#30. Ways of Being Religious

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The convergence of science and religion is especially clear when we look at studies done by the human sciences which deal with humanity's religious practices. The data come primarily from cultural anthropology and sociology. It's probably not surprising that four basic patterns are evidenced in global religious experience across all the denominations and religious traditions of the Earth; it makes sense in terms of our "quaternary consciousness," the Four-fold Mind I described in the previous post.

What may be surprising, however, is that there is no readily agreed-on definition of "religion" to use when we're looking at the various ways people are religious. ("Religion" is like the word "God." We all know what it means-- or think we do.) There are dozens of definitions of "religion" floating around.

But if we take the word in its broadest sense-- to mean "whatever is most deeply important to a person"-- then even the large number of modern people who don't want anything to do with traditional or institutionalized forms of religion do, in fact, exhibit the same four basic patterns of behavior and experience with regard to what matters most to them.

If you haven't read the previous post (#29) where I spelled out what I call the "ABCs of the four-fold mind," you might like to read it in connection with this one; they go together. In this present post and the one that follows I hope to share some thoughts about the significance for the healing of the Earth of the fact that our four-fold mind results in four ways of being religious.

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Since even the most basic aspects of our physical existence --time, space and matter-- are usually understood in terms of fours (the four seasons, the four times of day, the four directions, for example), it really isn't surprising, as I've said, that because consciousness operates in four distinct ways, there are also four essentially different ways of being religious-- or as many prefer today, of being "spiritual."

But it's also important to understand the more traditional ways of being religious. If we can see the best of the past, we can better judge what's appropriate for our present transitional situation.

This post's title comes from a book I used when I taught college courses on the nature of religious experience back in the 1980s. It was Ways of Being Religious by Frederick J. Streng, then of Southern Methodist University. I had come across the book years earlier in a college book store, and when I saw it I knew instantly that it was important. I said to myself, "If I ever have a chance to teach a course about the nature of religion, this is the book I'd use." And that's what happened.

I don't think Frederick Streng ever mentioned that the four main ways of being religious as he described them are related to Jung's four functions of consciousness, but that they are clicked with me instantly, and I've been accumulating examples ever since.

Our four-fold mind seems to want to understand not just time and space and matter but everything in terms of fours. We're just not yet especially conscious of that fact. Or maybe we are, and we don't think it's especially important. I think it is.

As we move beyond scientific rationalism and religious dualism into the new Universe Story which contemporary science presents to us, the significance of the quaternary nature of the mind will become more obvious: it seems to be intrinsic to the perspectives of the New Cosmology. I hope to talk about those ideas in detail in future postings; this one offers some introductory ideas about the four traditional ways of being religious.

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Being Religious via the SENSATION FUNCTION

Sensation is one of the mind's two perception activities; by it we see not the forest but the trees and it's primarily concerned with details in the here and now. The question Sensation asks about anything is "What's it for? How can we make use of it?" The energies of the Sensation function are especially oriented to those details which need attention in order to sustain life: with providing food, shelter, protection, whatever is needed so that life can continue. And its focus is not just details in a vague sense, but attention to all the details: not overlooking anything which might be important, not leaving out anything or anybody.

It makes good sense that on the Medicine Wheel the Sensation function is imaged by the Buffalo, the animal which provided food, shelter and tools for the Plains Indians, and that it is placed in the North and connected with the cold of winter and dark of midnight-- those harsh conditions where overlooking details even for a short time can quickly result in disaster.

Because of its focus on responsibility, people with a strong Sensation function are good in emergencies and are attracted to those kinds of jobs and tasks that involve immediate and close attention to details. Engineers and emergency room personnel are good examples.

The brain locus of the Sensation function is the Frontal lobe, which is concerned not only with focusing attention and concentration but also with muscle activity, so people with a strong Sensation function can also become good musicians and good athletes: they find it easy to keep in physical motion for long periods of time and don't quickly get bored with repetitive practice.

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Frederick Streng called being religious by the Sensation function "the way of cosmic harmony." It's a way of service to others, taking care of people in need, "helping out" simply because that's the right thing to do. Drug rehabs, food banks, houses of hospitality and soup kitchens are staffed by people for whom such social action is their way of being in harmony with the way things are meant to be. Volunteers of all kinds express what's important to them in this way, and perhaps the most common expression of "doing what should be done" is the effort made by parents to take good care of their children.

Even though many would not often describe their motivation in this way, people who are religious primarily by the Sensation function tend to see God "in every hand and face." Martin Luther said, "Ever, ever, goes the Christ in stranger's guise." Mother Teresa describes a leper dying in the streets as "Jesus in a distressing form." As a way of being religious, Sensation takes literally the gospel's words, "A cup of cold water given in my name is given to me." People who are religious-spiritual in this way see life as a work of service for the common good "on behalf of all and for all," in the words of the Byzantine liturgy.

Bearing witness, in the sense of taking a stand against a hostile and indifferent world, is also part of this way of being religious. Today, we can see much better than in the past that such work includes service not only to human beings who are in need, but also to animals and plants and to the Earth itself. In our day, ecological concerns take their place right next to work for social justice, peace and equality. Thanks to the Sensation function, we're coming to see in the modern evolutionary context that concern for the Earth and concern for the Earth's peoples are one.

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Being Religious via the THINKING FUNCTION

The Thinking function is not a perception activity but an evaluative action: it is the conscious mind judging whether what we believe to be true conforms to the facts as we know them (or think we know them). The Thinking function looks at everything with a certain objectivity and from a distance; it's always dividing, separating, making logical distinctions, always seeking clarity and asking "Is it true?"

On the Medicine Wheel the place of the Thinking function is the East, where it is connected with the rising sun, the spring of the year, and imaged as the Gold Eagle flying high in the sky at dawn. Its element is wind and air.

