#93. The Home Stretch

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I began writing this blog about the convergence of science and religion late in 2006. I didn't expect, then, that over the next five years I would end up writing almost a hundred mini-essays. I didn't know I would have so much to say. I've learned a lot in five years!

As the number of posts continued to grow, I had the feeling that I should stop before I reached the one hundredth post. That's still my plan. I hope to end with #99.

The need to stop before post #100 has the feeling for me of the old Zen story about the novice who was assigned to swept a littered garden path but each time he thought he was finished, the chief gardener said "Not good enough." When, after a half-dozen attempts, the young monk finally asked in frustration to be shown what more he needed to do, the old gardener picked up a handful of leaves and scattered them on the path.

Not going to the nice round number for the blog posts feels something like leaving a few leaves scattered on the path. So, at this point (June 2011) I'm in the home stretch and I've been looking back at my earlier entries to see what thoughts I feel I still want to share. I've found several; that's what this post is about.

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I need to begin with a few words about how this blog got started in the first place.

It was an invitation, in the summer of 2005, from the alumni committee of my high school's fiftieth anniversary reunion which originally got me started in sharing my thoughts about the contemporary convergence of science and religion. "Send us a note," the committee said, "telling us what you've been up to in the last few years. We'll publish the responses we get in a booklet for the reunion."

When I retired in June 2000-- after 40 years of teaching high school science and college level theology-- I finally had the time to think about the links between those two big areas of human endeavor. Since that was, in fact, "what I'd been up to over the last few years," I wrote a brief report about my reflections for the reunion committee.

It was my earliest attempt to share my thoughts about the connections between science and religion. With an introduction and a few additional comments, that reunion report was eventually published in February, 2007, as post #3 ("High School 50th-Anniversary Report"). It's still on-line, if you'd like to look at it. (It's brief.)

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When I first considered the reunion committee's request, it felt important for me to send something less conventional than the usual comments in such reports, like "living in Florida now" or "had our third grandchild." I felt the need to say something about my efforts to understand the connections between science (specifically, evolutionary science) and religion (specifically, Western culture's Judeo-Christian tradition).

I mean it quite literally when I say that "I felt the need." I experienced a strong sense of being urged or called to say something of significance about how cosmic evolution and the spiritual side of life are related. I felt as if I was being given a "calling"-- a "vocation" in the old-fashioned sense. It seems I was. It turned out that this was, indeed, a major start for a new phase of my life.

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The task I felt was being assigned to me was to make use of my many years of teaching experience along with my background in science and religion (I have masters degrees in both) to share with my fellow high school graduates something about where my life-long interest in science and spirituality had taken me over the half-century since we graduated together from high school.

It wasn't until a year after I wrote the report for the reunion, however, that the idea of writing a blog about the convergence of science and religion came to me. It was originally my daughter's suggestion.

While many in our society tend to back away from any serious interest in science and math, and many more remain amazingly (to me) uninformed about the religious traditions of the world, Rosemary knew that I was comfortable with both areas and she obviously thought that I had something to say.

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I have, in fact, been fascinated by these two areas of human endeavor all my life. But in contrast to many who think of science and religion as incompatible perspectives, I always saw them as complementary and converging ways of understanding human life and our existence in the world.

I'm not alone, of course. In reviewing my earlier posts to see what thoughts I still felt wanted to be shared, I was surprised to see how many of the names of the thinkers-- scientists and religious writers-- who I mentioned in the first few posts are mentioned in many of the later posts as well.

Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry top the list, as might be expected, since Teilhard was a prophet and Berry a pioneer of the integration in our culture of science and spirituality. But many other less well-known names are also mentioned frequently: Sergius Bulgakov, Bede Griffiths, Brian Swimme, Raimundo Panikkar, Michael Dowd, Mary Conrow Coelho, and Bruno Barnhart, for example. All of them are mentioned in my first few posts.

These are persons who I see as being on the growing edge of humanity's present cultural development. And, as I said in the high school reunion report, "Although they each use very different words, they all seem to be saying something similar."

What they are saying, in one way or another, is that "we humans are an integral part of the evolving universe and that we thrive in dynamic relationship with the cosmic Mystery."

That last sentence is from post #3. It's a pretty good summary of what the "new cosmology" is all about and why the contemporary convergence of science and religion is so important in our day. For the most part, in recent centuries, Western religion has denied that we humans have any place in the material universe and Western science has denied that there was any mystery for us to relate to.

That's the context, thanks to that high school reunion committee's invitation, for my "calling" to help make the insights of the new cosmology available to others who might be interested but who, for one reason or another, do not happen to have the background or experience I do. In a word, my teaching career wasn't over, it just took on a very different form.

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There was a second event, in addition to that high school reunion committee's invitation, which helps to make sense of my "calling." In the spring of 2006 I attended a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania, co-sponsored by a number of medically and spiritually concerned groups, on the place of belief, "religious and otherwise," in the healing process.

