#27. Radical Honesty: The How-to of Ontogenesis

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A Quick Review: My previous four postings have been about ontogenesis, a technical word for our personal growth and development as it is understood from the neurological and anthropological perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism. The emphasis has been on what I call in post #22 the "other half of person": the social, communal and relational aspects of the mystery of our personal consciousness. 

This is in contrast to a dozen or so of my earlier posts which deal with the physical connection between person and cosmos; that is, with the link between the matter of the universe and ourselves as persons.

Entry #23 offers an overview of the Biogenetic Structuralist understanding of personal development as it takes place in the communal-social context, and next three posts (#24, #25 and #26) spell out its three main stages-- both from the perspectives of the human sciences and from an essentially religious view "with help from Uncle Louie."

One of my primary concerns has been to show that myth, ritual and symbol are understood in both perspectives to be the means or tools by which we are empowered-- in the highest phase of our conscious development-- to participate in the activity of the universe. Although long dismissed conventionally because of Western culture's "disenchantment of the world," myth, ritual and symbol are critically relevant to the emerging New Cosmology.

Along with the evolutionary worldview, myth, ritual and symbol have been of life-long personal interest and I hope to share further thoughts about them in future posts. But that's not the topic here. In this post I want to talk about something more fundamental: how we grow through the earlier stages of ontogenetic development to reach that mature stage of personal growth where participation in the cosmic process via myth, ritual and symbol is the norm.

Biogenetic Structuralists (as I described in post #25) and Thomas Merton (as I described in post #26) both refer to the third phase of ontogenesis as "contemplative experience" and "the highest form of cognition." Both also understand it to be nothing less than the mature stage of our personal development where we become creative contributors to the evolution of the universe.

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As I said in post #25, the static worldview of previous centuries has been so strong and so persistent that we're simply not used to thinking about our personal growth in any context, let alone trying to make sense of it in terms of ideas such as "cosmology" and "ontogenesis."

But at the same time, the desire for personal growth and development is one of our most basic human experiences: even two and three-year olds talk about "When I get big" and "When I grow up." Ontogenetic development is in our genes; it's one of the primal forces of the cosmic process which we embody.

So the question is: If everything about us wants to grow, what holds us back? What prevents us from achieving the highest and most mature form of personal consciousness?

In the most basic sense, our personal participation in the cosmic evolutionary process begins when our neuro-gnostic conscious awareness first dawns in the embryonic bundle of nerve tissue when we are still in our mother's womb. It continues beyond birth through the stages of acquired beliefs in childhood and our ego-experiences in adolescence and young adulthood, to the full blooming of our personal mystery in the third, contemplative, phase of ontogenetic development.

At least it can do that. Obviously not all of us make it to that most mature stage of personal development which many spiritual traditions call "wisdom consciousness."

What prevents us? What holds us back?

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If we can compare our development to the growth of a seed, it's clear that a seedling doesn't just sit there; it has to do something internally to continue its development into a healthy plant and to eventually reach its full-blooming mature stage. We, too, can't just sit back waiting for growth in awareness to occur; it doesn't happen automatically. As conscious beings, we have to consciously contribute to our conscious growth. It is, in fact, a major part of our essential human dignity that we have a role to play in our own personal development. "We make ourselves," as the famous anthropologist and archeologist V. Gordon Childe expressed it back in the 1930s.

This is one of the places where the biblical idea found Luke 19:26 makes good practical sense: "Those who have much will receive more, and those who have little will lose even that."

Not much growth in consciousness can happen if we're clueless. So it's important that we understand clearly what it is we have to do in order to continue to grow beyond the stages of embryonic awareness and childhood beliefs to the more mature ego-experience of adolescence and to the fully mature stage of personal participation in the cosmic process.

The question isn't just, "What holds us back?" It's also, "What do we personally need to contribute to our development?"

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The best answer I know to that question comes, not surprisingly, from the human sciences: in this case from the world of psychotherapy. It's spelled out especially well in the writings of Washington DC psychotherapist Brad Blanton, specifically in his book Radical Honesty (Starhawk Publications, 2005).

I discovered Blanton's work while reading a newsletter of Rowe Center, a human potential conference center in Western Massachusetts with ties to the Unitarian Church. The description of a weekend workshop he was offering caught my attention, so I got a copy from my local library of his Radical Honesty and recognized, to my delight, that among other things it is a practical "how-to" book for moving through the developmental stages of belief, experience and participation.

Blanton doesn't mention Biogenetic Structuralism, but many of his ideas fit well with its evolutionary and anthropological perspectives. He emphasizes, for example, that "unity is in the nature of things" and "we are each creators of the universe out of our own being"-- an especially good way to express the neurological jargon phase "cognized environment." And he describes his work as "social psychotherapy," stressing that personal development takes place in a social-political context-- an especially good way to express what anthropology means by a culture's "cosmology."

Blanton even uses the same odd term ("the being"), just as Biogenetic Structuralism does, for "person" or "consciousness." It's an odd usage which takes some getting used to; but if you have been reading my previous four blog posts, you're already used to it. You are, at least, familiar with the term "ontogenesis," which literally means "the development of the being." My point here is that Blanton's work offers some very clear ideas about what each of us must contribute to our personal ontogenesis.

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Blanton trained with Gestalt Therapy founder Fritz Pearls and started the first training program in Gestalt Therapy in 1971 in the Washington DC area, where he has been a psychotherapist in private practice for many years. He has written a half-dozen books, some translated into several languages, and he offers weekend workshops and eight-day conferences in the United States, Europe, Canada and Mexico. As a social reformer he has occasionally been arrested and spent time in jail due to his anti-war activities, all of which he says contributes to his ongoing education.

Blanton's central idea is that the primary cause of stress, depression and anger is "living in a story and lying to maintain it." Lying wears us out; and anxiety and burn-out can result in the severest kinds of psychological illness. What we have to do in order to move through the stages of our personal development is to tell the truth: we have to speak honestly about ourselves.

It sounds too easy, even simplistic, but when we hear what he's saying he is in fact providing the details for what might be called "the practice of ontogenesis." He's talking about what holds us back from personal development and what we need to do if our growth toward maturity is to continue rather than come to a premature dead end.

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Blanton's basic understanding is that what holds us back is shame, guilt and embarrassment.

We feel guilty, for example, that we frequently and consistently violate the moral principles which have been imposed on us in the belief stage of personal development. And because we attempt to hide that fact, the result is stress: everything from mild anxiety to crippling, even suicidal, depression.