In many cultures, the same word is used for wind, air and our life-breath. The cross-cultural list is impressive: akasa in Sanskrit, chi in Chinese, prana in Hindi, vayu in ancient Persian, woniya in Lakota, ruah in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek, spiritus in Latin. All of these words have the same basic meaning: the dynamic and life-giving energy of the universe which is around us and within us, permeating, creating and nurturing the growth and development of every human individual and of all things.

Not surprisingly, Thinking is associated with the Temporal lobe of the brain, the area connected with language, math and conceptual thinking. Because its time-focus is neither past nor present nor future but the sequential flow of time, the Thinking function is especially concerned with differentiation and uniqueness. Persons with a strong Thinking function are commonly oriented to the inner venture of finding the true Self-- with that process which depth psychology calls individuation and which, as I've spelled out in several previous blog entries, Biogenetic Structuralism names ontogenesis.

Because of its focus on time's movement and flow, the Thinking function readily embraces the evolutionary world view of modern science. It's also because of this emphasis on sequence and flow that we often identify the Thinking function with logic, but obviously the Thinking includes a lot more than logic's sequential reasoning. The Thinking function has been wonderfully described by the artist-psychologist Steven Gallegos as the psyche "searching relentlessly for wholeness and the 'not yet'."

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It's that "relentless searching" which explains why being religious via the Thinking function is a question of effort: the discipline needed to become all that we are called to be.

The classical term for this effort is asceticism. In Greek, an ascetic is a trainer or someone in training with a trainer. Today's gyms are filled with modern secular ascetics; they also jog daily through our streets.

A key religious trait here is doing what's difficult: practices like fasting, being celibate, going without comfortable clothing, living without comfortable companions, following unconventional dietary laws. Such practices are known in almost every religious tradition. In a dualistic context, ascetic abuses abound and I've no doubt every reader can give examples from their own background of such abusive practices being imposed on them.

But the most fundamental ascetic practice isn't something negative; it is simply being attentive. Every religious tradition (and that's "religion" in the broadest sense: "what's important to us") has exhortations such as "Be aware." "Pay attention." "Be sober and watchful." "Stay awake!" "Keep vigil." "Let us attend." "Be mindful." "Wake up and smell the coffee."

The heart of the Thinking function's way of being religious is the willingness to courageously follow that inner generative drive for enterprise and exploration which such persons experience.

In this context, "God" tends to be understood as transcendent-only (distance and apart, just like the Thinking function itself), but in whatever forms a religious tradition expresses its sense of the divine, that ultimate cosmic spiritus is also recognized as having a major guiding aspect. It guides us-- to become who-and-what we feel called to be-- by our genes, cultural background, personality type and the circumstances of our lives.

This divine guidance is also recognized in many traditions as having a trickster component, where it's understood that the generative guidance of the universe often comes to us via boredom or suffering. Most religious traditions recognize our need to face evil, death and tragedy as aspects of the cosmic flow, and that learning to accept one's vulnerability is in fact an aspect of being "befriended" by the divine trickster-guide.

It's for this reason that courage is usually a strong value for the Thinking function, the courage to be creative, to do everything, to go everywhere, to try every new thing, to leave nothing unexplored: to becoming all that we can be in response to "the will of God" for us. It's also for this reason that being religious by the Thinking function obviously has major significance for the New Universe Story provided by contemporary science and the New Cosmology.

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Being Religious via the FEELING FUNCTION

Like the Thinking function, Feeling is a judgment activity, but the energy of Feeling is in total contrast to that of Thinking. The Feeling function's emphasis is not on distancing but on relating: not on separateness but togetherness, not on isolation but belonging. Its primary orientation is to the warmth of participation, the experience of closeness, the simple delight in being part of it all.

The evaluation which Feeling makes is not concerned with whether a perception is accurate but whether what we think we are perceiving is valuable. Does it help or hinder life? Feeling's question is not "Is it true?" but "Is it friend or foe?" (And, if it's not dangerous, "Do I like it?")

On the Medicine Wheel, Feeling is located in the South where its Native American animal is the Green Mouse. Its element is fire, its season summer, and its time of day noon-- all images of warmth and connectedness. Its time-focus is the past.

Like a mouse that has to jump to see the distant mountains, Feeling is very close to the earth. And like all rodents, it's a pack-rat: the Feeling function tries to save everything. It doesn't want to part with anything, and for that reason persons with a strong Feeling function have a tough time letting go of things.

Because the Feeling function's focus on the past is the literal opposite of the Thinking function's concern for the flow of time, people with a strong Feeling function also tend to be conservatives, whether religiously or politically or both. The biblical prophets are a good example of the political-religious combination; their main historical role wasn't predicting the future, as is sometimes thought, but reminding the people of the past: " You have betrayed the past. You have gone against the agreement (covenant) with the Lord. Return to the right path!"

Feeling is associated with the brain's Parietal lobe, which has to do not with time but with space and the body's orientation in space. Again, we can see that what the Feeling function is all about is how we are related and connected with whatever is not our self, with what in previous posts I've called "the Other Half of Person."

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The Feeling Function's primary way of being religious is devotional activity. "Devotion" just means doing whatever connects us with what's important to us. It's a familiar idea: if we're devoted to Monday night football, we watch "the game" every Monday night-- "religiously." The fact that devotional activities are also "symbols" in the literal sense is a less familiar idea, but "symbols" are simply things which connect us with what's important to us.

The Feeling function almost always pictures what's important to us in personal terms: God is frequently imaged as a protective Father or a caring Mother, for example, but also as Lover, Spouse, Sibling, Friend. Streng's name for this way of being religious was "The way of the Holy Presence."

Because the key idea here is relatedness, for the Feeling function, the divine is not transcendent but immediately present: "God with us." And being religious by the Feeling function is always social and down to earth: it's always about connecting with others and relating to things, whether in terms of sexual love, friendship, or cosmic love for All. It's always about, as Native Americans say often in prayers and speeches, "All my relations!"