It was attended by a large number of medical people, as well as hospital chaplains, pastors, persons involved in religious education, and the curious-- like me.

It was very exciting to be part of that symposium. When I returned home and reflected on my experiences, I had such a strong desire to share with others what I'd learned that I wrote a report about it which I e-mail to friends. That report also became a blog post, and it, too, is still on-line, if you'd like to read it. Look for post #2 ("Spirituality Research Symposium").

Unlike the high school reunion committee's request, I had not been invited to write about the symposium. I wrote it simply because I had a strong inner need to "share my thoughts."

So that's how this blog came to be. And, as I've said, it did, in fact, begin a new phase of my life.

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Now that it is five years later, and I'm in the home stretch, in looking back I see something else which quite unexpectedly stands out. It's how frequently I express frustration at the lack of adequate words for communicating the thoughts I want to share.

I see that I have complained repeatedly about the available words being just not good enough; I've even entitled one of the posts (#21) "Struggling with Words."

My teacher-instincts rebel at the inadequacy of good tools, in our culture, for communicating new ideas about our place in the world and the presence of mystery in our lives. There's a good example in post #2 where I end a brief description of the cosmic and biological basis of our human origins with the words, "And we started out as stardust."

I don't have the talent to express well the awe I experience when I reflect on our origins and destiny seen in the context of evolutionary science and the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. As I've said many times in the blog, I'd really like to be a poet!

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Another fact which stands out in my home stretch blog-review is how consistently I have made use of the four-fold or "quaternary" understanding of human consciousness in trying to put my thoughts into clearly understandable words.

That sentence I just wrote provides another example of the frustration I mentioned above about the lack of adequate words. The fact is that I can't count on every reader knowing what I mean by the "quaternary understanding of human consciousness." Few people in our culture are yet aware that our conscious awareness functions in four distinct ways.

So we don't just need a better understanding of our religious instincts and of how the physical world works. We also need a better understanding of how our own minds work!

I've found my understanding of the four-fold workings of our conscious minds to be a big part of what I've had to say with regard to the new cosmology. More accurately, it's a big part of how I've tried to say what I have to say. I've come to see that the quaternary perspective provides us with a basic set of "tools" for our understanding of the new relationship between religion and science which emerged in the 20th century.

My genes didn't give me any poetry-writing talents, but they certainly have provided me with strong thinking skills and teaching instincts!

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In my home stretch reflections I have also recognized something about the quaternary perspective which I hadn't seen before: how useful it is precisely for understanding the details of the great cultural shift that's happening as we move away from the static worldview of patriarchal civilization.

Knowing that conscious awareness operates in four distinct ways is tremendously helpful for understanding the many details involved in global humanity's movement to the dynamic-evolutionary perspectives of the new cosmology. And some of those details about that great shift in human consciousness are still calling to me to be shared.

If I was writing about it for an academic journal, I'd name that article something like "Understanding the Contemporary Immense Transition in Terms of the Four Jungian Functions." That wouldn't work as a title for a post, of course, but it is a good expression of what would be the main thoughts I'd be sharing.

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Perhaps what stands out for me most in the review of my five-year-long blog effort is the inadequacy-- or maybe, more correctly, the incompleteness-- of my attempts to express well my thoughts about the depths of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

With regard to the spiritual side of the science-religion convergence I often say, "There's more to religion than it seems."

By that "more" I mean precisely the inner core of wisdom at the depth of the religious tradition that got lost over the centuries due to the body-soul and matter-spirit dualism which has dominated western culture and religion for so long.

Even though the Judeo-Christian tradition originally gave the world its evolutionary viewpoint, the static-dualistic outlook of classical philosophy and patriarchal culture gradually replaced the dynamic and unitive perspectives at the base of the Judeo-Christian religion.

So, in talking about the convergence of science and religion, to indicate that I don't mean "religion" in the static-dualistic sense-- as it's still understood by fundamentalists-- I often use the words "religion at its best."

I say "at its best" because I can't assume that all readers know what I mean by Christianity's "dynamic and unitive perspective"-- any more, unfortunately, than I can take for granted that every reader knows what I mean by "quaternary consciousness."

For me, religion "at its best" specifically includes all those concerns which are outside the competence of the rational-empirical awareness of science and which, for that reason, are dismissed as non-existent by those lacking the quaternary perspective.

We need that four-fold outlook to recognize that there is "more" to our lives than just the details. A good example of the "more" is our deep, if usually unspoken, wonder about the end of the world.

Even those words-- without an understanding of our minds' intuitive-rational functioning-- are usually misunderstood!

I mean "end" in the sense of purpose. At the level of intuitive rationality-- where we focus not on empirical details but on the big picture of our lives in the world-- our consciousness asks questions like, "Why does the universe exist at all?" And, "What's the place of conscious creatures such as ourselves in the vast scheme of things?"