Blanton's main point is quite simple: via the imposition of cultural norms, the neurognostic self is made to feel guilty for being adventurous and creative, and the only healing possible is to acknowledge what we have avoided and kept hidden. We become free-- from the stress imposed by cultural beliefs and personal ego-experiences and for more mature personal development-- simply by telling the truth. Being radically honest about ourselves is the only way to grow as a person.

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Obviously I can't do an adequate job in presenting Blanton's ideas here; I hope you might read Radical Honesty yourself. But I'm going to present a brief overview of some of his basic concepts, focusing on his understanding of what we need to do in order to move beyond the earlier stages of belief and ego-experience. This will provide, I hope, a sufficient context for an understanding of what he sees as the three levels of honesty, which I find remarkably parallel to the three stages of personal development that I've been writing about in recent blog entries. Blanton's three levels of honesty would seem to provide a kind of praxis-- a practical how-to-- for our ontogenetic development.

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Overview. For the sake of our life's survival, we need to make use of both the beliefs passed on to us in childhood and our personal ego-experiences in adolescence. We can't do without them. But due to insecurity, those childhood beliefs and adolescent ego-experiences can become a conventional routine of moralistic principles, rules and roles which lead to stress: suffocation, suffering and grief. It's especially difficult to get out of adolescence; we can easily end up living in an imaginary world-- what Blanton calls the "story"-- in which we hide and lie to make ourselves look good and to defend ourselves against shame and embarrassment. If we get stuck in adolescence, we become victims of our own mind, trapped in the prison of our own immaturity.

The only way out is grounding, says Blanton: managing our indoctrination by being honest.

Instead of living in an imaginary world, where we have to lie and hide to avoid the reality of our shame, guilt and embarrassment, we can make use of our image-making power to free ourselves from that mental jail. We have to go beyond first-stage beliefs and second-stage adolescent ego-experiences if we are not just to survive but also to thrive. Rather than being insecure, we can trust the world and ourselves; the alternative to insecurity is to trust our body and the material laws of the universe, so that we become grounded in the here and now.

This creative transformation leads to health, wholeness and meaningfulness: instead of being victims, trapped in a mental prison, we can use of our minds to become artists. But it's only radical honesty that can free us for a creative and self-reliant life.

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Level One. The first level of honesty is being honest about facts. With regard to the belief stage of our development, we need to be honest about the simple fact that we have not lived up to the ethical and moral principles passed on to us. It isn't so much our violation of those principles that is the problem; rather, what causes stress and anxiety is hiding that fact from others.

Blanton gives an example of a woman from a traditional religious family who secretly had an abortion at the age of 20. Guilt, shame and embarrassment prevented her from sharing that information with anyone for many years. She was in therapy for severe anxiety, and understood that she needed to stop hiding the fact of her past life from her parents. She tried many times to inform them, and only at the age of 35 was she finally able to do so.

Her father's reaction was, "Oh, thank God." He said, "We knew you had been wanting to tell us something for a long time; we thought that you must have a fatal illness." Note that the woman didn't need to tell anyone and everyone about the abortion, but only those from whom she had to work so hard to keep it a secret. It's the effort at lying, at hiding the data and living in a false story, that results in crippling stress, anxiety and grief.

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Level Two. The second level of honesty relates to adolescent ego-experience: it means being honest about our post-childhood thoughts and feelings.

"Thoughts and feelings" may sound trivial, and being honest about them may (again) seem simplistic, but we need to keep in mind that Blanton is talking about thoughts and feelings as conceptual judgments and emotional evaluations which have resulted from the ego-experiences of our adolescence. It's the effort it takes to hide our personal judgments and emotions that results in stress and even hatred-- just as does the effort to hide the facts about our past selves.

I don't need to give an example here; we all can provide numerous examples of overgrown adolescents who can't stop judging and criticizing themselves and for that reason have become super-critical and moralistic with regard to everyone else. Blanton says that the better we get at playing hide-and-seek during adolescence the harder it is to grow up, and that many end up trapped in perpetual adolescence.

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Level Three. At the third level of honesty we need to speak the truth not about the facts of the past or about our adolescent conceptions or emotional values but about our own self-images. If the first level of honesty looks to the past, this third level is more future-focused. Having a picture of ourselves-- as we are now, or as we want to be in the future-- isn't itself a problem; what is, is the effort needed when-- out of shame, guilt or embarrassment-- we try to keep that picture of ourselves hidden from others.

This may be the hardest level of honesty to understand. Most of us recognize that we need to grow up, to get over childhood. But in our contemporary adolescent culture, it's not easy even to see that we need to get out of adolescence. And Blanton says the odds are against us; the great majority never get beyond the stage of adolescent pretense because we use up our energies in hiding our self-image from others.

He gives an example of adolescent pretense that can be seen in cold weather at any street corner school bus stop: "Many teenagers would rather look cool, while freezing to death waiting for the school bus, than wear a warm jacket that is not as 'in' as the shirt they are wearing." We may laugh at that example, but we need to keep in mind that many people are still trying to look cool in their 30s, 40s and 50s. (If that seems like an exaggeration, just think of all the online ads that come in daily for replica watches and penis-enlargers.)

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Isn't it amazing that to get out of adolescence we have to share with others what most embarrasses us about ourselves! And that sharing our self-image-- in contrast to putting on a show-- is such hard work. Blanton says it "feels like dying."

I'm aware that my brief overview of these ideas is extremely superficial and I hope, as I said above, that you might read Blanton's book yourself. It's full of treasures. It contains, for example, the best description I've ever seen of the Buddhist understanding of annata (the no-self) and also the best description I know of what Christians call "grace" (as in Amazing Grace).

Another "treasure" is the quaternary perspective which shows up in Blanton's presentation of the three levels of honesty. If you are familiar with the Jungian idea of the four-fold functions of consciousness or with the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, you may have noticed that the progression in the levels of honesty goes from Sensing (in the belief stage) to the judgment functions of Thinking and Feeling (in the ego-experience stage) and to the image-making Intuitive function (in the most mature stage). This quaternary perspective allows us a wholistic understanding of conscious awareness that is invaluable for our self-understanding. I hope talk about it in some detail in a future post.

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I have several additional thoughts about Blanton's work which I also want to share. They don't seem to fit elsewhere in my brief overview, but they seem important enough not to leave out.

