uniqueness.

While Rahner's second existential-- self-transcendence-- describes our experience of being open to all reality, this third existential-- personal freedom-- describes the human task of bringing the "unbounded human spirit" down to earth. By our free choices, we creatively embody the cosmic spiritus.

And it is this creative freedom-- which is ours precisely because we are both open to all things and specific and finite-- which makes us a mystery to ourselves.

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But here too we need to think in terms of "the Other Half of Person" which I described in post #22. A significant aspect of the Second Axial Period is that we see self-determination as characteristic not only of individuals but also of the entire global human community. We see that humanity as a whole has a certain amount of freedom for self-determination and that this responsibility includes all the peoples of the Earth and extends to all the Earth's living things.

And this really is something new. Our growing awareness that we are a responsible part of nature and of the cosmic process on Earth is a key aspect of the Immense Transition. Global humanity is coming to recognize our freedom and responsibility for creative self-determination.

Just as individuals, when they reach a certain stage of maturity in their ontogenetic development, see that what they do with their lives is up to them, so the human race as a whole is coming to see that our cultural development is up to us. The Great Turning is a dawning on the part of the Earth's peoples of the place not just of each individual as a "person in the world" (as Rahner puts it) but of the role of communal creativity in our on-going history.

There are two new perspectives here. One is that we see ourselves as creative participants in the cosmic process; and this is a new-anthropocentrism, different from the anthropocentrism of past ages where humans focused on themselves to the exclusion of nature. Now we see that we have a central role in nature, that we-- all humans together-- are responsible for the Earth. One way is to say it is that we see now that cultural evolution and the future of the Earth is in our hands.

And this realization is indeed a Great Turning. Teilhard has a down-to-earth image of this new anthropocentrism: we're like a group of people playing cards. If we get up and leave the table, that's the end of the game. Nothing happens without us.

The second new perspective is that we see ourselves as creative participants in the cosmic process. I think this aspect of the Immense Transition can best be understood as  an acceptance of and adaptation to the accomplishments of science and technology-- of humanity's creative role in transforming society and the natural world.

We don't usually think of creativity and technology together, but in fact they are two words for the same human activity: the creative transformation of our world. We have trouble putting the two words together because in the static cultural perspective of the past, the idea of creative transformation was literally inconceivable.

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In understanding this change in human consciousness it helps to keep in mind that our experience of freedom is expressed via the Jungian function called Thinking, and that Thinking is a judgment function. It's based primarily on the activity of the brain's Temporal lobe and concerned with distinctions, differentiation and diversity-- with all that "head" means in contrast to the Feeling function's "heart."

It also helps to remember that the Thinking function needs to keep a certain distance and objectivity for the sake of clarity and that it is especially concerned with questioning; it asks of anything, "Is it true?" It's also especially focused on the dynamic flow of time. The emphasis here is on movement, growth and creative development, both of the individual (which Jung calls the "individuation process" and Biogenetic Structuralism calls "ontogenesis") and of the human community (which we are learning to recognize as "cultural evolution").

In contrast to the Feeling function's need to hold on to the past, the Thinking function's concern is to "move on." And it's this desire to "get on with it"-- continually asking questions about how we can make things better-- that we call creativity.

While the traditional way of being religious associated with the Thinking function is asceticism, we see that the effort, attention and mindfulness involved in traditional ascetic practices is being expanded in this time of Great Turning to include creative activity. But we also need to enlarge our sense of scientific technology. Down-to-earth science and down-to-earth religious practice are both concerned with creative transformation.

Certainly creativity was not something stressed in the religious writings of the past. But as we move beyond the limitations of the Thinking function's imprisonment in the patriarchal perspectives of former centuries, we are coming to recognize, as Matthew Fox notes in his book Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet, that it's precisely our creativity, via our free choices, that defines us. Human creativity, Fox says, "is not frosting on the cake" but "integral to our sustainability." Creativity is our "survival mechanism... it is the essence of who we are."

The free creation of new things and the creative making of old things new again is what makes us human. And newness is the very essence of the Thinking function. On the Medicine Wheel Thinking is imaged by the Gold Eagle of the east, where it is associated with dawn, the rising sun, and the fresh air of morning and springtime-- all images of new beginnings.

The emphasis on creative newness is well-expressed in pre-industrial cultures which daily honor the first rays of the sun as it appears above the horizon, and also in the trickster figure such as Coyote which is prominent in many pre-Christian cultures and also in the renewed post-patriarchal masculine perspectives. Because of the fear of Black Bear imagery, western people have lost the sense of the trickster, but in many traditional cultures it's the trickster-- if not Coyote, then some other animal figure such as Raven or Brer Rabbit or Anansi the Spider-- who acts as a teacher and counselor in our use of freedom, always promoting cooperation rather than competition as the way to creative transformation.