Those who are still stuck on the bottom rung of the Great Ladder laugh at such thoughts. (If the idea of the "Great Ladder of Being" is new to you, see posts #74, #75 & #82.)

While I have already written many posts about the four-fold capacities of our minds, in this home stretch I still feel the need to spell out more clearly my thoughts specifically about the dynamic and unitive perspectives which are part of what I mean when I refer to "religion at its best."

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One more concern is closely connected with the world's purpose or end. 

Since we can't remain indifferent to it, we have the question of what kinds of responses our awareness of the world's end might take.

I think that topic-- of how we respond to our conscious awareness of the purpose of the world-- must be the most difficult of all the thoughts I feel called on to share.

Just as my "academic" title for a post on a quaternary view of the shift 
away from patriarchy wouldn't work well as the name for a post (it was, you will remember, "Understanding the Contemporary Immense Transition in Terms of the Four Jungian Functions"), neither would the title appropriate for an academic journal work well for what I want to say in the blog about "religion at its best."

In an academic context, that post would have a title like "Evolutionary Eschatology and Eucharistic Ecclesiology."

As you can see, at this very moment-- even after five years of writing these posts-- I'm still "struggling with words"!

In any case, the fact is that an awareness of world's purpose is at the heart of Judeo-Christian tradition, and my thoughts about how we can most humanly and authentically respond to it are ideas about which I still feel urged to share my thoughts. I hope to do it in the next few posts.

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The final topic I still feel called to write about-- even after more than 90 posts-- will not come as a surprise to long-time readers. Yes, it's ritual.

From the time I first started the blog, I've felt a very strong need to share my understanding of the explanation of ritual presented in what's now a more than 30-year-old text, The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis (Columbia University Press, 1979).

I think the insights coming out of that early neurological research-- done completely in the context of biological and anthropological evolution three or four decades ago-- are by far the best perspectives yet available on the nature of religious ritual.

I feel, in fact, that I won't be able to die in peace if I don't share with others at least some understanding of the ideas offered by the early Biogenetic Structuralists. I hope to do it.

If nothing else, I would like to write at least a brief book review-- so I can rest in peace!

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Well, that's my agenda as I move into the home stretch of the blog. If you would like to add something to my list, let me know.

sam@macpeno.com

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#55. "All we have to do..."

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We take care of what we value. That's the main point of the very different thinkers, Jakob Wolf and Heather Eaton, whose ideas I described in my two most recent posts.

This post is a followup. It's about the importance of personal experience in taking care of the Earth in this time of environmental crisis. From their distinctive perspectives and in very different languages these two thinkers agree that neither western science, with its intentionally rationalist thought, nor the western religious tradition, with its disdain for the Earth, can help much.

As I described in post #53 (Bridging the Gap), from a philosophical point of view, Professor Jakob Wolf of the University of Copenhagen says we need a third thing. He calls it the "phenomenological apprehension of intelligent design in nature."

He makes clear why science can't provide us with a sense of what's important to us. That's simply not what science is about. It's neither what science was invented for, back in the time of the ancient Greeks, nor what science has been doing for the last five centuries.

As I described in post #54 (We Take Care of What We Value), Dr. Heather Eaton of St. Paul University in Ottawa comes from another starting point, but she too agrees that neither science nor religion are sufficient in themselves.

"The ecological crisis has not made much of a dent in the western religious consciousness," says Dr. Eaton. "The Christian tradition has not been able to deal effectively with evolution." The insight that the earth is our home is "an enormous challenge to our ecologically dysfunctional patriarchal religious traditions."

What's needed in this time of environmental crisis, Dr. Eaton says, is the coming together of humanity's ancient religious traditions with the much more recent evolutionary cosmology of 20th-century science. It's their convergence that we need.

Why? Because "we take care of what we value" and what leads us to ethical responsibility is personal experience.

Whether we call it "the apprehension of intelligent design" or "the experience of the sacred"-- or use more familiar words like "reverence," "mysticism," or "contemplation"-- it's that experience that we need if we are to contribute to the healing of the Earth.

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Probably most of us don't respond positively to Professor Wolf's term, the "phenomenological apprehension of intelligent design"-- even though he makes very clear that it's nothing more than a philosophical name for the personal experience of nature's intelligibility.

It's difficult to relate to the idea well, as he says, because the term has been "compromised" by Christian fundamentalists in the USA who use it in support of their creationist views.

For many of us, Dr. Eaton's words speak more strongly when she says that to heal the Earth we need to recover the age-old basis of all religious experience "in the experience of the sacred."

But most of us aren't much more comfortable with a term like "the sacred"-- or even with the traditional religious words such as "contemplation" and "mysticism"-- than we are with Dr. Wolf's "phenomenological apprehension of nature's intelligibility."