One thought is that, as Blanton puts it, "freedom is a psychological achievement." He mentions in his Introduction that according to Hugh Thomas, author of A History of the World (Harpercollins, 1982), the greatest medical advance in history has been garbage collection!

And Blanton says that the greatest psychological advance in history (which he optimistically sees as "just around the corner") will involve a similar awareness of our need to clean up our communal world. (Never before has our global need been so obvious to achieve a cleaned-up environment and a cleaned-up psycho-social situation-- especially in terms of our political and religious leadership. Obvious, at least, to everyone beyond the belief stage of personal development. So Blanton's optimism may not be as unfounded as it first might seem.)

A second interesting point is the question that probably comes to each of us when we are thinking about the various levels of honesty: Where am I? Which level best describes "where I'm at" in terms of my growth and development? Blanton offers a clear criterion: "The sound of freedom is laughter."

A third interesting point is Blanton's comment that underlying all of our stress, depression and grief, there also may be found a layer of joy. Freedom, laughter and joy! Those words don't often appear in science writing-- even in the literature of the human sciences.

Finally, in sharing my thoughts via this blog about the convergence of science and religion, I have consistently tried to provide examples of how similar ideas, although usually expressed quite differently, can be found in the two very different perspectives of contemporary science and religion. For this posting on the "how-to" of personal development, a religious expression is readily available similar to the understanding from the human sciences of our need for radical honesty to grow and develop. Most likely it has already come to your mind.

"Don't be afraid. Speaking honestly will set you free." John 8:32

sam@macspeno.com

#26. Help From Uncle Louie

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In the 1980s, when I made a mid-life vision quest-- questing for a vision of what I should be doing with the second half of my life-- I was given the name "Scavenger." In the main part of the vision I was a cinnamon-colored black bear digging through trash cans in the parking lot behind a restaurant in a spectacular natural setting something like Yellowstone National Park.

The full earth-name I was given is "Scavenger of the Sacred Mystery." I was told that I "was not to mourn the Mystery's loss nor hate those who damage it" but to scavenge for those good things relating to the sacred which have been ignored, damaged and discarded by our culture.

The name stuck; this blog is part of that calling. I started the blog, with the help of my techno-savvy daughter, to share the results of my scavenging-- particularly, as the title says, to share with anyone interested "thoughts with about the convergence of science and religion," my two life-long interests.

In the more than two dozen blog entries I've posted so far, I have stressed that by "science" I mean not the science of 19th-century rationalism but the late 20th-century perspectives of contemporary science, and I've repeatedly emphasized the great value of the little-known movement from the human sciences in the 1970s, Biogenetic Structuralism, which attempts to combine the perspectives of biological evolution with cultural anthropology and studies of the brain and nervous system in its scientific quest to understand the mysteries of our existence.

I've also emphasized that by "religion" I am not referring to its dying institutional forms, but to the growing-edge thinking coming out of those traditions in their attempts to recover their ancient roots. In each posting I offered a comparison between those growing-edge religious ideas and similar contemporary scientific concepts.

So far, the most radical example I've offered is in post #20, where I compared the neurological concept of consciousness (as expressed by Biogenetic Structuralism's jargon term cognized environment) with an understanding of the ancient religious doctrine of the resurrection of the dead (as expressed in the writings of the Russian Orthodox Sophiologist, Sergius Bulgakov).

Needless to say, the language of these two perspectives is quite different, but both seem to be saying something very similar about the connection between mind and body (or more generally about the relationship between human consciousness and the physical universe). There really does seem to be an amazing convergence of religious and scientific thoughts going on there-- at least to me.

I did not offer an example of that type of convergence in the previous two postings. I had enough to do in trying to describe Biogenetic Structuralism's understanding of ontogenesis and of the role of symbol, myth and ritual in the third stage of personal development.

It's important to keep in mind that "ontogenesis" is a scientific understanding, essentially from the combined fields of neuro-physiology and cultural anthropology, of the growth and development of human consciousness as it takes place in the context of a culture's cosmology and happens via the three stages of belief, experience and participation.

In this entry I want to offer some similar ideas from a religious perspective about the role of symbol, myth and ritual in the participatory phase of our personal conscious development.

You may well ask whether such a religious perspective exists. The fact that "contemplation" is one of the names given by Biogenetic Structuralism to the third stage of ontogenesis provides a hint that there may be. In fact, there's help from Uncle Louie.

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In his religious order, Thomas Merton officially was called "Father Louis, OCSO." But among his fellow monks he was known by the (I think, affectionate) nickname, "Uncle Louie." Merton was one of the most significant persons in 20th-century American Catholicism and was greatly respected worldwide for his many contacts with religious thinkers in Islam, the Asian traditions and the secular world. In an introduction to Merton's Contemplation in a World of Action (Doubleday, 1971) the famous scholar of Medieval thought, Jean Leclercq, ranks him "with the Fathers of the early church and those of the Middle Ages."

If you are thinking that Merton is an unlikely source for a convergence from the world of religion with concepts coming from cultural anthropology, I agree. But in fact he has a very significant essay where there is an amazing agreement from his religious perspective with the kind of scientific ideas about the role of myth, ritual and symbol in our personal development that I spelled out in the three previous blog entries. That's what I want to share in this posting.

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Merton died in 1968, a half-dozen years before the appearance of the first of the Biogenetic Structuralists' three books, Biogenetic Structuralism. As far as I know, he had no science background and no contact with those pioneer research scientists. But in a major essay dealing with the relationship between religion and literature, written sometime in the early 60s, Merton talks about some very similar ideas.

I find the essay valuable not only because it offers an especially good example of the convergence of some significant contemporary scientific and religious perspectives, but also because it provides an excellent introduction to a much deeper understanding of religious experience than has previously been commonly available in western culture. Most of what follows deals with Merton's thoughts specifically with regard to myth, symbol and ritual in connection with what he calls the "religious elements" in literature. I hope to talk about that further idea, the "deeper level of religious experience," in the future.

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Merton was a highly talented writer with a life-long interest in art and literature. The thoughts that follow come from his introduction to a collection of essays by various writers dealing with the connections between religion and literature. The book is Mansions of the Spirit, Essays in Religion and Literature (Hawthorn, 1967). His introductory essay is entitled "'Baptism in the Forest': Wisdom and Initiation in William Faulkner." The essay also was printed in a later collection: The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton (New Directions, 1985).

