#148. Struggling with Henri Corbin

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Blog entries beginning with #101 are not essays but minimally-edited notes and reviews from the files I've collected over the last few decades. I no longer have the time and energy needed to sort out and put together into decent essay-form the many varied ideas in these files, but I would like to share them with all who are interested.

If you have questions and think I might help, you're welcome to send me a note: sam@macspeno.com

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This post contains two short sets of notes about the work of Henri Corbin. It's in two parts: some thoughts about Corbin's basic ideas, and my attempt to express what I think is one of his most central ideas.

Part One: SOME OF CORBIN's BASICS

1) The most basic of Corbin's ideas is simple enough: humans are non-dual with the Ultimate, so that every person is a unique theophany (epiphany, expression, manifestation).

2) Just as our awareness of the external world comes to us via experiences of sound, light, smell, etc., so our awareness of our "theophanic non-duality" comes to us via the experiences of the energy of the cosmos expressing itself within us via images.

3) This is the experience of only a minority in a patriarchal culture such as ours, and we have no readily understandable words to talk about it easily. The closest available are words from non-Western cultures such as the Native American "vision quest" or the Australian "walk about." Corbin uses the Sufism term "recital."

4) While patriarchal culture seems almost to require a world-negating (i.e., matter-negating and body-negating) language, and even though Corbin affirms the non-duality of anthropos-theos, he uses strongly dualistic words with regard to anthropos-cosmos.

5) More easy communication of these ideas awaits two significant cultural advances: an increased awareness of the dynamic and emergent worldview, and the recovery of the mandalic nature of human consciousness.

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Part Two: "PERSON-TO-PERSON"-- thoughts on pp 93-94 of Corbin's Introduction to his book on the "recitals" of Ibn Arabi

The main issue here is the question of what the Abrahamic traditions have in common. Corbin says that the non-conventionally religious or spiritual people of every tradition-- he calls them the "disciples of Khidr"-- constitute a "community of perception."

They see reality differently than do the more conventional literalists and dogmatists, because they perceive reality via that function of the conscious mind called "Intuition" by Jung and "Imaginality" by Corbin. With it, they "penetrate" into the depths of reality, so that what they-- the "disciples of Khidr"-- have in common is the "perception of an over-all unity."

Corbin doesn't expand on the nature of this experience. Here, he only says that Ibn Arabi will provide us with a fine description of it-- in the texts to which this essay is an Introduction.

He moves, instead, in two different directions. One is to offer some brief comments about the visionary nature of Imaginality. The other-- which I think is, in fact, the central point of this whole 100 page Introduction-- deals with what the phase "alone to alone" means. He refers to it a "much misunderstood 'mystical anthropology'."

He begins by saying that each individual person has a two-fold aspect. In addition to the who/what we are (our "self"), we have an other aspect which is not really an other. Here he calls it a "celestial counterpart." Previously he has referred to it by many names, of which I think "angel" and "holy spirit" are the most prominent.

What the names for this other aspect of each person are, in fact, are references to the imaginal images by which we perceive the mystery of human-divine non-duality. And they are "much misunderstood" because, says Corbin, in the conventional context, that divine creative source-- here called Allah-- is thought to be an objective reality separate from-- and equally distinct from-- each created person.

But, he notes, Ibn Arabi says there's also a non-dualistic understanding of the creative source, called "Rabb" in the Quran. Corbin doesn't explain the term, but we have its meaning from Wiki:

It is an Arabic term, found in the Quran as one of the traditional Names of God, meaning Lord, Sustainer, Cherisher, Master. It comes from a root word, yurabbi, which has to do with raising (as in "raising a child") and means something like "fostering things in such a manner as to make them attain one condition after another until they reach their goal of completion." What a delightful evolutionary understanding of the divine-human relationship!