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What about "wonder and awe"?

Those are good words. I think we need to hold on to them; they may be the best we have to talk about the experience of the sacred.

But even "wonder and awe" has been compromised in our day by the similar-sounding phrase "shock and awe" used by America's political and military leaders to describe what they hoped would happen when they invaded Iraq.

When it comes to "awe," our only everyday use is the exclamation even my five-year-old grandson says often, "Awesome!" And while we know what the experience of "wonder" is, we also know that it's not what we mean when we describe something as "wonderful."

"Sacred" is the one word we still use to describe things that are important to us. When we hear something mocked or treated more lightly than it should be, for example, we tend to say (or maybe just think quietly to ourselves), "Is nothing sacred?"

Clearly, we use "sacred" to refer to things that are of value to us. So our experience of the Earth-- as sacred-- is important for its healing simply because, as both Dr. Eaton and Dr. Wolf each in their own way say, "we take care of what we value."

In this time of environmental crisis, their point is a very practical one.

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A major problem, however, is that in our culture the experience of wonder and awe is usually considered a purely personal matter. It is "acceptable as a private experience," says Dr. Eaton, "yet it is often belittled, ignored or dismissed as socially relevant."

Obviously it's not a purely personal matter, however-- not if dealing well with the environmental crisis depends on it. Dr. Eaton points this out even in the very title of her paper: sacred awe and wonder is at the nexus of religion, ecology and politics.

As I mentioned in the previous post, her paper, "This Sacred Earth: At the Nexus of Religion, Ecology and Politics," isn't readily available in print form, but she gave me an OK to share it with friends. If you would like a copy, send me a note: sam@macspeno.com.

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One of the main reasons why the experience of the sacred isn't readily understood in our culture is because, as Dr. Eaton says, "the primary mode of knowing in Western societies is analytic" and, as a way of being aware of reality, "analysis has its limits."

The experience of awe and wonder is a different kind of awareness.

The fact that there are different kind of conscious awareness is something I've talked about in many previous posts. Because there are four distinct kinds of conscious knowing, this perspective is often referred to as a quaternary or mandalic understanding. I described it in detail in post #29 (The Four-fold Mind).

I've made use of it (in post #30) to talk about the traditional ways of being religious, in a half-dozen posts (#40 through #45) to describe the Sophia/Wisdom perspectives at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and (in posts #35 and #36) to help make sense of the many aspects of the Immense Transition we are presently experiencing.

These four functions of the conscious mind were spelled out explicitly early in the 20th century by Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung. Today they are known to almost everyone in terms of the Myers-Briggs personality typology. It's even on Facebook. (You can find "What's Your Myers-Briggs Personality Type?" on the Facebook Apps page-- along with "Which Teletubbie Are You?")

Long before C. G. Jung, Myers-Briggs and Facebook, however, the fact that we have a four-fold mind was known to the people of many earlier cultures.

On the Native American Medicine Wheel, for example, each of the mind's functions is pictured by an animal and associated with one of the four directions, the four seasons and the four times of day. I've made use of that imagery in many posts. I think it's one of the best tools we have for our self-understanding.

It is especially helpful in understanding wonder and awe.

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Our ability to experience the sacred via awe and wonder is pictured on the Medicine Wheel as a shamanic Black Bear. It's an image of the same function of the conscious mind which C. G. Jung calls "Intuition," the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant refers to as "archetypal intuition," and Jakob Wolf calls "phenomenological apprehension."

Black Bear is located on the west on the Medicine Wheel, directly opposite the Gold Eagle of the east. It's this Gold Eagle awareness-- Jung calls it simply our "Thinking function"-- which deals with the rational cause-and-effect workings of patterns in nature and is the very essence of scientific analysis.

It's because "the primary mode of knowing in Western societies is analytic," as Dr. Eaton says, that the experience of the sacred via our Black Bear (Intuition) ability isn't readily understood in our culture. We need to balance our Gold Eagle (Thinking) ability with our Black Bear (Intuition) capacity if we are to heal our home, the sacred Earth.

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Jung calls Black Bear (Intuition) "the religious function" because it doesn't make distinctions as Gold Eagle (Thinking) awareness does. It makes connections. Native Americans express this experience of the sacred with the phrase "All my relations!"

One of the most helpful understandings I know of the mind's Black Bear (Intuition) ability comes, rather surprisingly, from the eminent 20th-century German Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner. He calls this capacity we have to experience awe and wonder "self-transcendence."

As a conscious person in the material cosmos, says Rahner, each of us experiences ourselves at a deep level as being utterly open to all things. We don't have any limits; we are connected with everything that exists; we simply do not exist apart from the infinite unbounded reality underlying the whole universe. I've described this more fully in post #34 (Talking About Us).