It's a long essay of several dozen pages. The first few pages are devoted to comments about religion and literature in general and to the ideas of the many authors of the essays found in Mansions of the Spirit. He eventually gets to talking about two books by 1950 Nobel Prize author William Faulkner, Go Down Moses and The Wild Palms. (Merton wrote a master's thesis on Faulkner while at Columbia University.) It's in that section that he introduces some extremely significant ideas about the "religious elements" to be found in literature.

He begins by noting that there are a number of contemporary authors in addition to Faulkner in whom such "religious elements" can be found; among the more familiar names he mentions are Boris Pasternak, D. H. Lawrence, William Butler Yeats and William Carlos Williams.

But Merton's view of literature is global: he compares Faulkner's work to Greek tragedy in western literature and to things like classical Japanese No drama in Asian cultures.

One of his main points is that in such literature there are "specifically religious elements which come not from any specific cultural or confessional expressions of religion but from human nature, the human psyche, human experience." And this is already a convergence, in that Merton is looking at the religious elements in world literature in exactly the same way that anthropologists look at rites and ceremonies in world cultures.

His language is so close to that of the Biogenetic Structuralists that I keep thinking: "Maybe Merton did have some contact with them." But that's highly unlikely, so the similarity between his thoughts and theirs serves as an even stronger example of a contemporary convergence of religious and scientific perspectives.

He notes, for example, that the religious experience available via literature is neither inborn nor based on "acquired beliefs and attitudes" but is the result of personal experience at a deeper than rational level, and he calls this deeper level "the highest form of cognition."

With this kind of emphasis-- on the fact that the specifically religious elements in world literature are not genetic but cultural and that they are not at the level of beliefs but at the trans-personal level of conscious development-- Uncle Louie sounds just like a Biogenetic Structuralist!

And he sees "literature" in a broad sense as having the same kind of potentially profound transformational effects that Biogenetic Structuralism attributes to symbolic myth and ritual.

He says Greek tragedies and performances like the religious dance-dramas of Bali, for example, were "not merely presentations which an audience sat and watched" but "religious celebrations, liturgies, in which the audience participated."

He observes that they were in fact so powerful that if we-- "our twentieth-century selves"-- had been "present then, in those days, for instance in the theater at Delphi during the festival of Apollo," we might "have undergone the same kind of thing that happens now to people who take LSD." (He was writing, remember, in the Psychedelic 60s.)

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I find five major ideas in Merton's understanding of the religious elements in literature that seem to me a convergence with the scientific perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism. They are all interrelated, so it's not easy to sort them out and describe each separately. But here's an attempt....

One. The first big idea is Merton's emphasis on the "participatory" character of the kind of experience he's talking about: it is, he says, "something we can participate in, at a deep level."

He notes that what makes the Greek myths "classical" is that they are universal: "they speak to our human nature and we find ourselves involved in them." They are "not just a spelling out for ourselves of a religious or metaphysical message." Rather, they deal with "the drama of human existence" and "have a direct impact on the deepest center of our human nature." In myth and ritual "our conflicts are not explained, not analyzed, but enacted."

By "conflicts" he means our human condition: the issues and problems we have to deal with as human beings. Note that he uses the term "enactment" in the same way Biogenetic Structuralism does and that he says that it is precisely the creative power of enactment which "brings us into living participation with an experience of basic and universal human values."

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Two. A second major idea of Merton's is that these profound participatory experiences happen "via ritual and symbol language." Here, too, as in the Biogenetic Structuralist understanding, myth and ritual are the stories, while symbols are the language-- the means or tools-- by which the stories are told and enacted.

Merton says symbols are "signs which release the power of imaginative communion." He calls them "efficacious sign-symbols": "basic archetypal forms" which "have arisen spontaneously in all religions and which have everywhere provided patterns for the myths in which [we] have striven to express our sense of ultimate meaning." Symbols "put us in communion with our deepest selves via images, not by concepts and ideas."

Merton emphasizes that symbols are "signs which do not arbitrarily signify something else but which release the power of imaginative communion": they release in the reader "the imaginative power to experience what the author really means to convey." (It helps to read "imaginative power" as "the power of images, in contrast to concepts.") It is this "creative power of enactment" which "brings us into living participation with an experience of basic and universal human values [which] words can only point to but not fully attain."

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Three. A third major idea is Merton's note that the depth of awareness evoked by these archetypal symbol-signs is "beyond the rational and analytical."

"Our conflicts are not explained or analyzed," as he has said; "we're not spelling out a message but being directly impacted, via signs and symbols, on the deepest center of our human nature." He describes this deep center as "a certain depth of awareness, beyond words and explanations, in which life itself is lived more intensely and with a more meaningful direction."

He calls this depth of consciousness beyond rational knowledge the "highest form of cognition," just as Biogenetic Structuralism does: it "initiates us into higher states of awareness, an intuition of the ultimate values of life and of the Absolute Ground of our life."

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Four. A fourth big idea is Merton's emphasis on the transformative power of myth and ritual. The "religious elements" in literature and ritual performances, he says, "have power to evoke in us an experience of meaning and direction." The "power of enactment" works by bringing us, via signs and symbols, "to living participation in an experience of basic human values: it leads us to imaginative communion with meaningfulness."

By "imaginative communion" he obviously does not mean "imaginary" but the fact that the communion happens via images. Merton says these archetypal patterns are "capable of suggesting and implying that [human] life in the cosmos has a hidden meaning which can be sought and found." The transformative power of images is just the opposite of 'imaginary': myth and ritual are "not an initiation into a world of abstractions and ideals but deepen our communion with the concrete." They put us in communion with the real world.

And it is this concrete imagery which he says "makes possible a change of heart and can restore us to an awareness of our limitations and our nobility." Through their therapeutic effects, myth and ritual enable us to "a more real evaluation of ourselves, a change of heart" which brings us to "an awareness of our place in the scheme of things."

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Five. With his reference to "our place in the scheme of things" Merton is saying that myth and ritual provides us with a meaningful cosmology: "The meaningfulness it takes us to has to do with the why of things: ultimate causes and the ultimate values." This "highest form of cognition" is not "knowledge about things but a living out and possessing this meaningfulness in everyday life."

And this sense of meaningfulness and significance allows us nothing less than participation in the evolution of the universe: "This extraordinary shift in consciousness is called initiation, enlightenment, regeneration, rebirth, becoming an heir, being in harmony with world and its energies." (All of those words are italicized in Merton's essay.)

And Merton names our participation in the evolution of the world "salvation." It is, he says, "salvation in the sense of freedom from isolation from the natural world and thus communion with the ground of our being." Because it is the "acquisition of understanding of life's purpose and the decision to live in accordance with it," it gives "a privileged status as a conscious participant in communion with the energies of the cosmos."