So Rabb is the non-dual divine creative source, specifically understood as being totally active in a most intimately personal promotion of the mystery of ourselves. The role of Rabb-- if "role" is anything like an appropriate word here-- is "fostering, bringing up, nourishing, regulating, completing, accomplishing, cherishing, sustaining and bringing to maturity by evolution from the earliest state to that of the highest perfection" of each of us as utterly unique personal beings. All this certainly sounds like Divine Sophia, as well!

And Rabb is "Lord of all the worlds." He "takes care, nourishes, fosters through every stage of existence, everything that exists."

I think this emphasis on Rabb-- as the divine creative source taking care of, nourishing, fostering through every stage of existence, each human person in the most uniquely intimate manner-- is the essence of Corbin's "mystical anthropology." And what great value it has in the evolutionary context of the New Cosmology and Big History!)

Corbin uses the Feeling function language of the fedele d'amore to take it all a bit further. He says that the particularized (personalized, individualized) relationship between the Lord and his vassal of love goes in both directions. The roles are exchanged, so that the Lord depends on the vassal as much as the vassal depends on the Lord.

I see this as helping "up-date" Louis de Montfort's idea about Divine Wisdom, where Montfort says that "without us, she is nothing." And also Alexander Schmemann's thoughts about our role in the "actualization of the divine potentialities." But Corbin adds something more, an emphasis which, as far as I know, even they don't.

The real secret here, says Corbin, is the Lord's sadness, nostalgia and aspiration to know Himself via those beings who manifest His being. He needs the vassal's theopathy-- that is, the vassal's passionate theophanic experience-- to reveal Him to Himself.

In words a bit more general that of the language of the fedele d'amore, we might say something like this: Rabb so needs each of us that He lets each of us uniquely be rabb for Him.

And this is always in an "alone to alone," says Corbin. I think those words simply-- and awesomely-- mean that the experience is a one-to-one ("man-to-man," "person-to-person") kind of thing.

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#81. The Deep Roots of "Person"

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Author and artist Mary Conrow Coelho sent comments on post #79 (A Dowd Sampler) which tie in well with my previous post about the relationship between mind and matter worked out by the "Two Mavericks," physicist Wolfgang Pauli and psychologist C. G. Jung.

Although at first it may not seem so, they are especially helpful in my struggle to express well my understanding of religious ritual in connection with evolution. Here's Mary's note in full:

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Hi Sam: I have wanted to comment about your reflections on Thank God for Evolution. I do appreciate Michael's energetic work, his very important travels, together with Connie, and the many things that you mention that are valuable about the book. They are indeed valuable. I'll just try to say a word about my concerns in response to the paragraph that follows, which you included in your section about Michael's Higher Porpoise:

The pre-frontal cortex is especially significant because it is what makes each of us not just a living being or a mammal or a primate but a person. It is the home of our personal consciousness and freedom-- of the mystery which we experience ourselves to be.

I do not know if this is fair, but what worries me is the failure to mention that the pre-frontal cortex, which I assume has been correctly identified as important in personal consciousness, is attributed to be a full explanation of "the mystery which we experience ourselves to be."

This neglects the vast "within" of things, including the vast "within" of the pre-frontal cortex. I think personal identity, including experience of that identity is not fully described by the brain structures alone, as experience of the vast "within" (a depth dimension of it?) is part of identity, although, of course, also integral to the structure.

When you talk about the structure (the form) don't you also have to discuss the nature of the matter that it is comprised of and the energetic "emptiness" that is the nature of that matter, although now highly structured? This is the kind of distinction that I don't remember him making. Tell me if I'm wrong. This topic would require a book.

Michael's writings do not indicate as full an appreciation of the contemplative tradition as I'd like to see; I do think emphasis on anatomy without reference to depth experiences is inadequate. I don't know the relationship between numinous experience and/or mystical experience (includes "I am" experiences) and brain structure. However I doubt that such experiences are registered in the pre-frontal cortex only, so assuming this is correct, "being a person" has deep roots in the nature of matter and some resonance or registering (through an alternative form of knowing) of those deep roots in the mind and body. It is of course most important to say that this ground of identity does not negate the role of the pre-frontal cortex in the personal consciousness.