A common devotional action in many traditions is placing flowers in front of a sacred image-- of Mary or Buddha, for example-- just as we place flowers on our mother's grave. But anything done out of love, anything done to express a strong and positive relationship, would fit this category, such as saying long prayers or doing little acts of kindness. Examples are innumerable. Russian peasants used to do summersaults in front of their holy icons. Therese of Lesieux talks about picking up a piece of thread from a rug as an act of love for God. A woman in one of my classes once offered a delightful example of a devotional activity when she told us about how, simply out of love for him, she enjoyed ironing her husband's jockey shorts.

Steven Gallegos, the artist-psychologist I mentioned earlier, describes the awareness of the Feeling function as a consciousness of movement: a sense of "what's happening." And many modern thinkers talk about the "Immense Transition" we're currently experiencing as a turn toward episteme, by which they mean the western world's slowing dawning awareness that participation and connectedness are essential aspects of the human condition. Obviously the Feeling function's consciousness of our relatedness with all things is also a major component of the New Story of modern science.

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Being Religious via the INTUITION FUNCTION

Intuition is the perception function by which we see the forest rather than trees. As the opposite of Sensation, it allows us to see not the bits and pieces of anything but the big picture. It allows us to envision the whole of any situation, even of all reality. People with a strong Intuition function are not uncomfortable with words like "awe," "wonder" and "reverence" to describe their experience of the wholeness and sacredness of life.

On the Medicine Wheel, Intuition is located in the West where it is associated with the autumn season and with the fluidity of its element, water. It is especially well-imaged by the diffuse vision we have of our surroundings during the evening twilight. Because its time-orientation is the future, it is especially concerned with healing and wholeness, for what we can become at our very best. It's for this reason that Intuition is imaged by the Black Bear, the "medicine animal" who, with its unique claws, is able to dig up the healing roots and herbs offered by the Earth.

In contrast to Sensation, which asks what something can be used for, Intuition asks "What does it mean?" While its focus is the meaning and significance of everything, its intention is just as practical as that of the Sensation function: it wants to know about the why of things. It is concerned with ultimate causes and the ultimate values. Needless to say, the rationalist mind of Western culture has an especially difficult time understanding this way of being religious.

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The primary emphasis in being religious via the Intuition function is myth and ritual. Here, archetypal symbols and sacred stories are recognized as the language by which we enter into the deepest meaning of our existence, the tools by which we can become all that we can be.

So far, I've mentioned ritual in probably half of all my postings, and I focused on it in #26 (Help From Uncle Louie), where I described important ideas about ritual presented by Thomas Merton in a major essay written a few years before his death in the 1960s.

Merton was on the growing edge of contemporary religion and he looked at the religious elements in world literature in exactly the same way that anthropologists look at rites and ceremonies in world cultures. He describes, for example, the creative power of myth and ritual this way: it can bring us into "living participation with an experience of basic and universal human values." And with regard to their therapeutic effects, he notes that myth and ritual can enable us to "a more real evaluation of ourselves, a change of heart," and that thus it can bring us to "an awareness of our place in the scheme of things."

It was my own life-long interest in ritual which originally lead me to discover the "Anthropology Plus" of Biogenetic Structuralism. I'm especially interested in how ritual works-- specifically with regard to those transformational aspects that Merton describes-- in two senses: in terms of the workings of the brain and also with regard to what needs to be done in practical terms to insure that our rituals work well. I hope to spell out some of those thoughts in future posts.

C. G. Jung says Intuition is a direct pipeline to the unconscious. He describes it as the capacity to be in touch with the good energies of the earth-- especially in the form of animal powers and spirit ancestors, who are, as Native Americans say, "out there, wanting to help us." It also includes the shamanic power to “call in” those spirit-powers and archetypal energies of the universe, to make them available to all for our health, healing and wholeness. In surviving pre-patriarchal cultures, this way of being religious is so basic to human life that most of those cultural groups don't even have a name for it.

In western culture, for the last thousand years the classical form of this way of being religious has, to a great extent, been confined to monastic cloisters. In contrast, in Asian cultures the age-old meditative practices of this way of being religious are available to all.

In recent centuries, this way of being religious has also come to be known as "mystical" and the word has taken on strong negative connotations of magic and irrationality. But "mystical" just means "hard to put into words." Religious experience via the Intuition function is like tasting food and hearing music: it's not irrational or less real because it's non-verbal.

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I realize that there are too many ideas here to be mentally digested easily. But I think they are worth all the time and energy we can give them.

Jung called Intuition "the religious function." He recognized it as the beginning and the end of all spirituality: religion's alpha and omega. But while it's obvious that being religious via the Intuitive function is the most neglected and least understood form of religious experience in contemporary society, it's also important to keep in mind that just as all four functions of consciousness are needed for our personal wholeness, as I stressed in the previous post, so too all four ways of being religious are needed for a contemporary healing of the Earth.

If we are going to move beyond the failures of religious dualism and patriarchal rationalism, these are the basic tools that will help us do it.

sam@macspeno.com

#19. Diversity: Our Service to God

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"God must love cockroaches. There are so many of them!"

That's not a religious statement, but a science statement in religious language. I heard it from a ecologist while I was helping with rain forest research in Borneo. His point was not just that there are a great number of cockroaches in the world but that there are more species of cockroaches than of any other kind of insect. "And there are a lot of species of insects!"

In religious language, the point of this blog posting is that "God loves diversity." Or, in more scientific terms: diversity is a cosmic value.

But it's not a value our society gives much attention to. Many still live to a great extent in a static worldview where diversity just isn't seen as having any significance. In the dynamic world of evolutionary science, however, it's clear that what the cosmic process is all about is diversity. At least diversity is one of the things that the cosmic process is all about. And that means that is has significant religious implications.