Obviously, many people in Western culture are not at ease with such an understanding of themselves. But it's much more familiar to people in Asian cultures, and it is one of the reasons why westerners, in this time of Immense Transition, are turning to the religious traditions and spiritual practices of the East.

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So, this is not only a time of Immense Transition due to the discovery of the new scientific cosmology, it is also a time of Great Turning for the world's religions themselves. We live in nothing less, says Dr. Eaton, than a "new religious moment" in the history of the world.

And because of the environmental crisis, says Dr. Eaton, "it is pressing for all religious traditions to reclaim their roots in the natural world."

She notes that, East and West, "Each tradition has an awareness that the natural world is a primary place of revelation and religious experience" and that "it is only in recent history that this has not been so."

With regard to the West, for example, she says that the Christian faith in its recent history "has belittled the earth as a religious reality." And that this "diminished Christian awareness of a sacred indwelling presence in the natural world" is "one of the central causes of the ecological crisis and the excessive domination and exploitation of the earth."

Christians are "faced with the task of allowing their theological understanding to be transformed," and as Dr. Eaton notes, this task is "an enormous challenge to our ecologically dysfunctional patriarchal religious traditions."

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But it's not the western religious tradition alone that's being challenged by the environmental crisis. All the world religions , she says, "need to reclaim their heritage"-- to rediscover their roots in the world of awe and wonder.

If we are to heal the Earth, we have to "reacquaint ourselves with the divine presence revealed within the natural world." Because we take care of what we value, "to encounter the sacred in the natural world moves us to resist its destruction."

The question, then, is a very practical one: How do we "reacquaint ourselves with the divine presence revealed within the natural world." How are we to "encounter the sacred"?

Dr. Eaton says simply, "Awareness of the power of wonder and awe is available to anyone who spends time in the natural world."

Is it as simple as that?

I think it is.

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The experience of the sacred isn't considered socially acceptable but, as Dr. Eaton says, "the capacity for awe remains omnipresent." Awe and wonder is a normal aspect of human experience. It's in our hearts. It's part of our DNA.

C. G. Jung says it. Native Americans say it. Karl Rahner says it.

There's one catch. In Dr. Eaton's words: "To marvel at the natural world requires a transcendence of our superficial worldviews and beliefs."

We may be potentially open to everything, as Rahner says, but we'll never actually experience awe and wonder if we don't literally spend time with nature. We need to "phenomenologically apprehend, " as Jakob Wolf would say, the intelligible patterns operating in the natural world.

Dr. Eaton quotes the famous Jewish theologian who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Selma in 1965, Abraham Heschel, about the difference between what happens to us when we do, and don't, spend time in nature.

"Away from the immense," says Rabbi Heschel, "cloistered in our own concepts, we may scorn and revile everything. But standing between earth and sky, we are silenced by the sight. We can never sneer at the stars, mock the dawn or scoff at the totality of being."

When we spend time in the world of nature and find ourselves aware of our connectedness to everything-- when we experience that all things are "our relations"-- we simply cannot sneer, or mock, or scoff at our own experience. We just need to let the experience happen.

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For many years, my wife Anne and I have included on our Christmas cards a few words from Teilhard de Chardin's essay "In Expectation of the Parousia" found at the conclusion of his early work, The Divine Milieu.

Teilhard's words are his way of expressing the profound idea that Heather Eaton and Jakob Wolf are trying to spell out for us.

His words may sound simplistic. But in terms of taking care of what we value, they are profound.

How do we experience the Earth as sacred?

Teilhard says, "All we have to do is let the heart of the earth beat within us."

sam@macspeno.com

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ARCHIVE TECHNICAL PROBLEM: Since I started this new series of posts, each time I publish one, an earlier one vanishes from my Archives list; they're still there, just not visible. Until tech support can deal with this, I'm putting links to those "missing" posts here.

#5. Alternative to "Human Nature Redux"

#4. The "Biogenetic" Perspective

#3. High School 50th-Anniversary Report

#2. Spirituality Research Symposium

#1. On Recent Developments in Science and Religion

#31. Integrating the Four Functions

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Western culture is lopsided, and it's that lopsidedness which accounts for the great damage patriarchal attitudes inflict on women, minorities and the natural world. It's also the cause of the antagonism between rationalist science and dualistic religion and of much of our racial and religious conflict.

The main point of this post is that the four-fold "quaternary" perspective on the human mind can help us understand that lopsidedness. It can provide us with the basic tools we need for moving beyond the failures of religious dualism and patriarchal rationalism. Just as all four functions of consciousness are needed for our personal wholeness, so too we need all four ways of being religious for a contemporary healing of the Earth. I mean "religious" in the broadest sense, as I described in the previous post: what matters to us most.

If you haven't read the two most recent posts-- #29 (The Four-fold Mind) and #30 (Ways of Being Religious)-- you might like to read them in conjunction with this one. They go together.