This question of the nature of contemplative experience and mystical experience is an important question since it relates to the experience of being a person. I ask this question simply to try to get at the danger of identifying too much with anatomical structure, although that it not to say it is not obviously essential.

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This interesting note from Mary Coelho brings up two important concerns. One is an appreciation of contemplative-mysticism perspectives. The other is the question of the brain's activity as the "cause" of human consciousness.

Some thoughts about the mystical tradition first. While there's certainly not an emphasis on contemplative perspectives in Thank God for Evolution, I don't see that fact as a lack of appreciation of those perspectives so much as a focus on what Dowd is trying to do: help people to see that the scientific story of the universe is compatible with-- and, indeed, greatly enriching of-- the Christian tradition.

He's talking to people for whom the contemplative perspectives simply haven't been much a part of their religious worldview for many centuries. 

It has been missing even within the older "catholic" denominations (Roman, Episcopal and Lutheran) and not at all present within the Evangelical and Fundamentalist denominations.

From my experience I'd say that the vast majority of those still actively involved in the institutional churches simply remain unaware of the mystical dimensions of their tradition. The vast majority of Christians-- not just ordinary people but also clergy, administrators and even theologians-- had nothing to do with it. It was the provenance of monks and nuns.

And the monks themselves had the view that it wasn't for everybody: it was only for the "strong." A friend recently read me some remarks by Bernard of Clairvaux to that effect. They occur right at the beginning of the first of his many sermons on The Song of Songs.

Bernard says: "The instructions that I address to you, my brothers, will differ from those I should deliver to people in the world, at least the manner will be different... [I] will give them milk to drink rather than solid food, and will serve a more nourishing diet to those who are spiritually enlightened.... who have reached maturity."

What makes you mature, according to Bernard? If you have "prolonged your study of divine teaching, mortified your senses, and meditated on God's law day and night."

Bernard, a contemporary of the 12th-century saint Hildegard of Bingen, was an early and highly influential member of the Cistercian order, so for nearly a thousand years the contemplative perspective was more or less closed to "people in the world."

The efforts of Thomas Merton in the middle of the 20th century, and of people like Father Thomas Keating and Brother David Steindl-Rast in the second half of the 20th century, remain pioneering efforts.

Somewhat earlier, the French monk Henri Le Saux and British monk Bede Griffith went to India to find this contemplative dimension which Bede called "the other half of my soul."

All this is very far from the concerns of Fundamentalists and Evangelicals-- as well as of most members of other denominations today. 

As I wrote in my posts (#73 to #79) about his insights, Ken Wilber helps us to see how the contemplative vision-- as well as the basic spiritual perspectives of Western society-- were definitively lost to Western culture as a result of those cultural movements called Modernism and Post-modernism.

That vision is however the focus of many outside the Christian tradition. It has been rediscovered, for example, in our secular culture by the "Integral" community. They talk about spirituality as it was understood within the Western tradition for many centuries-- but without any special reference to its reality in the early Christian tradition.

Bruno Barnhart, an author I've mentioned a number of times in these posts, says that it's as if the ancient wisdom of the desert hermits is blossoming anew in the modern desert of our secular world.

I think that Western society will eventually catch on to its religious roots, but just now our confused Post-modern cultural situation makes it almost impossible. Professor Paul Lakeland, speaking at a recent conference of church-reform-minded Catholics in Minnesota, described American Catholicism as being "in hospice." So we can't expect much from the religious tradition itself.

At the same time I think it's important to say that the contemplative-mystical perspective is at the very heart of the new cosmology. And thanks to Mary Coelho's comments I see that it's also at the heart of my efforts to express well how religious ritual relates to the big story of the universe.

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Mary's second idea (which she presented first) has to do with whether and/or how human consciousness-- the mystery of the human person-- can be understood as the result of, or as an expression of, the activities of the human brain.