Big ideas, indeed!

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I noted in the previous post (on the third phase of ontogenesis) that myth, ritual and its symbol-language was dismissed by 19th-century rationalist materialism in what came to be known in academic circles as the "disenchantment of the world" and was considered to be a sign of progress.

In our day, we have a far better understanding than our 19th-century ancestors of our place in the scheme of things. That's why we call it the "new cosmology."

But we are still in the process of recovering an understanding of the means by which we take our place as conscious participants in the cosmic process. It's not easy for western people, victims of the 19th-century "disenchantment of the world," to accept the idea that we enter into communion with the energies of the cosmos by way of symbol, myth and ritual.

But the recovery is in process. This Scavenger sees it as coming thanks especially to the anthropological and neurological perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism. And with help from Uncle Louie.

sam@macspeno.com

#25. Ontogenesis: Phase Three

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On first hearing, the third phase of ontogenetic development makes little sense for many people today. The static worldview of previous centuries has been so strong and so persistent that we're simply not used to thinking about our personal growth in any context, let alone trying to make sense of it in terms of ideas such as "culture," "cosmology" and "ontogenesis." So here's a quick review of those key terms.

"Ontogenesis" is a fancy word from anthropology which recognizes that our growth and development takes place within the context of a culture's cosmology. Psychology also deals with personal development, of course. In the Jungian perspective it's called "individuation," but the focus is more on an inner sense of personal development rather than on the fact that our personal growth takes place within a cultural context.

"Culture," for anthropologists, includes everything which is not part of our genetic inheritance: all the knowledge and understanding we have which is passed on to us from older and more experienced members of our group.

"Cosmology" refers to a culture's response to the basic question of our place in the scheme of things; the focus of any cosmology is on how we are related to the rest of reality.

As I said, these ideas make little sense to many people today, and once we begin thinking in terms of "our place in the scheme of things" the reason becomes obvious: for many centuries western culture has lacked a coherent cosmology. It's for this reason that the emergence of the New Cosmology is of such great significance.

Thanks to modern science, the New Cosmology can be shared by all humanity. And it offers a perspective which includes the whole of the cosmic process-- from the Big Bang and the formation of stars and planets to the emergence of life on earth, the eventual emergence of self-awareness in humans and the continuation of the evolutionary process via the creativity of the human spirit.

That's the broad cultural and cosmological context in which Biogenetic Structuralism sees our personal growth and development taking place. Easy tags for the three stages (or levels or phases) of the development of consciousness are belief, experience and participation.

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I described the first two stages in the previous post (#24). This one deals with the third phase, participation.

As the third stage of ontogenetic development, participation differs from both belief-- the conscious understanding of ourselves and of our place in the world which we have received from others-- and from that kind of personal experience we have by which we compare what we have been told with what we have personally observed to be true.

Working out the relationship between knowledge which has been passed on to us and knowledge we have from our personal experience is, of course, a major part of growing up.

In earlier cultures, where awareness of this third phase of development was still part of the culture's tradition, the growing up process was usually completed during the teenage years. By contrast, as a result of the several-centuries-old divorce between science and religion, in modern western society the maturing process often continues well into an individual's 30s.

The problem is that western culture has been caught in the trap of thinking that we have to make a choice between science and religion. That was, unfortunately, the one thing early science and traditional religion agreed on. The reason I find the insights of Biogenetic Structuralism to be of such great value is that these insights make clear-- from a scientific perspective-- that we don't have to make that choice.

Because it combines evolutionary and anthropological understandings with neurological information, Biogenetic Structuralism allows us to recover this third phase of ontogenetic development as a normal part of our personal growth and development.

And it's precisely the perspectives of the New Cosmology-- which sees the world not as static but as developmental, and recognizes that we do indeed have a place in the evolutionary cosmos-- that allow us to move beyond the impasse of scientific rationalism and religious fundamentalism.

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By referring to the third phase of ontogenetic development as participation, Biogenetic Structuralism intends to indicate that it means something more than personal experience.

As usual, the words we have available tend to get in the way. In this case, however, the distinction really isn't a difficult one. It's a distinction we make every day. Participation means doing something, not just talking about it.

When we're first learning to drive, for example, we have a lot of conscious information about how to drive, but it's only when we're behind the wheel and actually driving that we are participating in the driving process.

That phrase-- "participating in the driving process"-- sounds strange because we don't usually talk that way. But we need to here, if we are to understand clearly the difference between knowledge about the evolution of the universe and personally participating in it.

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It sounds confusing because we still lack good terms for this third phase of ontogenetic development. Biogenetic Structuralism uses words like "trans-personal experience," "advanced individuation" and "contemplation" to talk about our conscious participation in the cosmic process. While none is the ideal term, each is worth our attention.

"Advanced individuation" is a reference to the Jungian term for personal development. Calling it "advanced" is a way of saying that Biogenetic Structuralism is referring to the same growth process but is looking at it, as I mentioned earlier, in the very broadest cultural, cosmological and evolutionary context.

"Contemplation" is a more explicitly religious term; for many it brings to mind spiritual writers such as Teresa of Avila or Thomas Merton. Its original meaning is something like what's meant by the familiar saying, "as above, so below." The image evoked is the construction of a temple being built on Earth in accordance with the architectural plan of the temple in heaven. So it's contemporary meaning is something like "making myself in accordance with the divine plan."

That contemporary meaning is similar to the meaning of "meditation" as it's used in Eastern religious thought: coming into contact with ultimate reality and ultimate values. So the contemporary and the ancient meanings of "contemplation" aren't all that different. And neither is the Biogenetic Structuralist use of it-- except that the emphasis in the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective is, again, on the fact that the construction process (or contact with ultimate values) takes place in the broadest cosmic context: the evolution of the universe.

The third term, "trans-personal experience," has been in use for several decades; there are academic journals devoted to Transpersonal Psychology and some schools offer courses in it. But it's a misleading term in the sense that the third level of ontogenetic development isn't something beyond personal experience so much as personal experience which takes place in a much larger than usual context. That context is described well in Native American tradition by the phrase "all my relations." So the term "trans-person" is meant to emphasize that the context for our personal development includes all of reality.