So it's worth a serious look. What follows is a brief overview of the cosmic evolutionary process, with an eye specifically to diversity as one of its major values.

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In the beginning, even before matter, there was energy. Energy in the form of light seems to be the one basic stuff of all the universe.

Matter appears later, as a kind of condensation of light-energy. It takes the form of three fundamental particles-- the proton, neutron and electron-- and atoms are made from these bits of matter-energy. In the hearts of stars, atoms are combined via thermonuclear reactions to make up the approximately one hundred chemical elements known to exist in the universe.

When the temperatures are cool enough, as on the fragments of stars we call planets, the hundred or so basic elements combine to form many thousands of chemical compounds.

And while the smallest bit of a compound (called a molecule) can be made up of as few as two or three atoms, many molecules contains dozens or even hundreds of atoms, and the most complex molecule we know (DNA) is made of millions of atoms.

Unlike all the smaller molecules, DNA has one very special property: it can replicate itself. DNA is at the border of the second level of complexity in the cosmic process, where matter becomes alive in the form of self-organizing systems. On Earth it takes innumerable forms as single-celled and multi-cellular plants and animals.

Over time, the Earth's living things grow more complex and some in the animal kingdom evolve simple nerve cells, cells which can reach out to one another via electrical impulses. More advanced animals evolve complex nervous systems and brains. The human brain, at the third level of cosmic complexity, contains billions of cells, all reaching out and connecting with one another in a structural complexity we can hardly imagine.

And it's there that, as a result of what Biogenetic Structuralist jargon refers to as the cognitive extension of prehension, personal consciousness emerges. And as we know from another important Biogenetic Structuralist concept, cognized environment, each personal consciousness which emerges constitutes its own unique inner world.

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Even from this brief and greatly simplified overview of the cosmic process, it's clear that diversity is indeed a fundamental value to the universe. In religious language, God loves diversity.

And so do we; the human mind and heart loves diversity. But because our contemporary culture so numbs us to the world around us, we need to remind ourselves just how fascinated we are by diversity. Two easy examples follow.

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In a recent novel by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, Kabbalah: A Love Story, the central character is a rabbi-scholar who finds himself at an illustrated lecture at Columbia University on "Recent Images from the Orbital Chandra X-ray Observatory Telescope." "It was an exciting presentation," says the story-teller. "Now, right here on the screen in front of him, were some breathtaking images that effectively blurred most of the customary distinctions between mystical experience and scientific evidence."

We don't need to attend a lecture in Manhattan to see those breathtaking images. Thanks to the world-wide web, we have images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory Telescope-- along with many other wonderful illustrations of the diversity of stars, planets and galaxies in the cosmos-- available at our fingertips.

One of the best web-sites for them is Astronomy Picture of the Day.

It's just what its name says: a different picture of the cosmos offered each day. It's been operating for about a dozen years now, so there are many thousands of pictures available; just click on "Archives" at the bottom of today's picture. If you want a quick sample, try 26 November 2006: it's our nearest "sister" galaxy, M31, the Andromeda Galaxy.

This site is only one of many astronomy sites on the web, but it's an especially good one. And some of the pictures it offers are, indeed, as Rabbi Kushner says, "breathtaking images that effectively blurred most of the customary distinctions between mystical experience and scientific evidence."

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But with all their diversity, stars and galaxies are only at the first level of complexity in the cosmic process. And life on Earth-- diversity at the second level of complexity-- is even more fascinating.

There are many good web sites for bio-diversity, too. By far the most interesting is The Encyclopedia of Life . It's much newer than the Astronomy Picture of the Day site; it started on 9 May 2007 and is planned to be under construction for the next decade.

The New York Times carried an article about it on September 6, 2007, "That's Life," by the famous Harvard biologist, Edward O. Wilson.

Wilson says, "The Encyclopedia of Life will contain an infinitely expandable page for each species, with links as needed, providing whatever is known of the species from its DNA to its place in the environment and its importance to humanity. It will ensure that existing knowledge is freely available to anyone, everywhere, at any time."

It's exciting to be alive when such scientific work is going on!

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At the same time, because we can easily feel overwhelmed by the diversity of life on Earth, it's important to keep in mind our own place in it all. It's especially at the third (human) level of complexity in the evolution of the universe that diversity most stands out as a cosmic value.

As I've spelled out in recent postings, the structural organization of the human brain and nervous system-- out of which our personal awareness emerges-- is the result of our unique genetic material, and the possibility that anyone else has the same DNA we do is something like one chance in 10⁸⁰.

And because of the Empirical Modification Cycle, which I've also spelled out in recent postings, our original in-born uniqueness is constantly being modified by our life-experiences, so that the chance of anyone else having the same inner world we do is something like one in (10⁸⁰)⁸⁰.

At the third level of cosmic complexity, every emergent consciousness is unique. And it's only when we see the context for it-- the diversity of galaxies and stars and, even more, the diversity of plants and animals on Earth-- that we can appreciate what a remarkable thing the diversity of persons is in our world.

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But there's something even more remarkable.

It's awesome to think of ourselves as being at the center of our own inner world, so that each of us is a unique epiphany of the cosmos, but it's far more awesome to think that we're called by the universe to cooperate with it in "doing its thing." We are called by the universe to "make ourselves" and thus to contribute our personal uniqueness to the cosmic process. Diversity is not only what the universe is all about; it's what our existence is all about, too.

This is why the evolutionary perspectives of the New Cosmology are so important. We can see from an objective scientific point of view what couldn't be seen as well in past times: the ultimate value of each unique human person's contribution to the whole universe.

An anonymous comment (signed K.P.), was sent in with regard to post #17, What Is the Universe Doing? K.P. says, "The profound realization of what the human person really is... could be the basis of one's entire spirituality."