If we ask the question in its briefest form-- Does the mystery of our personal consciousness depend on the brain?-- I think the answer is 'yes.'

But I need to say three things to make clear what I mean.

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1. From an evolutionary perspective, human consciousness is an emergent quality, just as is life itself. Complexity is the very drive of the evolutionary process: the more complex things become, the more consciousness appears. When, several million years ago, the brains of primates evolved just a little more degree of complexity, human self-awareness emerged.

That self-awareness-- the mystery which we experience ourselves to be-- really does depend on the workings of our brain. I would emphasize, however, that it's the workings of the human brain we're talking about. What results from the complexity of the human brain really is something different from and more than what results from the complexity of the brains of our primate and mammal relatives.

It's called a "phase change" when a small change produces a big result. I wrote about it back in post #12, on "The Cognitive Extension of Prehension." The work of the Biogenetic Structuralists helped me to understand this idea well, which is why I gave so much time and energy to the Biogenetic Structuralist perspectives. Those researchers were pioneers, but because they were not as good at teaching or communicating as they might have been, their insights were not picked up and built on by others back in the early 1970s and 80s.

The reason why the idea that, as Mary Coelho says, "being a person has deep roots in matter" is such a challenge for us is because we have to hold two difficult ideas at the same time. One is that the mystery that we experience ourselves to be is an expression of the brain's functioning. 

The other is that we are keenly aware that there is no evidence for the persistence of personal consciousness once the brain is severely damaged or destroyed.

Personally, I don't see that holding these two thoughts at the same time is incompatible with the basic mystical tradition. That tradition sees all reality as one with the ultimate Mystery. As I see it, it's how we understand the relationship between the world and the Mystery which causes problems.

I think that relationship is especially clear when we understand the evolutionary process as the expression or manifestation of the Mystery. 

It helps to understand the Great Mystery not as a reality separate from the world (as it was understood in the past) but, in the words of the great 20th-century theologian Karl Rahner, as the "context and precondition" for the world.

The three-thousand-year-old Tao Te Ching (I shared a version of it in posts #68 to #72) also helps us to grasp the essence of contemplative perspective: that all reality-- energy, light, matter, life, consciousness, self-awareness-- is one with the ultimate Mystery.

An awkward-- but helpful-- way to say it is that "nothing is not non-dual with the Great Mystery."

A more familiar name for describing the cosmic process from the Christian tradition is divine incarnation. As the Russian Sophiologist Sergius Bulgakov expresses it, the evolution of the universe is the "actualization of the divine potentialities." (And the great dignity of conscious persons is that we are called to consciously participate in that realization.)

Personally, I think the simple term "unitive" is best for what we're talking about here. It emphasizes that the perspective is the very opposite of religious dualism, a viewpoint which has done so much damage to the world-- and also to the religious tradition itself which promoted it in contrast to its own core perspectives.

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2. A second major idea, in the context of saying 'yes' to "Does the mystery of our personal consciousness depend on our brain?" is that, as I see it, this unitive (mystical-contemplative) perspective is the basis for-- or better, it's another version of-- the sacramental worldview.

Again, "there is nothing that's not non-dual with the Mystery." While our human consciousness is a very special case of that non-duality, the fact is that every thing and every human activity can expand (heighten or deepen or increase) our awareness of our non-duality.

And those things which allow us to enter more profoundly into our experience of unity with the Mystery have traditionally been called "sacred things" or "sacraments."

And this, I think, is where-- finally!-- ritual makes most sense. Whatever intentional and conscious activities we do to help us to that unitive experience is what we call "ritual."

And we know that many traditionally "religious" activities-- chanting, drumming, dancing, silence-- can in fact direct our attention to and promote our awareness of the non-duality of all things-- including our own personal mystery-- with the Great Mystery.