Perhaps a better term than "trans-personal experience" might be "trans-ego experience." But even that isn't quite right. As with the jargon found in every branch of science, we need to keep in mind that "trans-personal" is shorthand for an idea-- just as are "contemplation" and "advanced individuation." In this case, it's shorthand for the concept of conscious participation in the developmental process specifically as it's taking place in a relational-- rather than ego-isolated-- context, and that the relational context excludes nothing.

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In any case, whatever name we give to it, this third phase of conscious development is understood to be a shift in awareness; and it's a shift so radical that its results are often described as an "altered state of consciousness."

Even that term comes from the mental framework of 19th-century science, however, where our mind's thinking function was considered as the norm of ordinary awareness, and the other functions of consciousness, such as feeling and intuition, were dismissed as being of little significance. (Or even worse: as being feminine!)

But there's really nothing extra-ordinary about the third stage of conscious awareness. From the broader evolutionary and neurological perspectives available to us today, it is as normal and ordinary as are the other phases of our growth and development. It does, however, feel extra-ordinary when we first get into it, in much the same way that puberty, for example, feels like an extra-ordinary development for a teenager.

Even the reason why the third phase of ontogenetic development feels so extraordinary is similar to the early adolescent experience of puberty: they both take us out of the very narrow focus of our ego-centered concerns and allow us to enter into a world of relationships which were previously unimaginable.

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What's going on in the brain during the third phase of our developmental experience is fascinating. Just as in the biological evolutionary process generally, living things survive via adaptation (assimilation and/or accommodation) to the external world, so ego-consciousness develops in precisely the same way at the second phase of ontogenesis. But in the third stage there's a difference in that, while the same process is operative at both levels, it's the process itself (rather than the external environment) that's the focus at the contemplative level. I hope to spell out this kind of fascinating information in some detail in future posts. (Such optimism!)

Meanwhile, I'd like to offer some basic thoughts about what Biogenetic Structuralism understands to be the very means by which we enter into our participatory experience of the cosmic process. I'm referring, of course, to symbol, myth and ritual.

In post #22 (The Other Half of Person) I called myth, ritual and symbol "in-between" ideas because on one hand they are found in every culture on the Earth and are part of every religious tradition; even religious groups which formally shy away from them make use of them in practice (the Quaker "meeting for worship" would be a good example), and of course anyone involved in a regular meditation practice makes use of them. On the other hand, precisely because symbol, myth and ritual are significant aspects of religious practice throughout the world, they are also objects of study in the human sciences.

So as odd as it may sound, what bridges the gap between science and religion is ritual, symbol and myth.

As I also pointed out in post #22, they are "in-between" concepts in a second sense: they tend to be dismissed by the rationalist-materialist worldview-- along with belief and the intuitive and feeling functions of consciousness -- as little more than childish superstitions.

It's important that we recognize that the dismissal is itself a belief. In academic circles, this major component of western culture's materialist-rationalist cosmology has been described as the "disenchantment of the world". In the mid-20th century it was considered a sign of progress, a gain for humanity.

But while that disenchantment continues to pervade western culture, it is itself in the process of being deconstructed, as a result of the findings of post-rationalist science.

A central aspect of the re-enchantment of the world is that we are rediscovering the "other half of person": the fact that we are communal-relational beings. And along with it we are seeing a recovery of an understanding of the place of myth and ritual in our lives.

As I observed in an earlier post (#21 Struggling with Words), for most of us, the terms we have available to talk about these things are both familiar and fuzzy. We're in the process of updating basic words such as "science," "religion" and "person." And we're also in the early stages of updating our understanding of myth, ritual and symbol.

I need to emphasize that it really is a kind of "deconstruction of the deconstruction" that's happening. So before sharing some thoughts about a positive understanding of myth, ritual and symbol, I first want to say a few words about what they are not. Since I began these blog postings in the last days of 2006, I have intentionally avoided expressing negative attitudes as much as possible; but this is one place where some negative thoughts are appropriate. Think of them, if you will, as a contribution toward the effort to "disenchant" rationalist materialism's disenchantment of the world.

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In that disenchanted worldview, "myth" only means "something which is not true." It can refer to anything from a deliberate lie to common misunderstandings, but also to stories like urban legends and tall tales told for our entertainment (such as stories about Paul Bunyan or Bigfoot). "Myths" usually refer to events of the past, involving Greek gods, magic swords and flying dragons, but Santa Claus, King Arthur and the Parting of the Red Sea are also "myths" in this sense.

The word "ritual" in this same disenchanted worldview almost always includes the idea of repetition. From the rationalist perspective, "ritual" is the name for any kind of repetitive gesture or any activity which is repeated on a regular basis. Rituals are usually described as being "empty gestures" and are often considered compulsive or even pathological.

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The word "symbol" is a little more complicated. It has a valid use in science and math where it means "something which stands for something else." In this use, symbols are a shorthand for more complex meanings. We couldn't do chemistry, for example, without chemical symbols such as NaCl and H₂O, and we couldn't easily summarize Einstein's understanding of the physical equivalence of matter and energy without his famous equation, e = mc².

But when this legitimate use of "symbol" is extended into other areas, we end up with silliness and nonsense: that a circle, for example, "stands for eternity" or that a dove "is a symbol for peace." This use of "symbol" exemplifies the rationalist disenchantment of the world. We need to keep in mind that like the conventional meanings of "myth" and "ritual," it has nothing to do with our ontogenetic development or with our participation in the evolution of the universe.

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For that reason, I want to conclude this blog entry with at least a brief introduction to a positive understanding of myth, ritual and symbol. I hope to spell out why the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective sees myth and ritual as the tools by which we participate in the cosmic process in the third stage of our ontogenetic development.

In this more positive understanding, myth simply means a story: a description of anything that has happened or that people are involved in, and which illustrates or expresses in some way the culture's cosmology. Gods or spirits may be involved, but the story is not about them, it's about us. Myths in this anthropological sense help us to understand our place in the scheme of things; they are stories which help us to enter into the mystery of our human condition.

And ritual in this anthropological sense simply means telling the story. The telling can be around a primitive campfire or a Thanksgiving table, and be as complicated as a three-day Tibetan Buddhist rite or the three-hour Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom. It doesn't even have to include words. It can be told in gestures and actions, like a dance, or even by no action, like the zazen practice of "sitting quietly doing nothing."

While "mythos" is a Greek word, "ritual" comes from a Sanskrit term: rita. The basic meaning of rita is something like "the order of the universe" and "the round of the seasons." It's the way the world works: what we call today the scientific rules by which the universe operates.