Exactly! Diversity is an ultimate value to the cosmic process, and simply by living our lives of ever-increasing differentiation we are doing exactly what the universe is calling us to do. So an evolutionary spirituality isn't something separate from everyday life. It is everyday life.

In religious terms, our everyday life is our service to God. As St. Cyril of Alexandria expresses it, "The glory of God is a person fully alive." And I've mentioned several times in these blog entries, this is what Teilhard calls "our work of works."

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However, Cyril of Alexandria lived a long time ago, and an emphasis on personal aliveness or uniqueness-- or diversity in any sense-- hasn't been part of western spiritual consciousness in recent centuries. That "sapiential perspective"-- or wisdom tradition as it's called-- was lost to European culture following the Dark Ages.

But in our time of immense transition, it is being recovered. As I mentioned previously, it's one of the main things I hope to spell out in future postings.

Moving beyond a thousand years of religious dualism and centuries of scientific rationalism isn't easy, so here I want to offer just two examples, specifically with regard to diversity, of how the evolutionary perspectives of contemporary science converge with the best of the older, sapiential, religious tradition.

One example comes from the Russian Orthodox Sophiologist, Sergius Bulgakov, who died towards the end of the Second World War. The other is from the writings of a little-known 17th century French Catholic saint, Louis de Montfort.

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Bulgakov is considered by many to be the greatest Eastern Church thinker of the 20th century; he was the principal spokesperson for the recovery of the wisdom tradition in Eastern Orthodoxy.

He noted, among other things, that Sophiology is especially concerned with anthropology and cosmology-- precisely the focus of the new story of the universe being uncovered for us by contemporary science.

Here, I want to note just one thing which Bulgakov says from his sophiological perspective about the relationship between God and the world, the anthropos-theos relationship, as I like to call it. He says that the two greatest gifts of God to the world are communion and diversity.

It's easy to pass over that thought with a quick nod. "OK," we may say; we know that communion, in the sense of our union with God and others, has always been a major concern of religious thinking.

But note what Bulgakov is saying. Diversity-- not just of stars and galaxies and plants and animals, but our own unique personal consciousness-- is no less important. Diversity is no less "a gift of God," than is our unity with all things.

That's not something we hear in dualistic religious contexts, but it's a major point of agreement between the cosmological and anthropological insights of contemporary science and the wisdom perspectives at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

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Although he lived much earlier, Louis de Montfort was also in touch with those same perspectives. And while he may be familiar to older Catholics because of his promotion of devotion to the Virgin Mary, they are unlikely to be familiar with his writings about wisdom; even his on line biography in the link above doesn't mention them.

I learned about them a few years ago when a friend, knowing of my interest in the sapiential recovery, passed on to me a privately published translation and commentary of Montfort's book, The Love of Eternal Wisdom.

He lived a century and a half before the evolutionary worldview was formulated, but he was aware of what today we could call the dynamic perspective because of his study of the sapiential literature in the Bible. He often quotes the author of the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, which was written about a century before New Testament times.

Montfort himself was a young and enthusiastic missionary priest when he wrote The Love of Eternal Wisdom, so the resulting text is filled with the breezy slang of a youthful but charismatic leader trying to speak in a hip style to an even more youthful audience. And his archaic thought patterns are set within the context of what has been called "the baroque piety of 17th century France." So why bother with it?

Because no one had done anything like it in western Christianity since the time of the early church fathers. And it would be another hundred and fifty years before the first Sophiologists appeared in Russian Orthodoxy.

He has some significant thoughts about how we are to respond to our calling by the universe, and I mention them here as a good example of the importance of diversity within the sapiential perspective.

His name for the divine energies which pervade the universe and address each of us personally is Eternal Wisdom. It's the same "Wisdom from all high, who orders all things mightily" which we know from the old Advent carol, Come, O Come, Emmanuel.

Montfort says Divine Wisdom needs us. He describes it almost like a stalker, always pursuing us: "Divine Wisdom inspires us to do everything, to go everywhere, to try every new thing, to leave nothing unexplored. That we should become all that we can be. That’s what the Wisdom of God wants from us!"

So here's yet another voice tuned in to the wisdom tradition, this one from three centuries ago, telling us "God loves diversity." In contemporary language: diversity is a cosmic value.

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From a single form of energy in the cosmos to three fundamental particles... from a hundred chemical elements to many thousands of chemical compounds... from millions of atoms in our DNA to billions of cells in our brain... the pattern of the cosmic process seems clear enough.

It's a single over-all design of ever-increasing complexity and diversity, which we are called to participate in by living our everyday lives creatively, by becoming "all that we can be."

I had a tough time deciding what to call this blog entry. The ideas are difficult to deal with easily and giving them an appropriate label was even tougher. I talked myself out of it, but I'm still thinking that the best title would be "God loves cockroaches."

Maybe you have a suggestion?

sam@macspeno.com

#16. Our Own Inner World

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One of the most fascinating findings uncovered for us by contemporary neurological studies is the fact that we each have our own inner world. That's what this posting is about.

As I mentioned in the previous post (#15. Pre-view and Re-view), it's something we experience all the time but rarely give any attention to.

It has to do with how we are related to the rest of the universe, to what I've called in that posting (#15) the anthropos-cosmos relationship, so it has a number of significant religious implications. It's worthy of our attention.

And of course it's challenging, as are so many of these ideas that deal with the convergence of science and religion.

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It isn't easy, for example, to identify the most personal and private aspect of ourselves with the scientific jargon term "cognized environment." But from the point of view of brain and nervous system studies, we indeed are the external world "cognized" (internalized), "the world become conscious of itself."

This same concept is also the basis for understanding that each of us has our own inner world. You might like to look back at post #13 where I tried to spell out the concept of "cognized environment" in some detail.