I finally see why I have had such a difficult time feeling satisfied with my expression of religious ritual in the context of cosmic evolution. It only makes sense in the unitive perspective! I'm grateful to Mary Coelho for her comments which have helped to make this clear to me.

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3. One final idea about all this. Complex things come apart; living things die.

If we hold to the thought that a person can exist apart from matter-- from body and the brain-- we're back again to the dualistic view of human nature and cosmos. I'd express it even more strongly by saying that it's not only a dualistic view, it's also a non-sacramental and anti-incarnational view point. It's incompatible with the basic Judeo-Christian tradition.

Of course what this means, since we know that all living things die, is that the ultimate question for each of us personally is "Do conscious persons stop existing?"

I think all we can say in response to that is, "We hope not."

But it's not just a casual hope. It depends on our sense of all things being non-dual with that Mystery which is the context and pre-condition for everything. It's the very essence of the unitive-contemplative-mystical perspective-- that "there is nothing that is not non-dual"--that allows us to trust, as Karl Rahner expresses it, that we do indeed "have a future."

As I see it, the question is not so much "Does my soul survive death?" as something more along the lines of "Is the evolution of the universe meaningless in the long run?"

To me, believing that we have a separate soul that survives death, as glorious as that thought seemed to past ages, isn't a sufficiently appreciative view of the cosmic process.

So the ultimate question isn't as much personal ("Do I have a future?") as it is cosmic: "Does all reality, as the incarnation of the ultimate Mystery, have a future?"

A more provocative way to ask it is: "In the end, will God be a failure?"

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In the previous post I described the efforts of C. G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli to understand the link between matter and mind. I see their work as a significant step (although hardly recognized yet) in the recovery of the unitive and sacramental world view.

It was a tremendous breakthrough in global humanity's cultural evolution when, toward the middle of the 20th century, two leading scientific researchers-- "mavericks" in the areas of quantum physics and depth psychology-- were able to see and acknowledge that cosmos and psyche, universe and person, are two aspects of the one same deeper reality.

For the first time in many centuries, the Western world once again began to move toward the realization that, in Mary Coelho's words, "being a person has deep roots in the nature of matter."

And for me personally, those insights offer an excellent context for expressing a satisfactory understanding of the connection between religious ritual and the evolution of the universe.

Again, thanks to Mary for her helpful and stimulating comments!

sam@macspeno.com

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#63. Ritual's Psychological Roots

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This is the fifth in a series of posts that I began with #59, dealing with an understanding religious ritual in an evolutionary context. It's the first of several concerned with the roots of ritual-- physical, biological and psychological.

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In the big picture of the world which is ours thanks to the evolutionary perspectives of modern science, the cosmic process is defined in terms of the on-going emergence of new and more complex realities. Whatever now is has its roots in what was in the past.

So it's not surprising that even religious ritual should have roots in the past.

It clearly makes good sense from an evolutionary perspective that ritual has roots in the human psyche which has been developing over the last few million years.

But it's less obvious that religious ritual might also have roots in the life of the Earth even before humans appeared. And it's far less obvious still that ritual may be rooted in the very matter of the physical universe.

I plan to share my thoughts about the biological and cosmic roots of ritual in the next post. Ritual's roots in the human psyche is the topic of this one.

I feel the need to add that I'm more than aware of the immensity of this project.

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In post #62 I noted that religious ritual is far older than the western world's Judeo-Christian tradition, so that even if we don't accept the dualistic understanding of that tradition, we are still in need of rites.

I also noted there that even for many who accept the New Cosmology, ritual presents a major problem because of the influence of the reductionist perspectives of 18th and 19th century science which remain strong in the minds of many.

So once again, as I've said frequently in the past, we need a bigger picture. In this case, the bigger picture we need is of how we understand our own consciousness.

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Even though we can't put it into words, each of us knows by experience what we mean when we say "mind" or "awareness" or "psyche." But due to Western culture's dualistic and patriarchal alienation from body, matter, and the feminine, we remain unaware for the most part that our conscious mind can work in four distinct ways.