Clearly, the meanings of "myth" and "ritual" aren't all that different. They each have to do with the telling or acting out of a story which is of significance for our human self-understanding. A good brief definition of both might be simply: enacting a story which has meaning.

What makes the story significant is that it somehow allows us to enter into the meaning of our lives. It somehow speaks to us in such a way that we are transformed beyond what's conventionally called "ordinary" consciousness to an "altered" state of awareness. Which is, of course, what the third phase of ontogenetic development is all about.

I've no doubt that my use of the word "somehow" twice in the previous paragraph resulted in a strong response from many readers: "Somehow? Well... HOW?"

That's where symbol comes in.

We can easily understand "myth" as a story and "ritual" as its telling, but there is no similar equivalent term for "symbol." Symbols seem to be neither things nor actions but can be perhaps best described as a kind of communication. They are like body language-- in this case, the "language" of myth and ritual.

As a form of communication, symbols are the mechanism by which a story influences us. They are whatever grabs our attention. So symbols can be anything: words, actions, pictures, gestures, things, places, persons-- whatever helps us to enter into the meaning of our existence. 

They are whatever aspects of the story touch us and affect us at a deep level. This is why Biogenetic Structuralism understands symbol to be the means by which the mind-brain works to bring about our personal transformation.

I am aware that these are greatly oversimplified ideas with regard to symbol, myth and ritual, but I don't think they are inaccurate. I offer them as basic ideas to build on in our attempts to understand symbol, myth and ritual as means by which we participate in the cosmic process.

Nowadays, most traditional religious rituals are understood from the secular perspective to be nothing more than empty gestures; and for large numbers of contemporary people, traditional religious symbols have become what T. S. Eliot calls them, "a heap of broken images." 

They have been lost to western culture with the rationalist-materialist disenchantment of the world.

But they are being recovered again, thanks to the New Cosmology.

sam@macspeno.com

#22. The Other Half of "Person"

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I entitled my previous blog entry (#21) "Struggling with Words" to make the point that in sharing my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion, I continually feel the need to say that neither "science" nor "religion" mean today what they once meant. I also feel the need to say the same about the word "person." That's what this post is about.

The immense transition in human self-understanding which began at the end of the 19th century was essentially a shift from the static worldview of past centuries to the evolutionary perspectives of modern science. Thanks to it, we can see that personal consciousness is not something separate from, but an integral part of, the evolution of the universe.

I've devoted many previous blog postings to spelling out some of the details of this awesome fact, that each human person is nothing less than an utterly unique expression of the universe become conscious of itself.

But I still struggle with using the word "person." Like the words "science" and "religion," the older 18th and 19th century meanings of "person" still persist today in the conventional understanding of popular culture. The ideal of person as a "rugged individual," left over from America's frontier days, is clearly inadequate for our times. It leaves out the communal and relational aspects of person, precisely those perspectives which are needed for dealing with contemporary problems such as social equality, peace and justice issues and the ecological crisis.

So each time I say "person" I feel the need to add that, just as "science" doesn't mean rationalism and "religion" doesn't mean dualism, so "person" doesn't mean individualism.

There's another half to person.

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Readers won't be surprised to hear me say that in struggling to express a fuller understanding of person I've found the Biogenetic Structuralist view especially useful.

Just as the combined neurological and anthropological perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism help us to see the place of individual persons in an evolutionary perspective, so it also allows us a much better sense of the communal and relational aspects of the mystery of personal consciousness. It attempts to understand persons in the broadest possible scientific perspectives of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution.

It's those cultural aspects that I find especially challenging here. Just as we don't yet have good words to talk about post-rationalist science and post-dualistic religion, so we also still lack an appropriate language to talk about the post-individualist understanding of person.

As I said in the previous post, "The communal and relational aspects of person are part of the perspectives of both contemporary science and contemporary religion, but in trying to express those converging perspectives well, the very words we do have available tend to get in the way as much as they are helpful."

Even with that statement I feel the need to add that by "contemporary" I mean a growing edge understanding, one that includes the communal and relational aspects of the mystery of person and not the conventional assumptions of the media where "person" seems to mean nothing more than the ego-centric personalities of politicians, sports figures and the celebrities of the entertainment world.

Ours is such an individualistic society that the very idea that there might be something beyond the ego-stage of personal development is incomprehensible to many. And yet if we don't have a good sense of the communal-cultural nature of person-- of our communion with others and of our inter-connectedness with all things-- we have only half a sense of our own personal reality.

So what I hope to do in the next few entries is to take the ideas about person which I've presented in the earlier postings to the next step: to emphasize, with help from the perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism, our communion, connectedness and inter-relatedness with all things. It's here that I find the convergence of science and religion to be most explicit.

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A key idea in an understanding of this "other half of person" from the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective is that the development of human consciousness takes place in three clearly defined stages. Seeing these stages as Biogenetic Structuralism sees them is particularly helpful in understanding the communal-cultural aspects of our personal existence.

The Biogenetic Structuralist view offers insights which simply are not available in either the mechanistic-rationalist perspectives of 19th century science or in the static worldviews of dualistic religion.

I hope to spell out those stages of personal consciousness development as Biogenetic Structuralism sees them and to offer an interesting example of their convergence with the emerging sapiential-religious perspectives in the next posting.

Before that, I feel the need to say a few words about the term "culture" from an evolutionary perspective. It's a word we take for granted and one I've used frequently without trying to spell out its meaning, but a clear idea of what "culture" means as it's used in the human sciences is a big help in understanding the religious aspects of "the other half of person."

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"Culture" obviously refers to something more than attending operas or visiting museums. In the broadest sense, from the point of view of anthropology, "culture" refers to everything humans do that's beyond what's controlled by our genes and instincts.

The neurological basis of culture is the understanding which Biogenetic Structuralism expresses by its jargon term cognitive extension of prehension. I tried to spell out that concept in some detail in posting #12. The main idea is that because of the human brain's specific structural developments beyond that of other primates, humans can function in such a way that we have a certain amount of freedom, which the other primates lack, in our responses to whatever we encounter in our external environment.

It is a limited but real freedom from an automatic or instinctive response to the threats and opportunities encountered in our world. It accounts for our spiritual nature and for all of our specifically human characteristics such as language, technology and creativity. It also accounts for our relationships with one another and for our behavior in groups-- indeed, for all that's meant by human culture.

A traditional anthropological definition of culture is "passed on learning." It refers to skills and information needed for survival which older, more experienced persons pass on to the younger and less experienced. It has to be passed on precisely because it's not part of our instinctual or genetically-based behavior.