The trickster guides us through rough ways, helping us to accept our woundedness and to make the right choices in our efforts to become all that we can be. This emphasis on creative newness is also present in the feminine image of Divine Sophia in the Hebrew scriptures; she, too, guides and directs us as the "Wisdom from on high, who orders all things mightily." (Those words are still sung each year throughout the world at the winter solstice; we may not be so far from a recovery of the best of the old ways!)

In the previous post I suggested "green" as a one-word summary for the consciousness of that aspect of the Immense Transition which comes to us by way of our experience of self-awareness and Feeling-relatedness. For the aspect of the Immense Transition which comes to us via our experience of self-determination and Thinking's unceasing pursuit of creative transformation, I think the best catch-word might simply be "new."

Green and new. The Second Axial Period sounds like springtime!

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4. The Immense Transition and Our Experience of Being Given to Ourselves.

In calling the fourth existential aspect of human experience "grace," Rahner's main idea is that we are well-aware that we did not create ourselves, but rather that we experience ourselves as having our origins in the Great Mystery and of being blessed to be conscious participants in the universe as its manifestation.

In an interview on Salon.com, the well-known American "integral philosopher" Ken Wilber is asked about his understanding of this experience non-dual awareness. "It's very simple," he says. "It's something that's already present in one's awareness but it's so simple and so obvious that it's not noticed. Zen refers to it as the 'such-ness' of reality. [The Christian mystic] Meister Eckhart called it 'thus-ness.' "

Rahner's wording for the experience is something like "God is present in our self-awareness as the incomprehensible source of all" and as the "context and precondition" for our existence. The word "given" seems to be a good way to express this most profound personal experience.

As I noted in post #34 (Talking About Us), Rahner's fourth existential is less easy to express clearly than the others-- not, as I said, "because it's difficult to understand, but because it's difficult to put into words that aren't easily misunderstood." Nowadays, "God" is part of the problem.

In post #33 (Talking About God), I mentioned that the idea of creation by kenosis, in contrast to the idea of creation ex nihilo, is helpful in seeing the creative source of the world as bringing us into existence by pouring out itself as the world. To be clear about this idea of creation by kenosis, it's important to keep in mind what the pioneer 20th century theologian Henri de Lubac says with regard to the Mystery's creative out-pouring: "there is no prior recipient."

In calling this fourth existential "grace"-- which is related to words like "gracias" and "gratefulness," and also "charism," "charity" and even "cherie" (as in "ma cherie"), all of which evoke both a sense of gift and of love-- Rahner's point is that at a very deep level we do in fact experience ourselves as given to ourselves and that we are, thereby, an embodiment of the incomprehensible source which he calls the Great and Holy Mystery.

I want to emphasize again here (as I did in post #33) that Rahner is not proposing a theological doctrine, even though in our rationalist culture we can hardly hear it except in terms of theology. ("God" is indeed "part of the problem.") Rahner is intending to describe our experience of finding ourselves to be a "person in the world" (anthropos-in-cosmos) and offering insights about our human self-understanding which is independent of any specific religious or cultural tradition. Rahner says it is a matter of personal experience. (In that same Salon.com interview I mentioned above, Ken Wilber describes three different ways of talking about God, depending on our level of personal experience. You might like to check it out.)

It's helpful to keep in mind that post-rationalist scientists working in the fields of Systems Theory, Chaos Theory and Unified Field Theory are saying something very similar: that we and the world are manifestations of an underlying order of reality for which they use terms like the "Cosmic Fullness" and the "Quantum Sea."

It's also helpful to keep in mind that these scientific ideas sound a lot like the Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov's phrase that we are "actualizations of the divine potentialities" and like the Jungian analyst Michael Conforti 's comment that the archetypal energies are "continually being incarnate in space and time." They also support the ideas I expressed in part 2 of the previous post about the coming together of east with west as a significant aspect of the Immense Transition. I'm thinking of the ancient Chinese description of the Tao as "the no-thing from which comes every-thing."

Perhaps the best name for the Mystery behind the universe is cosmologist Brian Swimme's phrase "the all-nourishing abyss."

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In terms of the Immense Transition, our experience of being given and of being, thereby, the embodiment of the world's creative source has two parts. One is that the Second Axial Period is a movement beyond the modern world; it is a turn to what's called "post-modernism," where absolutely everything is questioned-- especially the past history of western culture, with its rationalistic perspectives from Greek philosophy and its dualistic perspectives from Christianity interpreted in terms of those Greek metaphysical principles. The other part is the already-become-familiar and world-wide emphasis on the Earth's global culture and on the unity of the human family.

The Immense Transition is a movement toward one world, toward a united humanity aware of its communion with Earth and cosmos. As Bruno Barnhart says in his book on The Future of Wisdom, "Despite the continual violent conflicts, the world begins to become one world-- one humanity-- before our eyes." Our daily use of the internet for global communications is a good example, as is our growing awareness and acknowledgment of the human role in climate change.