I've made use of this "quaternary" understanding of the psyche in many previous posts. I'll review the main ideas below, but if these ideas are new to you, you might like to check out some of those previous posts, such as #29, #31, #33, #35 and #44.

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With regard to religious ritual, the importance of the quaternary perspective is that it helps us to see that-- although we have a four-fold mind-- western culture consciously acknowledges and values only one of those four functions. And it's not the one in which religious ritual is rooted.

Our need for ritual is so great, however, that it persists both within and outside religious traditions. But in our day, ritual has come to be feared by some, considered nothing more than superstition by many, and felt to be unsatisfactory by almost all.

As I see it, without some sense of the different ways our conscious minds function, we simply can't be aware of how ritual works. Or of how to do it well.

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The main idea-- that we can be consciously aware of ourselves and of the world around us in four different ways-- is simple enough.

It was explicitly spelled out a hundred years ago by Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung, and has come into popular awareness by way of personality evaluators like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. 

But this four-fold perspective has been known for thousands of 
years. I find the version of it expressed in the Native American Medicine Wheel especially helpful and have made use of it in many previous posts.

Over my years as a teacher I've collected ways of describing the four-fold activities of the psyche. I've come up with more than a dozen of them and have shared some of them in different contexts over the three years of this blog.

To me, these are essential tools both for our own self-understanding and for an understanding of the psychological roots of ritual.

In the quick review which follows, I'll use Jung's terms for the four functions. And among the many aspects of each function which might be mentioned, I'll emphasize the orientation to time of the four functions. I've found that emphasis to be especially helpful in understanding the psychological roots of ritual.

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Jung says our conscious awareness can take two major forms: we observe things, and we also evaluate those observations. He calls our observations "perceptions" and the evaluations "judgments."

The fact that there are two types of perceptions and two types of judgments is what accounts for the mind's four-fold nature.

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Jung calls the two judgment functions "Feeling" and "Thinking."

Feeling is an evaluation of whether what we perceive is beneficial or harmful, while Thinking has to do with evaluating the correctness of those perceptions. It sounds complicated, but these processes make good sense in terms of natural selection.

With regard to their orientation to time, the Feeling function-- the one by which we value and hold on to good things, especially to our relationships-- favors the past.

Thinking, in contrast, is a form of cause-and-effect reasoning, so its focus is on how one thing follows from another; its orientation is to the sequential flow of time.

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To the other pair of functions-- our two perception functions-- Jung gives the names "Sensing" and "Intuition."

Sensing looks at details in the here and now; its focus is neither the past (like Feeling) nor the flow of time (like Thinking), but the immediate present.

In contrast, Intuition looks at the big picture and is oriented to the future-- not to what is, but to what can be-- to the realization of our creative potentials.

Of the four ways our minds can work, Intuition-- with its orientation to creativity and the promise of the future-- is the least understood, least valued, and least appreciated in contemporary patriarchal culture.

And-- surprise?-- it's the function by which ritual works.

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Because Intuition sees the big picture -- the forest rather than the trees-- it has to do with inner wholeness. Its orientation to the future comes from its concern for moving forward-- with moving beyond our present limitations and toward the realization of our creative potentials.

So Intuition is concerned with inwardness, with our personal sense of identity, meaning and purpose. But because of its broad, "integral" perspective, it sees our inwardness precisely in terms of our connectedness with everything else.

It sees a very big picture, and it wants to leave nothing out. It's an understanding of individuality in the context of absolutely everything that exists-- what the Asian traditions call advaita, the unity (non-duality) of all things.

And it's precisely this double orientation of the Intuition function-- to both self and all else simultaneously-- that constitutes the psychological roots of ritual.

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Jung gave Intuition a special name, the "transcendent" function, because it "carries us over," linking consciousness and the unconscious psyche. It's the bridge between our personal awareness and all else.