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We know that our four-fold mind has its origins in the matter of the universe; possibly, as Jung suggested, in the four-fold bonding capacity of the carbon atom, and certainly in the four main structural lobes of the brain. But what's of primary interest here is not the cosmic or neurological origin of the four-fold mind but how it manifests itself at the level of human culture.

We're not used to thinking about cosmic evolution in cultural terms, but it's important to do so now in this time of Immense Transition. As I've said frequently in these postings, one of the great values of Biogenetic Structuralism is that-- in combining biological evolution with neurophysiology and cultural anthropology-- it does precisely that.

Seeing the four-fold mind from the perspectives of humanity's cultural evolution can help us to understand what's involved in the truly immense transition global humanity is experiencing as we move from the static worldview of previous centuries to the dynamic-evolutionary perspectives of modern science.

One thing we can see right away when we look at quaternary consciousness from the perspective of its cultural development is that the static worldview of the past has been characterized by the values and attitudes of patriarchy. Those patriarchal perspectives have dominated western civilization for several thousand years, so it's important for us to have a good idea just what "patriarchy" means.

Although it may sound strange, in its original sense "patriarchy" refers to something good. It describes the ancient male role, dating back to the Paleolithic hunting culture, of being responsible for providing food and protection for the lives of those not able to do it for themselves. It's in this positive sense that the word is used of the Old Testament "patriarchs," Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In terms of the four-fold mind, patriarchy is the White Buffalo (Sensation) function's focus on the immediate details needed for the survival of life; it's the way of service on behalf of all I described in the previous post on Ways of Being Religious.

But "patriarchy" has come to have a totally negative meaning nowadays. In terms of the four functions, "patriarchy" refers to the dominance of the Gold Eagle (Thinking) function, with its concern for distance, separation and ascetical effort, along with the neglect of Green Mouse Feeling and the denial even of the existence of Black Bear Intuition.

It's precisely this lopsidedness of patriarchal culture which accounts for so many of the world's problems, such as the denial of equal rights to women, the oppression of minorities, and the exploitation of the natural world.

It's the lack of Green Mouse Feeling's concern for devotedness to connections and relationships, for example, that allows the captains of industry and the CEOs of the corporate world to remain indifferent to things like the poisoning of the Earth's air and water and the destruction of life in ecosystems which had remained in balance for millions of years. It also accounts for contemporary horrors such as religious groups using children and mentally retarded women as suicide bombers and political leaders proclaiming the legitimacy of human torture.

Clearly, we need to move away from such patriarchal attitudes and to move towards a more integrated consciousness for the healing of the Earth and its peoples. And, as I've said, it's my main point: that an understanding of how the four-fold mind works at the cultural level can help us do that.

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From the quaternary perspective we can easily see that the patriarchal mentality is essentially a usurpation of the psyche's four-fold activities by just one of them; Thinking has so dominated the western mind that it even equates itself with consciousness.

And with the Gold Eagle function's emphasis on things like "power," "control," "victory and defeat"-- words which the media use interchangeably nowadays in reporting not just political events and athletic contests but also in describing the activities of the business world and the entertainment industry-- the significance of matter, body and personal relationships for the culture as a whole, and indeed, the very meaning of our lives, has been lost.

I feel the need to add a note here for those who are already somewhat attuned to the New Cosmology and feel impatient with the slowness of the Immense Transition taking place in our day. We can easily become frustrated if we don't keep in mind how early it still is in the change-over from the static to the dynamic-evolutionary worldview. It's only a hundred years, for example, since we humans realized that we live on a planet near a star in a galaxy, that our galaxy contains millions of stars and that it is just one among many trillions of galaxies. And it's only a bit longer, maybe a century and a half ago, since we've come to understand that the world itself is many billions of years old.

This recently-acquired in-depth perception of time and space is of tremendous significance. But our growing in-depth perception of the quaternary nature of human consciousness and its role in human culture is even more significant.

It's precisely because of the patriarchal mindset that contemporary leaders in the larger areas of our cultural life are slow to see that significance. Black Bear perceptions and Green Mouse values are missing from all of our communal concerns-- politics, religion, education, the economy and most especially the world of advertising. We await the accumulation of a critical mass-- a tipping point-- in the dawning of the big picture. We know that it's coming, but we need to keep in mind that the only way that it can come is by changes in the hearts and minds of individuals, one by one.

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Specifically with regard to the convergence of science and religion, we can readily see-- in terms of quaternary consciousness at the cultural level-- that it's the patriarchal dominance of the isolated Thinking function that accounts for our many centuries of religious dualism and scientific rationalism. With their similar emphasis on rules, laws and order, it's clear that both religious dualism and scientific rationalism are simply at different ends of the spectrum of the Thinking function's activity.