In previous centuries our spiritual nature was expressed by terms such as interiority and subjectivity. Today, thanks to the modern evolutionary worldview, we can have an even better understanding of personal consciousness.

We know that there are three levels of complexity to the cosmic process-- matter, life and mind-- and that at the level of mind, via the workings of the most complex thing we know (the human brain), the world is doubled back on itself, resulting in personal self-awareness.

Understanding this reflexive process also helps us to understand that each of us has our own inner world. The details are a bit involved, but if we can hang in there, we can see that it really does make a lot of sense. It is, in fact, both awesome and delightful.

And it has profound implications for understanding the meaning of our existence. It's precisely in this fundamental understanding of the fact that each of us has our own inner world that the findings of contemporary science and the insights of ancient religions converge.

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To begin with, the neurological account of consciousness represented by the phase "cognized environment" makes clear that we do not have direct access to the external world.

Rather, data coming in via the senses from the external world (the "operational environment," as Biogenetic Structuralism calls it), gets taken in and organized by the brain's activities in terms of what's already there in the organizational structures of the brain. And this "cognized environment" is what constantly gets modified by our life-experience.

Biogenetic Structuralists refer to this process as the Empirical Modification Cycle; I spelled it out a bit in post #14 (on Person as Process). The main idea is that, via physical ("anatomical") changes in the physical links and electrochemical activities in the brain, in-coming data from the operational environment (the external world) constantly modifies the already-there structural organization of the brain.

It sounds awfully complicated, but it's not an unfamiliar experience. We "live and learn," as we often say after an especially significant modification of our personal awareness. We just don't usually think about that kind of experience in terms of brain functioning.

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With regard to understanding that we each have our own inner world, we need to keep in mind that, when we come into the world, something is "already there." The basic structural organization of our brain and nervous system is there right from the start; it's in-born.

To appreciate this perspective, we need to take the long view, precisely the view offered to us by evolutionary science. At the second level of evolutionary complexity, life results from the organization of atoms and molecules in the DNA of living cells; at the third level of complexity, mind-- gnosis (our personal consciousness)-- results from the organization of living nerve-cells in our brain's structural systems.

And the brain's neural structures are, of course, the result of our genes. As we grow through our nine-month gestation period, from a one-celled zygote to an embryo and fetus, the development of our brain and nervous system has its source (just as do physical characteristics like our body-build and hair color) in the genetic material we receive from our parents.

And it's this genetically-based organizational structure of the brain which is constantly being modified by our life-experiences.

Because our brain and nervous system comes from our DNA, we are born with an "already-there," genetically-based, neuro-gnostic brain structure. We are unique from the start.

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Three enormously significant ideas-- awesome ideas, really-- come from this combined evolutionary, genetic and neurological perspective. Each has to do with one of the three levels of the cosmic process: matter, life and mind.

The first, with regard to physical matter, is that our personal in-born consciousness is the result of millions of years of cosmic evolution.

Not just the chemical elements in our bodies and their structural arrangements in our DNA, but also the subsequent structural arrangements in our brain and nervous system, have a long history.

Human beings emerge at the third level of the cosmic process, but in terms of the cosmic matter of which we are made, that process started a long time ago; it started with the Big Bang. Each of us personally has been "gathered," as Teilhard puts it, "from all time and the four corners of space."

Teilhard describes us as having been gathered "into a wondrous knot." I imagine the "knot" he had in mind was an immensely complicated and beautiful Celtic knot. It's a good image for the material complexity that is the basis of our personal consciousness which has been in the making for many billions of years.

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The second "awesome thought" coming out of the combined evolutionary, genetic and neurological perspective has to do with life, the second level of complexity in the cosmic process. It is that the DNA of every human being is different.

While the general structure of human and chimpanzee DNA differs by less than two percent, and in fact all things on Earth have a great deal of their DNA in common, it is also the case that the specific structure of each human being's DNA differs from that of every other human being.

Statistically, the chance that any two persons might have exactly the same DNA structure has been calculated to be about one out of 10⁸⁰. That number is larger than all the stars thought to exist in the universe.

So each of us is genetically unique. Right from the start, even as a one-celled organism-- even before we have a brain and nervous system out of which our consciousness emerges-- we are called forth by the cosmic process ("from all time and the four corners of space") as utterly unique beings. (Even identical twins cease being totally identical once the one-celled zygote from which they are forming begins to divide.)

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The third "awesome thought" has to do with the level of mind. It's a specifically neurological concept.

We need to remember that, as I said above, data coming in via the senses from the external world (the "operational environment") is organized by the brain's activities in terms of what's already in the brain.

This means that not only do each of us start out as utterly unique, but that as we grow and develop, our in-born, genetically-based consciousness constantly gets modified by incoming data from the external world. Each life-experience, each thing we do, each choice we make, modifies who and what we are even more, so that as we live out our life we become even "more unique."

This is probably one place where "more unique" is a correct expression.

If, when we're born, our genetically-given uniqueness is such that there's only one chance in 10⁸⁰ that anyone else might have DNA identical to ours, then by the time we're two or three years old, the innumerable modifications of our inborn uniqueness-- via the Empirical Modification Cycle-- would make the chances that anyone else would have the same personal consciousness as ours would be far less likely than one in 10⁸⁰.

Mathematically, it's probably more like one chance in 10⁸⁰ raised to the eightieth power; i.e., (10⁸⁰)⁸⁰!

The point is that our in-born uniqueness is so modified by our life experience that there never was, and never will be-- indeed, never can be-- anyone like the utterly unique individual that each of us is. No one else-- past, present or future-- has or will experience the world exactly the way each of us does.

No one else-- ever, in the whole history of the cosmos-- is "the world become conscious of itself" in exactly the same way.

It seems like a strange idea, when we first think about it, that each of us has (or is) our own inner world, and yet, as I mentioned earlier, it really is a familiar experience.