This makes especially good sense when we keep in mind that, although each of us is the universe become conscious of itself, there is also much about which we remain unconscious. The unconscious psyche is the entire universe within us which has yet to become conscious as us.

It's these unconscious patterns of the world's workings which, as I noted in post #60, seep out into ours dreams and myths. As expressions of our self-understanding, they help move us forward, toward the realization of our potentials.

For this reason, we need to keep in mind what may seem obvious at this point: that when we say "we are the universe become conscious of itself," that that universe is not static but dynamic. We are the evolving cosmos become conscious of itself.

And the nature of that dynamism is precisely its creative orientation toward healing and wholeness. In the same way we talk about the "wisdom of the body," we can understand that creative dynamism as the "wisdom of the cosmos" operating within us.

For a good understanding of the psychological roots of ritual, it helps to think of this cosmic wisdom as a "wisdom of the psyche" and to keep in mind that the orientation of the evolutionary process to healing and transformation is expressed communally in our cultural development as well as in our personal psychological growth.

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The point of all this is that the creative cosmic process is operative both within us and outside us and that it's the Intuition function which we use to "plug into" the dynamic and transformative energies of the universe.

Ritual works not by some magical process-- although it looks that way to persons trapped in the rationalism of earlier centuries. In fact, all we're doing in ritual is giving the Intuitive function some space to operate. We're giving it room.

This is why ritual makes use of "droning, drumming, chanting and dancing."

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It's often said that such things are techniques for "quieting the mind," but it's important to realize that it's not the whole mind that's being quieted. Essentially, what we're doing in ritual is turning down the intensity of our hyper-active Thinking function.

We need to do this because the Thinking function tends to usurp the role of the mind's other three functions. Just as the psychological roots of ritual are found in the Intuition function, so the psychological roots of patriarchy and religious dualism are found in this tendency of the Thinking function to take over the activities of the whole conscious psyche.

It's this tendency of the Thinking function that results in the alienation from Earth and self which characterizes patriarchal dualism, and which continues to be the dominant mode of awareness in western culture-- both secular and religious.

Activities like drumming and chanting allow us to shift our minds to a way of being conscious that's different from that dominant mode of self-alienated consciousness.

While techniques for turning down the intensity of the Thinking function are many, and have been used for many thousands of years, it's an indication of how impoverished our culture is that activities like drumming and chanting have no regular place in our society.

In a culture such as ours, where we are immersed in distractions at every moment, ritual helps us to keep from getting lost in details and in the cause-and-effect reasoning of the isolated Thinking function. It lets us see the big picture.

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Another indication of our impoverishment is that any form of awareness which is different from Thinking is described as "an altered state of consciousness." Even in discussions of moving beyond it, the Thinking function is assumed to be the norm!

But it's not the norm, of course. To be fully human we need to drum and drone, chant and dance. We need to give our attention to things like fire and water, air and food that allow us to enter into the meaning of our lives.

And in a sense, that's all ritual is-- being quiet and giving our awareness, via the Intuition function, to the kind of things that grab our attention and so help to put us back together in terms of how we understand ourselves.

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As I said above, it's the double orientation of the Intuition function-- to both self and all else simultaneously-- that constitutes the psychological roots of ritual, so it's worth reviewing here just what Intuition is all about.

Intuition is concerned with meaning, with our self-understanding, with taking our place in the vast scheme of things, with being in harmony with the wisdom of the universe, with being attuned to the patterns by which our bodies and minds and indeed all things work, with being creative, with being one with the newness which is the essence of the Divine Wisdom which orders the universe.

That's all ritual is?

All that is what ritual is!

sam@macspeno.com

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PS (added 12 Feb 10): If you missed it, do see the recent New York Times article, Findings, about the content of frequently e-mailed articles. It's probably the most relevant data dealing with the convergence of science and religion to be published in a long, long time. It says to me that the New Cosmology is very much at work in people's hearts.

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