A common example is the fact that even as three-year-olds we seem to have a clear aversion to spiders; it's "in our genes." From a very young age we tend to be cautious about such potentially dangerous creatures in our external environment. But electricity is a recent technological invention and three-year olds don't have an in-born aversion to playing with electrical wires. They have to be taught to avoid them. That's culture.

And it's "culture" in this sense that's what I mean by the "other half of person." Even from that common example it's clear that culture involves communal relationships. What's easy to overlook is the fact that such communal relationships are biological components of the evolutionary process.

We need to see that culture evolves just as planets and stars do. The "other half of person" is this dynamic-evolutionary communal-cultural nature of human consciousness. It's only when we can see that the communal nature of personal consciousness is a part of cosmic evolution that it becomes clear why culture is such an important concept in the converging perspectives of science and religion.

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Everyone with a sense of history knows that culture evolves. We know, for example, that our early human ancestors learned to hunt cooperatively in groups, that Paleolithic hunting camps evolved (roughly eight thousand years ago) into settled agricultural villages, and that those Neolithic villages eventually evolved (roughly four thousand years ago) into the earliest cities of the civilization period. In this sense, we easily can see the developmental nature of global human culture.

But I want to say something more here, something even larger: we need to see humanity's communal-cultural evolution as itself part, and indeed a significant part, of the entire cosmic process-- from the Big Bang through the evolution of galaxies and stars to life on Earth and the development of the primate brain and the emergence of personal self-awareness.

And as I see it, it's only when we have this sense of human cultural development within the broadest cosmic context that the insights of the core of humanity's religious perspectives begin to make a great deal of sense. It seems to me that a contemporary understanding of the convergence of science and the sapiential religious perspective depends on our seeing human culture on Earth as part of the evolution of the universe.

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For example, there clearly are aspects of humanity's sapiential perspective, such as the pre-Christian idea of the resurrection of the dead, that make some sense in terms of a neurological understanding of our relationship with the physical universe. I offered an example in the previous blog entry (#20), where I pointed out the similarity between the Biogenetic Structuralist concept of cognized environment and theological understanding of Sophiologist Sergius Bulgakov with regard to the possible meaning of bodily resurrection. Even though they are coming from very different starting points, they seem to share a common insight into how personal consciousness is related to the rest of the material cosmos.

Scientific rationalists would, of course, dismiss the very idea of resurrection as childish wishful thinking. But even the fact that humans desire a life beyond the grave seems to make some sense when we understand humanity's cultural evolution as part of "the other half of person."

An interesting article about this desire, written by the award-winning Canadian scholar Charles Taylor, professor emeritus of philosophy at McGill University, appeared in a recent issue of Commonweal.

In his article,"The Sting of Death, Why We Yearn for Eternity", Taylor notes that a recent sociological study of unbelievers indicated that the point of their “creed” hardest for them to hold to is the thought that there is no life after death. He observes that even many rationalists-- with their often dismissive attitude which assumes that our desire for eternity is simply a desire not to have our lives stop-- frequently want to have religious funerals.

But it's not that we just want life to continue, says Taylor. Rather, it's the permanent loss of our relationships which is most difficult to accept. As he puts it: "Joy strives for eternity."

When we recognize "the other half of person" as the communal and relational nature of personal consciousness resulting from cosmic and biological evolution, it looks like our very "yearning" for the continuation of our communion and relatedness may be itself an aspect of the cosmic process-- rather than simply reducible to childish wishful thinking.

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The doctrine about resurrection isn't exclusively Christian, of course, nor is the desire for the persistence of our relationships. But there are also some religious ideas specific to the Christian tradition which seem to me to become especially clear when we see them in terms of "the other half of person."

Probably the most significant is the very nature of the Christian tradition itself which, in its formative period, saw itself precisely as the communal growing edge of humanity's cultural development. That dynamic ecclesial perspective was lost to the western world for a thousand years, but it emerged again in 20th century theological thought with the recovery of the sapiential core of the Judeo-Christian tradition and it makes good sense in terms of the dynamic-evolutionary and communal-cultural nature of our personal consciousness. I hope to share some thoughts along those lines in future postings.

There are also some "in-between" ideas which are much more clear in light of our awareness of "the other half of person." I have in mind things like symbol, myth and ritual, and related concepts such as shamanism and cosmology.

I call them "in-between" ideas because, while we don't think of them as scientific concepts and we know they're not religious doctrines, they are in fact perennial aspects of humanity's global religious practice and they are in fact objects of study in the human sciences.

Much like what Charles Taylor calls our "yearning for eternity," however, the very idea of things such as symbolic rituals or shamanistic cosmologies tend to be dismissed as belonging to an earlier and more immature stage of human development. But they all make some sense in terms of the "other half of person" and Biogenetic Structuralism's understanding of the stages of personal development.

I see them as nothing less than central aspects of the contemporary convergence of science and religion and it was my life-long interest in such things, along with my life-long interest in evolutionary science, that made my discovery of the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective so fascinating.

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I entitled my previous blog entry (#21) "Struggling with Words" to make the point that, as I said above, in sharing my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion, I continually feel the need to say that neither "science" nor "religion" nor "person" mean what popular culture takes them to mean. Even the word "culture" has a much more cosmic meaning than is clear from the term "popular culture."

This struggle to find good words is due to the immense transition in our human self-understanding which began with the 19th-century shift from the static to a dynamic-evolutionary worldview.

Today, we can see personal consciousness as an integral part of the dynamic cosmic process, and precisely for that reason we can see that there is an "other half of person"-- the cultural and relational aspects of the mystery of our personal awareness-- in a way former generations could not.

My whole purpose in writing this blog is to share what I see as the riches of these deeper perspectives with anyone interested, and to do so with that rather odd and mostly unknown branch of the human sciences which calls itself Biogenetic Structuralism and offers more help than anything else I know to spell out the convergence of science and religion.

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So that's where I'm going with all this. With this posting on the "other half of person" I feel that I'm at a turning point in these efforts. It's a good time to say "thank you" to all who have offered encouragement so far with this project.

Thanks, especially, for hanging in there when you repeatedly come across phrases like cognized environment and cognitive extension of prehension and see them linked up with things like myth and ritual. I see them, in terms of Biogenetic Structuralism's understanding of the stages of personal development, as nothing less than central aspects of the contemporary convergence of science and religion.

So... Thanks, thanks, thanks!

sam@macspeno.com