And once we become aware of the Thinking function's need for things like distancing and differentiation-- so well imaged by the Medicine Wheel's high-flying Gold Eagle-- we can also see the great value of the Green Mouse Feeling function's focus on connectedness, belonging and leaving out no one. Its concern for including every one is exactly the opposite of the isolation and hierarchical attitudes of Gold Eagle Thinking.

We also can see our need for a recovery of the Black Bear Intuition's way of vision when we look at things from the perspectives of quaternary consciousness. We need not only to hold on to the good things of the past, as Green Mouse does, but also to validate and encourage those creative persons among us who, with their strong Black Bear function, can share their life-dreams and new visions of the world with us. It's clear that we can't have a big picture without acknowledging our need for integrating the four functions.

My discovery of Biogenetic Structuralism was so exciting precisely because the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective is a wonderfully creative attempt to look at that big picture specifically from the science side of things, taking into account the combined data of evolutionary biology, neurophysiology and cultural anthropology. There are also perspectives from the religion side which attempt to take into account that big picture and I hope to describe some of them in future posts; but laying out the science perspectives first seems the right way for me to go.

What I especially want to emphasize here is our need to see that the process of healing wholeness, growth and development, centering, balance-- whatever we call it -- is essentially one of paying attention to the four-fold nature of the human psyche; and that, in attempting to integrate the four functions of the mind, we need all the help we can get.

The most stimulating and thought-provoking source of help along these lines I've come across is the work of the New Mexico artist and psychologist Steven Gallegos. I mentioned him several times in the previous post. In this one I want to share some of his thoughts which I see as especially relevant to our great need for integrating the four functions.

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His full name is Eligio Steven Gallegos. He offers workshops in North America and Europe on integrating consciousness specifically with the help of animal imagery. I hope you will check out his website. What follows are some insights about the four-fold mind that especially caught my attention in his book Animals of the Four Windows: Integrating Thinking, Sensing, Feeling and Imagery (Moon Bear Press, 1991).

With the book's odd title and its brevity (it's hardly 150 pages), I initially had the impression that it was just another of the many quirky New Age books still going around. But when I saw that it has an introduction by Steven Larsen, an author whose classic work on shamanism (The Shaman's Doorway) I've found to be especially solid, I was convinced that I should take it seriously. I'm very glad I did.

Gallegos calls the functions of consciousness "windows of knowing" and "modes of awareness." One of his main points is that these "windows" operate specifically via archetypal images which show themselves in the form of animals.

It sounds awkward at first, precisely because in our culture we are not used to seeing things via the Black Bear (Intuition) function, but his point is clear enough: the language or vocabulary of the psyche is, to a great extent, animal imagery. The Native American medicine wheel is a wonderful example of his point. Gallegos emphasizes, however, that if we look for it, each of us will find that we have our own animal imagery.

While there are many scholars and workers in the field of Depth Psychology dealing with various aspects of Jung's understanding of the un-conscious psyche, I don't know of anyone except Steven Gallegos who has done such interesting work in enhancing Jung's ideas about the functions of the conscious mind.

Gallegos' work is itself an excellent example of the value of the four-fold perspective. Because he is an artist as well as psychologist, with his strong Black Bear function he is able to talk about the big picture precisely from that artistic-Intuitive point of view which is so lacking in contemporary culture. Gallegos offers us an integrated and wholistic view of our need for an integrated and wholistic view!

In what follows I offer my understanding of some of his ideas focusing on the Thinking and Intuition functions, the functions which seem to me most specifically concerned with the healing of the gap between science and religion. I hope that my comments will spark you to read his books yourself.

Besides the idea that the four functions show themselves in the form of animal imagery, one of Gallegos' most basic and powerful insights is that the relationships which appear among the animal images makes clear their healing quality. In their relationship with one another the animals images connected with the four modes of awareness indicate that movement toward healing and wholeness is fundamental to the psyche. The conscious mind wants to be whole.

In the context of the New Cosmology, this movement toward wholeness which these "animals of the four windows" exhibit can be seen as nothing less than the dynamis of cosmic evolution, the same energy "that moves the sun and stars" (as Dante put it), operating within us at the most intimately personal level. That it operates by way of animal imagery is not a common understanding even among those familiar with the Jungian consciousness functions, and for that reason I see it as especially important in the work of what Thomas Berry calls "reinventing the human." I'm emphasizing these ideas because I haven't seen them spelled out elsewhere in the perspectives of the New Cosmology.

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Specifically with regard to the Black Bear (Intuition) function, Gallegos suggests that it might be better to call it "Imagery." He suggests that we reserve the term "Intuition" for the wholeness of the conscious psyche, which he describes as the "synergistic activity" of the four functions working together. He gives a good analogy: it's something like 3-D vision, which results when vision from separate eyes comes together "synergistically" to make something greater than its components-- in the case of conscious awareness, an in-depth perception of reality.