In everyday life, it usually gets expressed in negative terms. We often say, of people we find difficult to understand or be sympathetic to, "She lives in a different world than I do." Or we easily dismiss someone's thoughts with words like, "He lives in his own world."

But it's a profoundly positive aspect of our personal existence. And, as these evolutionary and neurological perspectives become better known, we can expect that they will have a strong impact on our religious understanding.

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For example, with his early awareness of the significance of cosmic and biological evolution, Teilhard had an extremely positive appreciation of the fact that we each have our own inner world.

The Teilhard scholar, Georgetown University theology professor Thomas M. King, S.J., mentions it several times in his book Teilhard's Mass: Approaches to "The Mass on the World" (Paulist Press, 2005).

Fr. King calls it Teilhard's "individualism," and notes that it is an element of Teilhard's thought which often goes unrecognized even by those familiar with Teilhard's writings.

In Making of a Mind: Letters from a Soldier-Priest, 1914-1919 (Harper and Row, 1961), Teilhard says, "Every man forms a little world on his own."

Teilhard wrote two essays with the title "My Universe." In one he observes, "I've become so accustomed to living in 'my own universe'." And in his Letters to Two Friends, 1926-1952 (New American Library, 1968) he says, "Another man is, for each of us, another world."

Fr. King notes that sometimes Teilhard refers to persons by the philosophical term "monads" and quotes Teilhard's Writings in Time of War (Harper and Row, 1967) where he says, "Each monad, in turn, is to some degree the centre of the entire Cosmos."

In that same collection of Writings, Teilhard sums up his view in one sentence: "Each one of us has, in reality, his own universe; he is its centre and he is called upon to introduce harmony into it."

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Science and religion converge powerfully in that last statement.

The scientific fact that each of us is at the center of our own world doesn't isolate us from the rest of the universe. Rather, it allows us to see that we have a profound relationship with the entire physical cosmos and thus that our personal existence has meaning and purpose within the cosmic evolutionary process.

We usually associate terms like meaning and purpose with religious or spiritual views more than with objective science, but that last statement of Teilhard's brings the two together in a way that simply wasn't possible before humanity awakened to contemporary evolutionary perspectives.

The "biogenetic" (evolutionary) perspective of modern science allows us to see the validity of the old religious idea of vocation.

Because we are at the center of our own inner world, we are thereby "called upon"-- by our very existence as part of the cosmic process-- to do something. We have a task. We have a purpose. Life isn't meaningless.

And when we see that our very existence is the result of fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution, and that the details of our everyday life have significance within that cosmic process, it slowly becomes clear that what we are "called upon" to contribute to the evolution of the universe is nothing less than ourselves.

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"This stuff is a bit heavy for me," one of my cousins told me recently.

"Yes," I said. "Isn't it awesome!"


sam@macspeno.com

#12. The Cognitive Extension of Prehension

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This is the first of three blog postings dealing with the Mystery of Person in light of the neurological perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism. It is intentionally being posted on Independence Day: it's about the neurological basis in the brain and nervous system for human freedom.In contrast to the static worldview of former times, the essence of the modern scientific perspective is that we live in a dynamic world, much bigger, older and more complicated than our ancestors ever dreamed.

The dynamic worldview of modern science allows us to see not only that the physical matter of the Earth has become alive in the form of self-transforming structural systems (plants and animals), but also that a portion of the living world has so increased in complexity, via the development of the vertebrate brain and nervous system, that it has become self-aware. Matter, life and mind are three distinct levels of development in the cosmic process.

Teilhard felt that this new scientific perspective was the biggest development in human history since humans first appeared on Earth; we can expect that anything this big will have a major impact on humanity's religious perspectives. Exploring those perspectives is what my efforts with this blog are all about.

I called the previous entry "The End of Dualism," for example, to make the point that we no longer need to think of ourselves as spirits trapped in bodies, as did Greek thought and those dualistic religious perspectives of western culture based on it. As I said in that posting, the modern evolutionary view "marks the end of philosophical and religious dualism which has influenced every aspect of human life for several thousand years." Thanks to contemporary science, we have a much better understanding of the relationship between mind and matter.

Although we know by personal experience what self-awareness means, we find it extremely difficult to put into words. We are indeed a mystery to ourselves. But contemporary neurological studies, set within a biogenetic (evolutionary) context, offer much help in our understanding of the "mystery which we are."

In this posting and the next I hope to share my understanding of the two closely related but distinct ideas about personal consciousness which in the jargon of Biogenetic Structuralism are referred to as the "cognitive extension of prehension" and the "cognized environment." Both have especially significant religious implications.

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To make sure we get off to a good start, we need to keep in mind that the word "matter" means far more today than it did in previous times. Our knowledge of the very small (summed up in Quantum Mechanics), of the very large (summed up in Relativity theory), and of the very old (summed up in Astronomy and Geology), allows us to see that the physical stuff of the universe is something very different from the dead, inert, passive material which for many centuries it was thought to be.

With our dynamic-evolutionary perspective, we can see that the three distinct stages of the material world's development are what is studied respectively by the physical sciences, the biological sciences and the human sciences. But the fact that the findings of the human sciences remain less well known than those of physics and biology, and indeed sometimes are hardly considered authentic science at all, indicates how much we have still to learn.

And of course it is in the "sciences of the mind," those which study the third level of the material world's development, that the implications for humanity's religious understanding are greatest.

But it is the unified perspective-- that matter, life and mind are three stages of the one same cosmic process-- which constitutes the modern scientific worldview.

From an anthropological point of view this unified view is called the "New Cosmology." It is, in fact, a New Story of the World, and one which-- despite religious, ethnic and cultural differences-- all humanity can eventually come to share based on the findings of objective science: plants and animals are the natural result of the evolution of cosmic matter, and human beings are the pinnacle of the development of life on Earth.