But at an even deeper level, this aspect of the Great Turning-- the contemporary movement of Western culture in its turn to Earth's global culture, with its emphasis on world, person, human unity-- is the recognition that humanity's cultural history is a continuation of the embodiment-- the actualization, incarnation, manifestation-- of the all-nourishing abyss and incomprehensible source of all we call 'God".

This aspect of the Immense Transition also includes the recognition that this new "one world" perspective presents us with a task. As I said in post #18 (Called by the Universe), "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." There's work to be accomplished.

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That we have a job to do makes good sense when we recall that the experience of being given to ourselves, of being blessed and graced, and of our awareness of the Great Turning as movement toward one world, comes from the Jungian Sensation function. Sensation awareness asks of anything, "What's it for? What can we do with it?"

Like Intuition, Sensation is a perception function, but it looks at the individual trees rather than the forest; it focuses on the details. Its concern is the present and with our immediate needs for food, shelter and protection: for continuation and fullness of life. Not just with life's survival but with its "thrival." Based on the activity of the brain's Frontal lobe, where our attention is focused on particulars, Sensation is well-imaged on Medicine Wheel by the White Buffalo of the North; it is associated with the solidity of the earth and our need to deal with the dangerous cold and darkness of a midwinter night.

The traditional way of being religious associated with the White Buffalo function is service to all who are in need. In contrast to Intuition, of which the body-part image is the eye, the Sensation function is imaged by the hand. And it is a "helping hand." This desire to serve is often expressed by people who recognize that they have been gifted-- with a good education, for example, or good health or a good income-- by expressing their need "to give back." A major aspect of the Immense Transition is our growing awareness that the work and task of all of us is to take care of one another.

This awareness of concern for the life of all is a tremendous contrast to the attitudes of the patriarchal period. In pre-patriarchal times, it was expressed by the Neolithic image of the Great Mother and the Paleolithic image of Kernunnos, the Celtic Lord of the Hunt. It's also imaged in the Hebrew scriptures by the feminine Divine Sophia pictured as a food-bearing vine or tree providing protection and nourishment for the Earth's children, and by the contemporary renewed post-patriarchal masculine perspectives which stress communal cooperation on behalf of life rather than hierarchical competition between patriarchal egos.

There's one more factor involved in all this, one that's difficult to express well. If we experience our existence as a blessing and as a vocation to the cosmic task of making the world better by taking care of one another, then along with that experience of being called comes an inner experience of confidence. We can trust in our ability to deal with life's innumerable problems and we can trust, therefore, that our existence is not meaningless. Either life makes sense or it doesn't.

This is, of course, not something that can be proved, one way or the other, outside the realm of human experience. But it is precisely the personal experience that Rahner calls "grace"-- the experience of having been given to ourselves and of being blessed thereby to be conscious participants in the universe as its manifestation-- that allows us to trust.

I think that one word-- "trust"-- might serve well as a summary catch-term for this fourth aspect of the Immense Transition. It includes our awareness that we're all in it together and that we don't have to be afraid in working "on behalf of all and for all." We can trust from our own inner personal experience that the world does make sense and that our work and our very existence isn't meaningless. "Trust" allows us to embrace the Earth.

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A Summary of Posts #35 & #36.

There are so many factors involved in the Immense Transition that it's hard to get a handle on them. The four-fold perspective I've been sharing is helpful, but it's important to note that even the four-fold perspective is itself an aspect of the Immense Transition. So is Karl Rahner's analysis that we experience ourselves as aware, open, free and given. It is a new way of seeing ourselves, based neither on rationalist scientific concepts nor on traditional religious images, but our most basic experience of being a person in the world. And it all comes down to three very big changes-- in our understanding of cosmos, anthropos and theos.

COSMOS. With regard to the physical cosmos itself, from an over-all scientific perspective the Great Turning is a change from stasis to dynamis. It's an awareness, different from that of all past ages of human history, that we live not in a static world but in an evolutionary cosmos.

ANTHROPOS: With regard to ourselves, the Second Axial Period is the transition from the patriarchal suppression of persons to an affirmation of the mystery of person as the cosmos-become-conscious-of-itself. It includes the understanding that each of us is called to make a unique personal contribution to the evolution of the world and that all of us together are called to play a responsible creative role in the Earth's cultural evolution. We are called to take care of one another and of "all our relations."

THEOS: From an over-all religious perspective, the primary focus of the Immense Transition is a turning away from religious dualism to a unitive understanding of the cosmos and anthropos as the embodiment of the Great Mystery.

Perhaps the best way to say all this is that we are coming to see-- better than ever before in human history-- the unity of the universe, humanity and God.

sam@macspeno.com

PS (added later): For a good example of western culture's openness to the unitive worldview of the Asian religious traditions (a significant practical result of the second aspect of the Immense Transition), see the New York Time's article of 27 May 08: "Lotus Therapy" by Benedict Carey.