Gallegos says that Jung didn't distinguish between the Imagery function and the wholeness of the psyche simply because Jung was so good at Imagery and because Jung's Intuition (in Gallegos' sense) expressed itself primarily via imagery.

This sounds confusing, to be sure, especially for people who are familiar with the Jungian terminology. But I think it's important to mention since Gallegos not only frequently uses the term "Imagery" for the Black Bear (i.e., Jungian "Intuition") function; he also has some very important things to say about it.

This is yet another example of the struggle we have with words during the Immense Transition we're in. Personally, I've found it helpful to use the word "Imagination" for Gallegos' term "Imagery." It may also help to keep in mind that in more religion-oriented settings, the synergistic wholeness which Gallegos means by the term "Intuition" is often referred to "unitive-awareness" or "totality-consciousness." (This seems to me a real breakthrough in our understanding of mystical-unitive experience in contemporary-- and appropriately evolutionary-- language. Maybe the first, in the western religious tradition, since Meister Eckhart. But that's something for a future post.)

In any case, Gallegos' main point as I understand it is that, whatever we call this "window" which on the Medicine Wheel is imaged by the Black Bear, it is "the foundation of our consciousness of all and of everything." It "connects us to all and gives the All its presence and persistence." Gallegos notes that it does so precisely as Jung said, by "transmitting images" and that these images are nothing less than our "perceptions of the relations between things."

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We need to keep in mind that the Black Bear function is a way of seeing in the broadest, widest and most comprehensive sense, and that it is the realm not only of artists, musicians and poets but of all creative individuals. (And, in the perspectives of the New Universe Story, that includes you and me.)

Our Black Bear Imagination function-- in its desire to explore possibilities for the future and its seeking to have an authentic ("wholistic") perception of reality, truth, and the meaning of life beyond the conventional-- is the very opposite of the attitudes of the institutional churches and governmental and educational organizations which seek to censor and silence creative expressions which depart from the well-established conventional norms.

And censoring-- saying "no" to something good, putting a stop to a creative enterprise-- is the death of creativity and cosmic dynamism. An especially relevant understanding of how such censoring prevents healing can be found in a book by the well-known art therapist Shaun McNiff, The Arts and Psychotherapy (Charles C. Thomas Publishers, 1981). (That's another topic for a future post.)

In contrast to patriarchal censoring, Imagery consciousness puts us in touch with the cosmic process in terms of our own personal healing, growth and development. And it also empowers us to creative participation in the life of the earth and of human society in terms of ecological awareness and concerns for equality, peace and justice-- precisely what the New Cosmology is all about.

Knowing that we have a four-fold mind not only roots us in the Earth and allows us to see that our personal creative participation in the Earth's cultural development is nothing less than the on-going activity of the cosmic evolutionary process. It also helps us to see that Imagery is the fuel (or energy) for the dynamic cosmic process taking place within us. And thus it allows us to recognize the importance of symbol, myth and ritual in our personal and communal development.

I find it fascinating that the "Anthropology Plus" of Biogenetic Structuralism, the comments of Thomas Merton in his essay on William Faulkner and religion's roots in the imagination which I quoted in #26 (Help from Uncle Louie), and the insights of artist-therapist Steven Gallegos I'm describing here, all point us in the same direction: the great importance of symbol and ritual in our lives.

Despite how complicated these ideas at first may seem, it's worth taking time to think about them seriously. In terms of the convergence of science and religion, they helps us to understand why-- with its need for hierarchal power and superiority, and its fear of connectedness and relationships-- the patriarchal mind ignores the very existence of the Black Bear function which transmits our awareness of relationships to our consciousness and is the source of our empowerment to participate in the evolution of the universe.

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I hope I've said enough to make my main point, but I've got one more thing to share. Perhaps of greatest interest with regard to the lopsidedness of patriarchal culture is that Gallegos found to his surprise that it's neither Black Bear Imagination nor Green Mouse Feeling that's most severely damaged; it's the Thinking function itself.

Thinking awareness, he says, has been "misused, injured, chained, trapped" by patriarchal rationalism, precisely in its having had external authority imposed on it, rather than having been allowed to function properly from within.

Its natural mode isn't only concerned with distance, distinctions and differentiation, Gallegos says, but with movement. With its focus on the sequential flow of time, as I described in the previous post, our Gold Eagle Thinking function moves us naturally toward wholeness and communion and the completion of the "not yet." It "relentlessly searches for wholeness," as Gallegos says, and its "natural mode of operation is questioning."

And questioning, needless to say, is in the greatest contrast to the imposition of beliefs by external authority, whether parental, political or religious.

Jim Wallis, well-known founder of the Sojourners movement, says in his new book The Great Awakening (HarperOne, 2008) that "the two great hungers in our world today are the hunger for spirituality and the hunger for social justice." People don't want to go left or right," he says, "they want to go deeper."

Integrating the four functions can help. We've had enough of being lopsided.

sam@macspeno.com