This is the new, modern context which we have for understanding the mystery of ourselves as conscious persons.

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One of the most interesting things about personal consciousness is that we have so many names for it. In different situations, we use a variety of words-- mind, soul, spirit, person, psyche, self, inner self, consciousness, cognition, awareness, knowledge, understanding, gnosis and episteme-- to name the inner experience of personal consciousness.

Because we see ourselves from so many different points of view, it's sometimes difficult to recognize that all those terms refer, in fact, to the one same thing. We really are a mystery to ourselves in the most profound sense: we can never exhaust understanding ourselves.

But modern science, especially that combination of neurology and cultural anthropology called Biogenetic Structuralism, offers much help along these lines; and this is one of the places where science and religion converge considerably.

As I said above, I see two big ideas especially worth exploring. The first is Biogenetic Structuralism's jargon phrase, "the cognitive extension of prehension." It deals with the fact that due to the cosmic evolutionary process, the matter of the Earth has become not only alive but self-aware.

The second is a closely related but distinct concept: the amazing fact that we human persons are "the matter of the Earth which has become not only alive but self-aware." "Cognized environment" is the jargon phrase for this concept. I'll try to spell out that idea in some detail in my next blog entry, and offer some thoughts about its religious implications in entry #14.

This present posting focuses on "the cognitive extension of prehension."

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When I first discovered that the field of Biogenetic Structuralism is what I've called "the parent generation" of research for contemporary neurological studies being done at the University of Pennsylvania by Andrew Newberg and associates, it took me a half-dozen readings of their original text Biogenetic Structuralism [Columbia University Press, 1974]) to make sense of their ideas about the cognitive extension of prehension.

So you might like to look back at posting #10 (Overview of Biogenetic Structuralism) where in the sections on Chapters III and IV I've tried to describe these challenging ideas. As I've said a number of times, they are not easy to understand, but they're not impossible either; they are well-worth whatever time and energy we can give them.

The main idea encapsulated in the phrase "cognitive extension of prehension" is that, thanks to the way the human brain works, we are to some extent free of the affective or emotional ties our primate relatives have to their immediate environment.

The structure and organization of the human brain is such that we have a real, if limited, independence of the brain's limbic system, the part of the brain we share with all vertebrate animals going back to our reptile ancestors. It is this relative freedom from instinctual action and response to things in our immediate surroundings which enables us to imagine possible causes of things not present in the external environment; it allows us to deal with things in their absence, to plan ahead and to make choices. This cognitive ability obviously had great survival value for our earliest human ancestors and accounts for contemporary humanity's predominance among the living things of the Earth.

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At first hearing, this idea of the "cognitive extension of prehension" doesn't sound too helpful as an understanding of the mystery of personal consciousness. But in fact it is.

"Prehension" comes from a Latin word which means to seize or grasp; we're familiar with its use in describing the prehensile tail of South American monkeys who use their tails as an additional appendage for wrapping around and holding on to tree branches.

But "prehension" also has a conceptual meaning, as when we say of something which we've previously had a difficult time understanding, "Oh, now I get it". We're saying that we have "grasped" the issue, that we have been able to "wrap our minds around" it. That's what's meant by the cognitive extension (at the human level) of primate prehension.

As I said above, the findings of the human sciences remain less well known than those of the physical and biological sciences, so these words sound strange. But in fact we know what they mean from personal experience.

The main point which the phrase "cognitive extension of prehension" conveys is that human behavior isn't just a matter of instinct, as it is with our primate cousins. We are less stimulus-bound and have a certain amount of autonomy because of the way the structures of our brain are organized. And, obviously, this behavioral freedom from "instinct," limited as it is, is what distinguishes us from our primate cousins and accounts for our characteristically human traits of speech, creativity, technical know-how and imagination.

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What's less obvious-- and this is my whole point in this post-- is that this partial independence of the human brain from the vertebrate limbic system is precisely what was meant in earlier times by our spiritual nature.

In the centuries before anything was known about neuro-physiology, it made good sense to say that "humans have a spiritual soul." In the context of the pre-scientific static worldview, talking about the spiritual nature of the soul was a good way of expressing the fact that what distinguishes homo sapiens from the rest of the animal kingdom is our limited but real autonomy from the world around us. Liberty or freedom is the very essence of what we mean by the human spirit.

Thanks to 20th-century scientific studies of the brain, we can understand even better what the freedom of a human person means. And the great advantage of seeing our spiritual aspect from a neurological perspective is that it doesn't separate us from the rest of the living world but situates us within it. Today, we can see more clearly than other generations that personal consciousness doesn't exist apart from the Earth's biological evolution but, rather, that we are an integral part of the evolution of the universe.

And it's this neurological-evolutionary perspective-- that the human spirit is rooted in the Earth-- which I described in posting #11 as marking the end of religious and rationalist dualism.

When we see what the cognitive extension of prehension means, it becomes clear that we neither have to deny as do scientific rationalists that we have a spiritual soul, nor to claim as religious fundamentalists do that only our spiritual side has value.

And this New Cosmology, this New Story of our place in the living world, coming out of 20th century science, takes away nothing of the awe, wonder and astonishment we experience at the mystery of being a person. Indeed, it enhances it tremendously.

And it opens the door to a much more healthy religious understanding of ourselves not as aliens to, but as participants in, the cosmic process.

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In the dualistic religious perspectives of pre-scientific times, humanity's main task was to escape from the world. Today, thanks to the modern evolutionary perspective, we can see that we not only belong to the world but also that we have a role to play in it.

The modern scientific worldview doesn't take away human dignity, it restores the age-old religious insight of the value of the human person. It allows us to see that each of us has a cosmic vocation, called by our very existence to make a personal contribution to the evolution of the world.

This is one of the most significant places where religion and science at their best converge: in helping us recover the sense that our personal existence has meaning and purpose.

sam@macspeno.com